Liberalism’s Last Legs
By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
TS Eliot
[There are] varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberal.
Phil Ochs
Liberals may be surrounded at all sides but it has done little to shut them up. From the ramparts, a gaggle of gargoyles, their expressions at once smug, ludicrous and insane, unload their protestations: we are right, it’s the world gone wrong!
There is little doubt that these libs, in a post-Iraq War, 2008, Brexit and Trump world, are besieged. Online a hefty portion of what passes for political discourse is directed at attacking these “new” centrists. How anyone could have made it through Iraq, ’08, Brexit and Trump and remained liberal is the real conundrum. Iraq showed the fatal limitations of its universalist vision, the Great Recession did that for their economic models and 2016 shattered any belief in democratic legitimacy.
And yet Count Blair, One Nation Conservatives and a good half of the mainstream media want you to discount all of that. Their solution to the disaster of liberal centrism is unreformed liberal centrism — Sick of unproven solutions? Vote for the provably worse! Although mass appeal eludes them, they are finding a hearing among the further educated.
While workers enthusiastically imbibe new (which is to say re-reheated) fantasies, it is among the middle classes you can find our target. In Britain, the dead in the water SDP, Lib Dems, Change UK — I daren’t speak of Labour’s Hollow Man — draw their support almost exclusively from the (slightly) better off. In the US, the equally insipid Democrat Party can no longer make claim to being a “party of workers”, planting its flag in the suburbs. Of this an old anarchist can perhaps illuminate. Education in the hands of the state and business (and that is what our floundering universities have become) Noam Chomsky has remarked, is a synonym for indoctrination.
The truth is this slightly conspiratorial explanation does not go far enough. Liberal ideology persists, despite it all, because capital needs it.
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As understood by way of Raymond Geuss, the liberalism which now dominates owes its origins to the acquisitive individualism of the early modern period, and being in its justifications idealistic is opposed to a realist politics. (The latter being older, respectful of bonds and suspicious of upstarts.) This is the credo of Thatcher and Reagan, of the Victorians, of the go-getting man of means. He who considers tremendous waste a necessity, and wasted opportunity the direst of sins. His is a religion which condemns want and feeds off it; being a friend to poverty, an enemy of the poor. He was born during the Great Transformation of the 18th century and he has been getting one over on the rest of us ever since.
Liberalism is paradox. This is the conclusion drawn by Domenico Losurdo in his “counter-history” of the project. There is the contradiction just alluded to: its unencumbered economy being born from, and utterly dependent on, ravaging its social context in order to survive. (The host has the unenviable task of regulating its devourment, in all but the most libertarian/failed states.) But there is also the uncomfortable fact that, just at the moment liberalism was most vociferously demanding liberty, it did so while upholding the most depraved slavery. And when it championed the necessity of unbridled self-determination, its ideologues were pounding North America’s First Nations into dust (many of which were far more democratic, and were demonised as such). The continent, mere staging ground, had to be made safe for markets.
But today’s liberals cannot countenance this history, it does nothing for the ego. For them, the logic of the market — the final authority to which all must prostrate themselves — is above criticism. Through it we have Equality (in that, with enough money intrinsic qualities are no constraint), Freedom (regardless of previous error there is always the option of succumbing to exploitation or simply starving), and smartphones (late modernity’s bread). This wonderful system, which works best in minds corrupted by prisoner dilemmas, must be made omni. The conception of a moral economy — i.e. practically every economy predating the Industrial Revolution — is lost; a perilously utopian one is born.
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It is usually enough to dissuade someone of their quixotic fantasies with a persistent “but how would that work, exactly?” No imagination is required to see how the dream has died, and as a result liberalism has collapsed into myth. This is not as anachronistic as it might sound. As Adorno and Horkheimer made clear in that eerily beautiful text of theirs, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Enlightened liberal modernity, far from being a sceptical age, is one steeped in illusion. The Gold (and quasi-Red) Standard of anti-capitalist critique, we will give the Frankfurt School’s tag team due consideration elsewhere.
For now we shall see how the crisis of liberalism has been interpreted by its occasional allies, the hard Right and the Left: that’s with the aid of radical liberals, Carl Schmitt and Karl Polanyi respectively. “Adorkheimer” and the latter two were definitive figures of the early 20th century, all but one German. As men who reached astonishing intellectual heights during a time and place when civilisation itself met rock bottom, their continued relevance is surely a given.
In brief, radlibs are leftists who see in institutional liberalism a system unworthy of Liberalism. Having scoured the masked half of the face, they have determined that what our elites truly lack is commitment. “What an outrage that human rights, the Rule of Law, parliamentary procedure, etc. etc. have been left in the hands of false believers!” They have wasted more ink, but to varying degrees this immanent critique is found in the pamphlets of Irving Howe, Chris Hedges, Ben Burgis and Matt McManus.
Long before the rot set in, and in a time when disagreements were refreshingly polarised, the old patrician Conor Cruise O’Brien explained how the world in fact worked.
[Liberalism] is the ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs: ‘liberalism’ is the ideology of the rich, the elevation into universal values of codes which favoured the emergence, and favour the continuance, of capitalist society… Liberal values, tarnished by the spurious tributes of the rich world’s media, today make the rich world yawn and the poor world sick.
An opposition which clings to the ideological justifications of their masters will always find defeat, deservedly so. Because when it comes down to it (and we’re almost there) those “inalienable rights” will be as useful to radicals as a subscription to Jacobin. This scattering is among the few today who need not be told what is meant by the names Manning, Snowden, Assange, Daniel Morgan and Fred Hampton, and yet they hold out, waiting for a mirage to materialise.
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When considering liberal thinkers themselves, most likely the rallying cry Progress! will be the first indication you’re in for a migraine. But this is an idea so loaded and consequential the present polemic will be unable to provide due scorn (see Glimpsing the Kingdom Beyond). Now — Meritocracy.
Like all good empiricists, the likes of Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson have little interest in what the research has found. Had they engaged with political science, they would have learnt that beliefs in “hierarchies of competence” or merit are not only baseless, but socially pernicious. That hallowed M-word being the casus belli of many a war against the undeserving poor. (Consider Robert H Frank’s work for an overview.) On the blindingly obvious side of things, we may even call upon FA Hayek — a neoliberal who at least saw value in honesty among thieves. He was well aware success under capitalism was little more than a game of chance. The view from Mont Pelerin being: the principle we must defend is not merit (which at the best of times has a circular meaning), but market exchange.
Another fetish is debate, and the incessant chatter may give liberal polities an appearance of pluralism. Liberals assure us that through “our free marketplace of ideas” (argh!) disagreements are mediated, conflict is avoided and the necessary tweaks are made. For Carl Schmitt this was self-indulgent guff. Throughout history the major shifts resulted not from well-meaning squabbling but through determined exercises of power. This applies to democratic struggles on a national scale as much as for the establishment of our liberal world order. Questions of power are something from which liberals refrain, caught as they are in the realm of Idea (a wondrous thought palace where the variables never break double digits, and graft alone keeps sub-Saharan African mothers from bagging a top job at Enron). A formalised hallucination which long ago claimed our “public intellectuals”. Those indispensable pseuds who have made it their singular mission to leave nothing unscrutinised. Giving us such gems as, Is lipstick responsible for sexual harassment? Are vaccinations turning your kids trans? And you there, do you agree your ethnic makeup has made you irredeemably stupid?
Despite the renegade pretence these are creatures of the establishment. To ensure endless publicity, the troublesome realities of Empire and market orthodoxy are kept off-script. Instead, the horrors of Slight Inconvenience are regurgitated, and the braying chew it down.
After explaining the problem (“the public must be put in its place …[so that the elite may] live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”), it was the doyenne of post-war liberalism who made the game plan explicit. Walter Lippmann convinced his fellows that misdirection was more effective than outward censorship. If the bleating ever finds itself on the redistributive or dangerously pacifistic, send out the clown.
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While liberal theory celebrates diversity, its practitioners have always favoured a putrid totality. In the face of contraries they opted not for the difficult and eminently political task of balancing interests, and instead chose standardisation. Through the rule of Law, which was always Deism’s unnamed god, every aspect of life became policed, and with universal education the cop was internalised. Yet this is for your own good so ran the tenour of the bond, because with sameness everywhere we might achieve peace everywhere. All these group identities, once accepted as the foundation of social solidarity, were in truth an obstacle to its perfected form. Stripped of everything which made you you, the terrible cacophony we were bequeathed may cease — then, finally, you will be a sovereign individual occupying space. You will be Man.
By some fortuitous accident, Man was the perfect accompaniment to an economic apparatus entering its imperialist phase. With no troublesome particulars to impede profit-seeking, the world was his for the taking (it too gained legitimating capitalisation, becoming System). Always somewhat askew from the planet he came to dominate, Man was here assured. The old bonds, the unassimilated — cementing, dividing, unincorporated — would not be tolerated.
This may give us some appreciation of Schmitt’s conviction, while still condemning the depths to which it led him. He was genuinely dismayed at what he saw as global homogenisation. Internationally, and thanks in no small part to American power, it appeared Liberalism was doing everything it could to “level down all civilisations to a single cheap and dreary dream.” Sweeping blandness, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana concurred, is the equality on offer.
Declaring its constituents the species as a whole, liberalism seeks to extend its protective gaze into every nook and cranny. In stark contrast to the petty nationalisms it seeks to erase, like a painter with a bad smudge, it speaks for everyone, whether you’d like it to or not. For Schmitt, this is what makes the venture so menacing. If you oppose it you are at base opposing humanity, and surely an enemy of humanity deserves no quarter. Meaning that when not engaged in bluster and theatrics at home, liberalism went about brutally administering its soporific principles upon the yet-to-be.
That other great Karl, Mr Polanyi, began writing at a time when one behemoth, the British Empire, was bowing out in favour of another, the United States. Both, although the latter goes to comical lengths to deny it, are liberal empires par excellence. Hegemons in a global system enforcing the dogmas of capital creation, chief among them the insistence upon a “self-regulating market”. Just as before, market fundamentalism of this sort draws strength from liberalism’s phoney division of politics and economics. When in actual fact, from the inception of the Great Transformation, the introduction of a market society made clear the marriage of both.
What was enclosure, the forceful privatisation of lands held in common, if not political? Was not the implementation of high tariffs on foreign goods, in order to shore up domestic industry, a political act? Surely the physical decimation of rival industries (the East India Company’s long-running sabotage of Asian industry) impinged on the deep-seated interests of some group or other? It is only after the event, when everything has been privatised, built up and the necessary elements have been crushed, that our liberal friends decide politics has had its day.
These policies, alongside wholesale ethnic cleansing and racialized slavery, are what made the UK and US forces to be reckoned with. Only, in the 20th century they began to preach from a different hymn sheet. Suddenly high tariffs and sizable state intervention equaled economic ruin. Consequently poorer nations were taught, with a mixture of disciplinary wars and, later, IMF strong-arm tactics, that they had to keep their economies open to foreign exploitation. No doubt this made some very rich, but it has left entire nations impoverished.
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This is where Polanyi comes into his own, the relationship between liberalism and democracy on a national level. For him a liberalisation of the economy corresponds with a social counterforce, the “double movement”. This consists of those social forces which seek to put a check on the all out anarchy of the anti-democratic market, with all its sudden lay-offs, environmental destruction and endless demands on labour. These arrive in the form of trade unions, activist politicians, regulation and state-issued welfare.
For Polanyi, although economic liberalism was always studiously planned the popular — even populist — reaction was spontaneous. They are largely of a red bent but, if for whatever reason these paths are closed off, the double movement will take a reactionary course. (Walter Benjamin and the tragedy of failed revolution.)
With an infuriating sleight of hand, after fighting so bitterly against it, capital’s most strident defenders will declare the successes of the double movement — increased life expectancy, greater political engagement, fewer working hours, clean air — as achievements of capitalism itself. Alternatively, when we’re left with conflict-ravaged (the Middle East and the Congo), cartel-ridden (Africa, post-Soviet Russia), and ecological disaster zones (Brazil, India), we are told, by the same people, that it was because economic liberalism was not pursued with enough vigour in these places. What is chalked up to being a lack of will should be seen as what it really is: that most damaging of political vice, hubris.
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But what exactly will come of all my talk? Nothing of course. Liberalism will not be defeated with words, anymore than feudalism was brought down by verse. Liberal evangelicalism created the age we live in and it’ll be counted among its victims.
When Locke, Smith and Jefferson penned their lines, nature was considered by the “civilised” little more than land, something to accumulate. Stock was hardly a concern. The horizon in every direction offered plenty more, even if people with different nose shapes needed liberating from it. Besides Earth, the old bitch, would keep putting out, when or if reserves ran dry. New New Worlds are ripe for discovery.
If today’s liberals find it difficult admitting their errors in other regards, the clear eyed and honest among them must see the existential problem nature now presents. Arable soil is disappearing, ice caps are melting, the sea is rising, entire forests are alight. And of course all this means people are on the move. The number of climate refugees by 2050 is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.
Watch how tolerant of dissent liberals are when a groundswell rejects capitalist progress and all that goes with it. How open they are when the starving millions pound at the gate. How devoted to laissez-faire when the state alone can face cataclysm (recognising in it a wayward sibling).
It will not be long before the political metamorphosis is upon us. So little Man, what now?
