Liberalism: An Autopsy

In hindsight, this was one of the early signs of the collapse of liberal humanism as the ruling ideology of our civilisation. The confident belief in decent thoughtful scepticism and gradual progress which TGA expressed was the water that I swam in as a child and a young man. But when I think of it now I don’t see the tide of history anymore, but the wallpaper from a house ruined by a flood, peeling away from its backing in the damp. The pattern remains, if anything more beautiful for its fading, but the plaster has come away from the brick and there’s no strength to it anymore.

1989, the moment of its seeming triumph was also the moment when its decline began. But what was it that had triumphed? Was what happened in and after 1989 a liberal revolution? We all thought it was at the time. We didn’t look at the peripheries of the collapsing Russian Empire: in the Caucuses and the Balkans the regimes that took power and immediately went to war with each other were not in the least bit liberal or internationalist. But they seemed anachronisms, to be helped out of history by a few well-placed cruise missiles.

This is a tendentious reading of the word ‘liberal’ but so is any other. Gladstone would be horrified by the policies known as ‘liberal’ today; meanwhile to be a ‘liberal’ in North American means something entirely different from being a member of a German or Swedish ‘Liberal’ party; and if the British Liberal Democrats have any principles these are concerned with winning elections by any means necessary.

All this confusion shows how completely ‘Liberal’ came to mean uncontroversially good and right, with no more definite content than that.

I think the important division cuts across all these. What started as the belief that everyone may be wrong and all our opinions under judgment has evolved into its opposite: liberalism today means that no one need submit to anyone else’s judgment. Everyone becomes their own infallible Pope because no one else may legitimately choose what’s right for them.

This became much clearer to me at a conference I attended in the autumn on post-liberalism, organised by a Catholic think tank, but also embracing every kind of monster that the sleep of reason breeds, from Maurice Glasman to Michael Gove. Such people were outright enemies of liberalism, and many, back then, were unashamed Trumpians—though the conference as a whole was not. But the question I was left with was whether liberalism had failed because of the efforts of its enemies, or because of its own internal contradictions. Without underplaying the malevolence and energy of the enemies of the liberal order, I was left believing that it was the internal dynamics of a liberal hegemony which had most undermined it.

As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in his 2023 book, Homelands:

But it was not just the intellectual and political challenges of rival ideologies that strengthened liberalism—that framing itself expresses a rather liberal optimism that the outcome of conflicts will ultimately benefit both sides. The problem turned out to be that only people who had grown up in illiberal societies had acquired the virtues and the habits of mind needed to make liberalism work.

The conservative idea was that we were all personally fallible but had access to an impersonal but certain guide to truth and right conduct in the traditions and constitution of the country and in the teachings of the Church, themselves honed by reasoning through the ages. Among its other characteristics, this conservative view made for good soldiers: men to whom obeying orders was so important that they would rather die than question them. This attitude, like so much else, became less credible after the first world war, was mortally wounded in the second and died out with the generation that had fought then. Even in the 1940s Orwell could write that conservatism was dead and ‘those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists’.

Margaret Thatcher, the first British prime minister not to have fought in that war, changed the Conservative party completely. It had believed in inherited covenants—binding obligations which you were born into, and which you passed on to your children. This is still the assumption of all traditional religions. They could not persist without it, and the incoherence of American religion with its bubbling chaos of sects and doctrine shows that they don’t.

Thatcher herself took covenant thinking for granted even as she spread contractualist reforms. She was a nationalist as well as a liberal—she made the single European market happen but she also led the opposition to the kind of federal superstate which would be required to make it work properly. But after her both liberals and those who called themselves conservatives came to believe in the sovereignty of contracts instead. Free and autonomous individuals, operating within a market, would come to agreements among themselves which had to be better than the old, imposed irrationalities. This was of course an idea that nineteenth century liberals would have recognised and embraced. But they did so from within a view of human nature which took constraint for granted.

At some stage in the twentieth century this belief was corrupted by a progressive assumption that constraint itself was immoral. You can see how this came about. If you ignored everything that happened between say 1914 and 1945 and concentrated on material progress, then the history of the West seemed to prove that things were inexorably growing better, with no end or limit in sight. This was certainly the American view and America was for several generations the hegemonic cultural power in the world.

Another way of looking at this change is to compare the attitude of Adam Smith with that of a contemporary American liberal. Smith, and I think David Hume as well, was explicit that the way to build a civilisation was to harness private vice to public benefit. The self-interest of the capitalists, rather than their benevolence, would end up serving the rest of us. As Keynes said, making this thought explicit, the theory of capitalism is that the worst of men, working for the worst of motives, will produce the best results.

The contemporary progressive view turns the old one on its head. The problem for contemporary liberals is not to harness vice but to abolish it. What’s needed is not better arrangements for bad people, but better arrangements for good people (like us). We can see this very clearly in the reaction of mainstream American leftists to Trump. They understand that the people who voted for Trump are morally bad, and must have this explained to them until they once more vote as they should. No wonder the bad people rebelled.

Perhaps a belief that those who do best in the world are also the morally best is natural to any form of political arrangement. Certainly it is what props up monarchies and aristocracies. But it is odd to see it embraced by liberals who think themselves democratic and committed to some form of egalitarianism.

There is a paradox here. Liberalism arises historically as a revolt against aristocracy and against the unfettered exercise of personal power. Instead, there are to be impersonal and so less fallible ways of ordering society: reason, science, free markets. Yet once you hand the ordering of society over to such forces you must either see them as amoral—and I don’t think liberals can see reason as amoral—or imagine that they work towards moral outcomes—and that is a very strange belief to hold about markets. Faith in markets was a dreadful heresy under the mediæval Christian dispensation, and still is in many forms of Christianity and I believe Islam. In Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, which illuminates wonderfully the traditional Christian worldview, Avarice is one of the deadly sins:

To weigh right and wrong ‘in equal balance’, as if both were equally valuable, is exactly what the market does, and if you believe that this is the mechanism which best and most impersonally arbitrates among competing interests, then of course those who best out of a market economy are those who most deserve it.

The American political scientist Michael Lind criticises this faith in markets in a powerful and interesting way, which has nothing to do with the morality of their outcomes. Liberalism, he argues is inherently unstable because it is based around a a false idea of competition.

Speaking at the post-liberalism conference, he said:

Liberalism, in his view, is an unstable condition which contains the seeds of its own destruction. The interventions necessary to keep markets working productively, and to keep competition alive, require a state that is always able to tweak the laws so that they reach the effects they are supposed to have. But the shrewd capitalist will then buy the state to remove this danger. That is very clearly what has happened with American tech companies, not just in the crude ways that are obvious after Trump, but in the more subtle ways in which laws around intellectual property have been used to construct monopolies and to make it almost impossible for us to dispose of our digital property freely. To take an apparently trivial example, I don’t own any of the 886 books on my Kindle except the ones I didn’t pay for. Those that I seemed to buy from Amazon can at any moment be withdrawn. Software is increasingly something you must rent, or ‘subscribe to’, like Microsoft Office, rather than buying and using as you see fit.

The point, which comes up again and again in different forms, is that liberalism cannot sustain itself, but requires resources and contestation from other traditions. Markets rely on trust but must by their nature consume it because it always pays to take advantage of another’s trust. The notion of market value annihilates intrinsic worth. It removes any question of what something—or anyone—is worth in itself, and replaces it with the question of what it is worth to someone else. This is a concept that goes much deeper than money, which is even in human markets is only an accounting mechanism, a way of keeping score and ranking usefulness. More broadly this relational concept of value is just the way the world works, all the way down to the smallest forms of life: everything has some value only in as much as it is useful for some purpose to some other entity. Mice in this way are valuable to cats; while cats are indispensable to the parasites that live inside them.

The history of the social internet provides a funhouse mirror of these arguments: almost as soon as people started talking to one another online the assumptions of trust and decency on which the systems had been built were falsified. It’s hard to believe now but there was a time when people talked about freedom of speech online without irony and without attempts at manipulation. Those ideas or ideals were in the air of Northern California, the home, in fact, of a student uprising called the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

Free Speech went along with Free Love. In both cases what had been regulated by the state was to now to become the domain of self-regulating markets, from which on the one hand truth and on the other happiness would emerge as a result of the uncoordinated interactions of all the people involved. Power dynamics were invisible to these theories, as was the human desire for status.

The earliest online communities, such as The Well, had grown directly out of the hippie movement’s discovery of computers, and the simultaneous discovery of psychedelics by the nerd culture. I was an awed novice on The Well in the late eighties, when it was believed that civilisation could be maintained there by the slogan ‘you own your own words’—which implied with wonderful self-contradiction both that you could be held to account for them, and that your rights over anyone else’s words were strictly limited.

The people who ran The Well soon discovered that the only way to make it tolerable for all it’s users—which mattered, because they paid subscriptions to use and read it in—was to institute blocklists, so that everyone lived in their own filter bubble. This was presented as a way to avoid personalities you found unendurable, which it did, but it also came to mean that you could avoid all contact with ideas that were disturbing. This in turn led to the dynamic identified by Michael Lind, where the contest of ideas produces winners who then drive the losers out of the discourse. It was much the easiest way to run online spaces, and the only one apparently compatible with the individualistic conception of free speech, where the sovereign individual made his own choice, but it had huge consequences in the world outside when it became general across social media. It was always unrealistic to suppose that the standards and morals of Berkeley could be imposed on the whole online world but this one aspect has been. The effect is that the world is now divided into innumerable mutually exclusive domains of unfree speech.

So in America today, if you are a Republican you have to deny the reality of global warming and the results of the 2000 election; if you are a Democrat you have to deny the reality of biological sex. As a politically engaged person you can choose which lie you prefer, but there is no large, organised movement which will admit you without your choosing one or the other, and in either case demonstrating that you prefer power to truth. It is all entirely post-Liberal, and if one of the contending parties is known as liberal, that just shows how little is left of the original hopes for it.

So what comes after? Lind thinks it is a ‘mafiocracy’—one in which the horizontal bonds of trust and decency between strangers on which liberalism relies have been hollowed out until only the forms remain. Instead they have been replaced by vertical bonds, enforced ultimately by the threat of violence and wholly dependent on personal relations between patrons and their clients. This is Trump’s world, as it was Julius Caesar’s. It is the world from which Victorian progress successively emancipated the Victorians through the reform of the franchise and—just as important—the reforms of the civil service and the army. These did not lead to a complete meritocracy but that is also what preserved them. Like free speech and indeed market competition, meritocracy worked only within a framework of social control that was not itself meritocratic. As soon as it became the unchallenged ideal it bred a vast discontented population of insufficiently merited losers who would combine with some of the winners to destabilise it.

A mafiocracy can of course co-exist with religion and most of them have (the communist countries after Stalin are an exception). Certainly most of the mafiocrats in the West today claim to be defenders of Christianity against secularism and Islam. If you are trying to defend the real gains of liberalism, this pose on the part of your enemies can only strengthen your suspicion of religion—of Christianity, of course, but also of Islam as the most ‘religious’ of all religions to the secular imagination. Nonetheless, I wonder whether religious faith is not necessary to preserve liberal institutions. I don’t mean that liberalism is a religion, but that religious faith helps us to see that it isn’t. In particular, religion points us to human purposes outside the market and more important. Any kind of belief in the intrinsic value of human beings seems to me to imply a belief in God—since some people really are no earthly use to anyone else. Their use and their value can only be to some transcendent entity.

In fact, any experience that suggests the intrinsic goodness or value in the world seems to me to demand an intellectual recognition of God, just as much as it compels an emotional response. The only escape from the tyranny of market is to recognise that some things really are sacred and cannot be bought and sold. The problem then becomes which things are actually sacred—but that’s another story, one which brings its own troubles.