I grew up in California, moved away in the early Nineties, and moved back in 2019. One of the new things I noticed upon my return was small signs stuck to the side of a car, or printed on posterboard and erected on a street corner, advertising “DMV services”. After some intercourse with a few of these, always conducted in halting, heavily accented English, I came to understand that these entrepreneurs are “fixers”, a species that most Americans are unacquainted with. If you want to get something done in the developing world, you often need to engage the services of a fixer. This is someone who has connections in the bureaucracy, often by virtue of kinship. Being a naïve visitor without connections, you couldn’t possibly know whom to bribe, how to approach them, or what forms must be observed. These things must be accomplished with delicacy. You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world. Too European.

They say California is the future. However that may be, the state has become more like the rest of the world, less like the erstwhile United States. The old European ways of procedure-following are anomalous, and perhaps never made a lot of sense. Or maybe they made sense only within a framework provided by something like Calvinism, Prussian organisation, ecclesiastical administration, or some similarly ascetic institutional morality that is “no respecter of persons”. By contrast, ties of kinship are easy to grasp, more robust, and make sense to more of the world’s peoples as the ground of cooperation, particularly in societies where the clan may be as far as trust extends.

I was very happy to have found my way to Smog Lady. I spotted her 20 minutes after I arrived at the parking lot. She was making her rounds, leaning into cars through the driver’s side window. Finally she approached me: a toothless matron who spoke only Chinese beyond a few key words in English such as “odometer” and “VIN number”. I noticed she had a large wad of cash in her hand. I gave her my $200. She then got in her car and drove out of the parking lot. I had a moment of panic, thinking I had just been ripped off. But sure enough, 30 minutes later she came back with my fraudulent smog certificate.

The Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine coined the term “service nomads” for distinct peoples, typically itinerant or diaspora, who perform functions within a society that can only be done by outsiders. That is because these functions, though indispensable, are shady in one way or another and can’t be openly avowed as necessary. Things such as usury (that is, providing credit), burying the dead, magic, puppeteering, prostitution, peddling, cobbling, knife sharpening, dispute mediation and all manner of border-crossing and go-between work that allows the principals to negotiate without losing face or being compromised.

Every society has such liminal populations (gypsies, Jains, Travellers, the “overseas Chinese,” the Sheikh Mohammadi of eastern Afghanistan) who develop some kind of “transgressor expertise”. They must keep themselves apart, as integration into the bonds of reciprocity and communal honour would make their trade impossible. As Slezkine lays out: they are regarded as unclean, and in turn they guard their own purity against contamination by the host population, from intermarriage, say, or simply by accepting hospitality from them. Dietary restrictions and other taboos of self-segregation serve to keep the boundary intact. They speak their own language, and may pretend not to understand the host language.

At first blush, the providers of DMV services appear to fit Slezkine’s description of “service nomads”. But that concept only makes sense when framed against a surrounding society that is settled and cohesive, with taken-for-granted norms that secure a basic solidarity among the host population. Without such a background of belonging, and therefore communal honour to uphold, there would seem to be no need for a separate population and social type invested in transgressor expertise. California has become a polyglot of unrelated diasporas, opportunity-seekers, guest workers, tech Brahmins and multiple-passport-holding functionaries posted to the Pacific Rim economic zone. It is more like the bar scene in Star Wars than like Tolkien’s Shire. We are all wanderers.

I think Smog Lady is not to be understood as a service nomad, then. Rather, the necessity of her services may be taken as an indication of the direction that state bureaucracy takes under conditions of multiculturalism (think Brazil), particularly in the absence of partisan political competition (think Soviet Union). These two features, multiculturalism and political monopoly, interact in interesting ways.

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With the collapse of the Republican Party in California, there soon emerged a political landscape resembling what the Yugoslav Communist official (turned dissident) Milovan Djilas termed the “party-state”. That is to say, there is little meaningful distinction to be made between the government and the Democratic Party. Competition for control of California takes place, not between two rival parties with different political visions and corresponding electorates in a general election, but between aspirants within the Democratic Party, under a shared political vision. In practice, this means competition for money from organised interests that fund the activist networks, which in turn translate those interests into various moralisms and thereby shape the vision of the party. The electorate largely drops out of consideration as a constituency.

Only what happens within the Party matters. In Yugoslavia in the Fifties that meant the deliberations of the “political forums”. In California, what happens within the Party is mostly determined by NGOs and foundations, public sector union leadership, expert bodies willing to generate Science in support of the Party’s program, and tech firms that are permitted unlimited capital accumulation on condition of alignment with the Party. Together these entities make up a sort of government-by-cabinet that is effectively insulated from the pressures of electoral politics. The citizenry isn’t feared.

In 2018, there was a rash of news stories about five and six hour waits at the DMV. Newspapers published DMV survival guides recommending that supplicants bring chairs, snacks and backup batteries for their devices. A state auditor’s report found a third of DMV employees not showing up for work on time. At least one data specialist slept for hours every day, year after year, without being fired, and this resulted in serious backups in the work flow.

When I returned to the state in 2019, I put off the transfer of my vehicles (I have a lot of them) and driver’s licence to California for as long as I could, knowing the rigours and uncertainties that awaited me in the attempt. Just as I was beginning the process, in March 2020, the state of California shut down.

Covid turned out to be a godsend for the DMV. On March 26, 2020 the Los Angeles Times acknowledged what those of us in bureaucratic limbo already knew: “To slow the spread of COVID-19, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has dramatically restricted customer visits to its field offices, barring people who do not have appointments and warning that no new slots to appear in person are currently available.” Now there were no lines and, more important, no embarrassing news stories about queues. Problem solved.

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To the party-state, citizens with their unending needs are a nuisance. The DMV remained “open” because it is an essential service, but presumably this was less for public safety on the roads than for reasons of the sort that came to light in Knox v SEIU, a Supreme Court case which found that the public employee union (which DMV workers were required to join as a condition of employment) in California had “improperly charged increased dues that went towards political spending”. Those dues from DMV workers were the essential thing, to the party-state.

Several months later, as the pandemic meandered around the globe according to its own logic (in which the only perceptible correlation that emerged between lockdowns and Covid deaths was an embarrassing one), I succeeded in getting in the door of the DMV. To secure a California driver’s licence, I did not have to take a written exam, nor was there a driving test. The DMV had quietly waived these tests. The LA Times quoted an anonymous employee who wondered, “They’re saying we’re being kept open because we’re an essential part of the community… How can we be essential when we’re not protecting the public? We’re putting the public in danger by doing this.” When the same employee raised concerns with her manager about granting licences to customers who’d failed their tests multiple times, she was told, “Nope, just give them their license.” One DMV employee in the San Joaquin Valley reported her office waiving about half a dozen tests in one week, including for people who had been cited for driving under the influence.

In dropping the pretence of its ostensible mission of public safety, the official DMV was perhaps just acknowledging the reality of the unofficial DMV, the one that is likely to be called “corrupt” by people clinging to first-world norms. Having now spent some time in DMV offices in the new California, my impression is that the shop floor operates along the lines of ethnic fiefdoms that overlap somewhat, and work fairly smoothly together when necessary. The Hispanic customers speak their own language with a Hispanic teller, the warm tones and easy gestures of which seem very unlike the bureaucratic mode of address that institutional English is adapted to. There are other languages spoken as well, each with its own characteristic emotional repertoire, and some of these seem better adapted to the haggle — at least to the naïve and suspicious ear of one feeling beset by a cacophonous Babel.

The occasional appearance of an unaffiliated Anglo-American such as myself is accommodated easily enough, and in such cases tellers are able to code-switch into officialese. But one does wonder if one is being offered quite the same menu of services as those who can make appeal to one of these fiefdoms. In 2021, five employees at a DMV office in the Los Angeles area pled guilty to taking weekly cash bribes to process drivers licences for unqualified drivers. According to ringleader Atanacio Villegas, a licence registration examiner in Torrance from 2010 to 2016, “a network of ‘brokers’ would contact him on behalf of drivers who could not pass their driver exams”, and then forward the drivers’ bribes to DMV employees. The scheme involved sending the drivers to the window of a participating DMV employee who had an “identifier”, such as a red hat, as reported in the Press Democrat and LA Times.

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In a case stretching from 2013-18, various trucking schools in the Salinas area were finding their own work-arounds. “Truck school owner Pavittar Singh was sentenced to prison for paying DMV employees for fraudulent passing scores,” reported The Californian. Meanwhile, “Kulwinder Dosanjh Singh, a broker, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and identify fraud.” Here “broker” refers to a provider of DMV services.

From the perspective of the party-state, presumably the problem with allowing corruption within the bureaucracy is that the thriving business done by these operations represents a lost revenue stream for the union, that is, for the war chest of the Party. In 2014, the California DMV went on a massive hiring blitz, adding a thousand new workers for the express purpose of providing drivers licences to illegal immigrants, per state bill AB 60. “For us, it’s more of a social justice thing,” said Ted Burnett, state-wide coordinator for Service Employees International Union Local 1000.

You, tender reader, might be scandalised by the ways of California’s DMV, but such a response is a hangover from another era. Under conditions of bureaucratic dysfunction typical of a party-state, corruption isn’t a problem, it is the solution. These new populations have found ways to get things done. Bribery is more efficient (and far less crazy-making) than clinging to first-world expectations in a world that has changed. For my part, I am sincerely grateful for the services of Smog Lady. Diversity is our strength.

Then, in the Eighties, Right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan adopted this philosophy, taking aim at the “nanny state” that had supposedly led to the proliferation of “welfare queens”. They were followed by Third Way politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who were convinced that the “era of big government is over” and the state’s power had to be reduced. Besides demolishing much of the welfare state, European state-owned enterprises that accounted for a significant chunk of national economies were also targeted. Companies such as British Gas, British Telecom, British Steel, and the railway sector were all privatised. But the aim of these policies was not merely a drive for efficiency; they were also designed to break the power of trade unions, while trying to turn Britain into a “shareholder society”.

Until a decade ago there was overwhelming support for this reining in of the power of the state, and in particular the privatisation of state-owned enterprises. But after the wave of repeated crises we have suffered since 2008, the public mood has changed considerably. According to YouGov, around 60% of British citizens now want to nationalise a UK rail sector infamous for its extortionate fares, and a similar number want to nationalise the energy sector. But it’s not only a matter of changing attitudes but also of political necessity. The current energy crisis is already forcing governments around Europe to consider bringing some energy companies under public ownership.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a severe rise in the price of oil and gas, with gas prices already increased by 52% by April 2022, and further hikes likely in the autumn. Now politicians are under heavy pressure to find rapid solutions that the market could not provide. Among the measures are releases of strategic reserves to increase supply by importing liquified natural gas from the US, striking gas deals with alternative suppliers from Algeria to Azerbaijan, and fast-tracking new Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) plants.

Governments were also forced to provide subsidies to families and companies to help with rising energy costs. In Britain, part of this was eventually covered through a windfall tax on corporate profits (totalling £5 billion): a common-sense policy given the profiteering going on in the energy sector. But even this intervention was met with disapproval by economists still convinced that the market should take its course, even if it destroys millions of jobs in the process. In preparation for the winter other measures are currently under discussion, including an EU-wide price cap.

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Some governments have also been offering free or low-cost public transport to help address rising energy costs. In Germany, the government has launched a nine-euro-a-month ticket to travel across the entire country on local or regional trains during the summer. The initiative has been immensely successful, with train trips increasing by 50% and may even be continued as a “Klimaticket” to fight against carbon emissions. A similar scheme has been adopted by the Spanish government, with 100% discounts on multi-trip ticket journeys on local and regional services from September to December. These measures are all good palliatives, but the war in Ukraine has unearthed systemic fragilities in our economy and highlighted how free-market extremism has put countries’ economic and geopolitical security at risk, while slowing post-carbon transition.

Desperate to reverse this, some policymakers are now turning to more direct forms of state intervention: nationalisations. In France, Emmanuel Macron has launched a plan to bring back the energy giant EDF (which was part-privatised in 2005) under public control, at a cost of around €8 billion. The immediate motivation is to save from bankruptcy a company already laden with debt, which has only grown since Macron forced it to sell energy below market price to avoid an explosion of social unrest. But the nationalisation is also part of a more long-term plan that aims at securing France’s energy independence while meeting its climate transition targets. This comprises the building of six new nuclear power stations over the coming decades.

France isn’t alone in falling back on the state-ownership of strategic companies. In fact, we may well be at the beginning of a wave of nationalisations around Europe, with policymakers forced to reverse Thatcherite policies, by dint of necessity rather than ideology. The UK government has announced that it will part-nationalise the National Grid to help reach the Net Zero targets. Even the German government has mulled the possible nationalisation of energy firms at risk of going bankrupt, including Nord Stream 2. The reason is straightforward: it’s far easier to radically transform the energy sector by owning companies directly than by regulating them.

The real sticking point, however, remains public investment, given the enormous resources needed for the transition to a post-carbon and more secure energy supply that may help reduce prices. In Europe, the 2010s were a “lost decade”, when austerity policies led to a severe drop in public investment in key sectors including energy. But since the pandemic struck, we’ve seen a partial inversion of this self-defeating bean-counter mentality. The European Union Recovery Fund, which totals €800 billion, for instance, was a partial move away from this austerity orthodoxy, and came after a longstanding confrontation with the so-called Frugal Four (Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria).

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But even still, it’s wholly insufficient to the challenge the continent faces. Worse, fiscal hawks such as Germany’s finance minister Christian Lindner are already calling for another bout of austerity, even while central banks are raising interest rates, which risks plunging our economies into deep recessions. In the US, even though Biden’s $1 billion Infrastructure Bill was passed, it still barely makes up for decades of public disinvestment, while more ambitious plans contained in the Build Back Better bill were scuppered because of opposition from centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin. Manchin, who is bankrolled by oil lobbies, insists that public investment would contribute to inflation, despite the fact that much of it is directed towards creating alternative streams of energy supply that may help reduce prices.

So while state interventionism is coming back, its return is far from complete. As economist Daniela Gabor has argued, what we’ve seen so far can be described as a “green derisking state”, in which governments attempt to guarantee financial markets against the liability of highly risky investments in the “green transition”.

What is instead required is a far more ambitious strategy — what Gabor calls a “green developmental state” — with governments heavily investing in energy transition and using state-owned companies as the driver of economic transformation. However, this requires moving beyond resorting to state interventionism as an emergency measure and safety net for market failure. It would mean rethinking our entire economic model, finally accepting that some sectors are best run by state-owned companies, and devising fruitful ways in which state and market can collaborate.

As the past decade has shown, there is no market solution to a problem that was created by prioritising the short-term convenience of the market over the long-term security of nations. If we want to avoid environmental disaster, economic decline and geopolitical blackmail, we need to move beyond the self-defeating fallacies of anti-statism.

But before “neoconservative” became a byword for the utopian, interventionist, nation-building foreign policy that was fatally discredited by the Iraq war, it described an entirely reasonable generation of American intellectuals who became disenchanted with the liberal domestic policies and the cultural changes of the Sixties. And their thinking, unlikely though it may seem, bears uncanny similarities with post-liberalism today. In fact, whether the post-liberals realise it or not, this group of writers, editors and thinkers from both the Left and the Right — Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Burnham, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, among others — are the closest thing they have to intellectual predecessors.

Consider a few parallels. First, neoconservatism and post-liberalism both emerged as critiques of their era’s dominant liberal ideology in politics, culture and economics. Indeed, many neoconservatives started political life on the Left. In his 1979 essay “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed — Perhaps the Only — ‘Neoconservative’”, Kristol, a former Trotskyist, wrote that the neoconservatives were “provoked by disillusionment with contemporary liberalism”.

Similarly, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s neoconservatism took form after observing the intolerance of campus radicals. A left-liberal at Berkeley, he became concerned in the mid-Sixties about threats to free speech and free expression on campus. By the end of the decade, he had fallen out not just with the activist Left but mainstream liberals too. Writing in The Atlantic at the time, he delivered a prophetic warning:

“The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Or we had forgotten the answers. We have to start remembering and start answering.”

Glazer’s rightwards journey was typical. Peter Steinfels, a critic of the neoconservatives whose book on the movement provoked Kristol into writing his “Confessions” essay, explained that the neocons actually “set out to defend liberalism from the radicals’ attack”. But as they did, they were faced with a question: “Why had a liberal society produced a wave of political criticism which they perceived (in many cases quite accurately) as so illiberal and destructive? Having begun as defenders of liberalism, they too ended, to some degree as critics of it.”

Not all of today’s post-liberals started life on the Left, but their critique of liberalism often follows a similar path. It looks at the ways in which liberalism has failed, and asks how it birthed an illiberal strain on both the Left and the Right. Its exponents, as a result, often end up with a more profound critique of liberalism that they went looking for.

Pabst, for what it’s worth, argues that “genuine post-liberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses”. The same could be said of traditional neoconservatism. Daniel Bell described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”. Kristol claimed that neoconservatives were “not libertarian in the sense, say, that Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Von Hayek are” and had no problem with “a state that takes a degree of responsibility for helping to shape the preferences that the people exercise in a free market.” Kristol did, however, go on to embrace Ronald Reagan’s free-market economic agenda, much to the dismay of Moynihan, a New York Democrat who confirmed his break with the liberal Left and confirmed his neoconservative credentials when he accepted a job in the Nixon administration; he later wrote how he watched his neoconservative friends siding with Reagan “with a combination of incredulity, horror and complicity”.

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But even the most market-friendly neoconservatives had their concerns with capitalism, viewing it merely as a means to an end. Kristol described the neoconservatives’ relationship with business as “loose and uneasy, though not necessarily unfriendly” and argued that economic growth was important “not out of any enthusiasm for the material goods of this world, but because they see economic growth as indispensable for social and political stability”.

There is a similar range of economic views among today’s post-liberals: some are on the Left, some are on the Right. Pabst’s Left-leaning flavour of post-liberalism emphasises “economic justice”, “social solidarity” and “ecological balance”. Right-leaning post-liberals argue that excessive economic freedom has shifted resources and power away from communities and families. What both sides share, then, is a suspicion of top-down central planning of the socialist Left and the reflexive libertarianism of many on the free-market Right.

Neoconservatism and post-liberalism are also both moods or instincts, rather than fully-formed programmes for government. Kristol called the former a “persuasion” rather than a movement. The latter is similarly disorganised, representing a loose collection of beliefs and a shared impulse as opposed to a group that meets up, agrees a manifesto or seeks office.

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Both also have a complicated relationship with populism, on the one hand seeing the rise of populist movements as a symptom of liberalism’s failures, and on the other embracing some of populism’s critiques of the status quo. Responding to the criticism that there was “a populist temper to the neoconservative impulse”, Kristol acknowledged that “any ideology that gives politics a priority over economics is bound to have a populist hue”. It was the job of neoconservatism, he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong”.

Though many post-liberals will balk at the populist label, I suspect they have assigned themselves a similar role. If they are serious about a political project that takes on what the American historian and author of The New Class War Michael Lind calls a technocratic neoliberal elite, it’s hard to see how post-liberalism won’t have the same “populist temper” as neoconservatism.

Another important parallel is their shared respect for the institutions that sit between the state and the individual. As UnHerd‘s Peter Franklin wrote in 2019, he was drawn to post-liberalism’s “respect for human dignity” that “distinguishes [it] from populism”, is “incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism”.

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Such a claim would no doubt leave Kristol and co. nodding vigorously. Writing 50 years earlier, Kristol described family and religion as “indispensable pillars of a decent society” and confessed that neoconservatives “have a special fondness for all of those intermediate institutions of a liberal society which reconcile the need for community for the desire for liberty”.

These neoconservative/post-liberal parallels are more than just a niche, extremely wonky parlour game. They are an antidote to an amnesia that infects a lot of post-liberal writing. Franklin, for example, calls post-liberalism “a genuinely new kind of politics” that “is tantalisingly close to breaking through”. But the many echoes of neoconservatism refute these claims of novelty and suggest that the post-liberals are the inheritors of a richer intellectual than many of them seem to realise.

Given that “neoconservative” is little more than an insult these days, I suspect most post-liberals will resist this comparison. But that would be a mistake. Half a century ago, some of the West’s sharpest minds assembled an incisive critique of post-war liberalism. Today, post-liberals are trying to do the same thing to post-Cold War neoliberalism. They would be foolish not to learn from those in whose footsteps they are following.