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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
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Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment. Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative - postliberalism - that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the destabilising inhumanity of 'just-in-time' free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote embedded, mutualist markets. This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgements
Prologue: a new era
Communitarian postliberalism
A new era
Notes
I POSTLIBERAL TIMES
Notes
1 Resolving the interregnum
Zombie order
A postliberal space
What postliberalism is and isn’t
Notes
2 Politics after the plague
Human decency
The dignity of life and labour
Change of era
What we are up against
Notes
3 Why opposites coincide
The great convergence
Dystopian dreams
Plutocracy and proletariat
Despotic demons
Notes
4 New polarities
The contradictions of right-wing postliberalism
Making sense of politics
Notes
II A PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY OF POSTLIBERALISM
Notes
5 The art of politics
Governance by number
Libertarian paternalism
Good government, good life
Conciliation of interests
Politics as the art of the actual
Notes
6 Social virtues
Value pluralism
Ancient virtues renewed
A shared moral horizon
Notes
7 Mutual obligations
A sense of limits
National and international duties
Renewing democracy and citizenship
Recognizing reciprocity
Notes
8 Pluralism
Elite anti-pluralism
Liberal-authoritarian monism
Building a pluralist polity
Renewing corporatism
The promise of personalism
Politics as practical wisdom
Notes
9 Place, limits and ecology
Our common home of nature
Place as the soil of humanity
Politics of place
Notes
III POLITICAL AND POLICY PROGRAMME
10 Building a relational economy
Two faces of state intervention
Developing the national economy
The foundational economy
Rebalancing the economy
Notes
11 Renewing democratic corporatism
A corporatist polity
Could the EU renew its corporatist tradition?
Notes
12 Reweaving the social fabric
Bourgeois order in decline
Community spirit
Covenantal ties renewed
From dystopia to hope
Policies for a new social covenant
Notes
13 Restoring the common home of nature
National Nature Service
Global environmental change and national ecology
National Civic Service
Notes
14 Promoting civic internationalism
Civilizational states vs nation-states
Values aligned to interests
Internationalism reinvented
Britain’s place in the world
Renewing the West
Notes
Epilogue: a new battleground of ideas
A new consensus
A new coalition
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise
‘Probably the word “liberal” should never have been a noun but left as an adjective, describing an ethos of fairness and generosity. As a noun it has come to be attached to a messy, incoherent bundle of positions, as chaotic as the opportunist and value-free capitalism whose ally it so often is. This incisive and intelligent book exposes with brilliant clarity the failures of our current political culture, and outlines where we should look for a political future that – for a change – has something to do with the heart of human identity and human desire. It obliges us to ask seriously what we have learned about this in the collective trauma of the last year.’
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
‘Adrian Pabst is one of the most original and insightful thinkers writing about politics today. In this book he examines the challenges which technological change, environmental degradation and unaccountable power pose to human flourishing. You don’t need to agree with his prescriptions to admire the power of his diagnosis – this work is essential reading for all concerned with our current discontents.’
Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
‘All thinking people realize that western liberal societies face dilemmas they have been unable to resolve, but until now there has been no constructive account of what a postliberal social order would look like. Adrian Pabst’s brilliant short book fills that gap. Fully recognizing the irreplaceable achievements of liberalism, he argues compellingly that they are endangered by an excessively individualist understanding of human well being. By showing what this means in a wide variety of fields, he has given us a book that advances understanding of the most fundamental issues of our time.’
John Gray, philosopher and author of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
‘Adrian Pabst is one of our most interesting political thinkers – and this wise, compelling book provides not only a penetrating analysis of the crisis of liberalism but something much more valuable: a road map for a transformative politics. It should be essential reading for Keir Starmer – and indeed Boris Johnson.’
Jason Cowley, Editor of the New Statesman
‘Within an impressive body of work this is Adrian Pabst’s most political contribution to date. His ambition is to rethink the terms of what is known as postliberalism and anchor contemporary debate within certain distinct ethical traditions. He succeeds and in so doing performs the essential – and long overdue – task of reclaiming postliberalism from the right. This is a vital contribution to any renewed public philosophy for the left. After four defeats in just over a decade, here are the foundations of a coherent domestic and foreign policy reset for Labour.’
Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham and author of The Dignity of Labour
‘A compelling case for a new politics based on the things that matter: families, places, traditions, relationships. This is the proper ground of political dispute – right and left should be fighting to represent the communitarian idea. Adrian Pabst has mapped the emerging post-liberal landscape with skill and passion. A vital book for the 2020s.’
Danny Kruger, Conservative MP for Devizes
‘A common critique of ‘post-liberal’ writing is that it’s stronger on critique than on vision. In the erudite but highly readable Postliberal Politics, Adrian Pabst seeks to remedy that shortcoming. Pabst draws on classical and Christian thinking to synthesise a vision for healthy public life after liberalism, that’s neither narrowly nationalistic nor inhumanly globalised but ordered by solidarity both at local and international levels, and with our natural world. Readers on both Left and Right will find much in this timely book to challenge political preconceptions, and also to enrich and re-humanise an urgent political debate.’
Mary Harrington, UnHerd columnist
‘By starting with the inescapability of limits and the common ground between liberal and authoritarian high-tech capitalism, Pabst succeeds with some flair in injecting political and intellectual substance into the idea of post-liberalism.’
Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy, University of Cambridge
‘As the neoliberal consensus that provided the public philosophy of the post-Cold War West shatters, demagogic populism and authoritarianism threaten to take its place. Rejecting these dangerous alternatives, Adrian Pabst makes a persuasive case for rebuilding democracy on a foundation of strong communities.’
Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite
Postliberal Politics
The Coming Era of Renewal
Adrian Pabst
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Adrian Pabst 2021
The right of Adrian Pabst to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4680-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4681-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pabst, Adrian, author.
Title: Postliberal politics : the coming communitarian consensus / Adrian Pabst.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “How to rebuild the common good beyond COVID-19, extreme identity politics, and free-market capitalism”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057912 (print) | LCCN 2020057913 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509546800 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509546817 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509546824 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Consensus (Social sciences) | Communitarianism. | Common good. | Liberalism.
Classification: LCC JC328.2 .P32 2021 (print) | LCC JC328.2 (ebook) | DDC 320.51/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057912
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Preface
The idea for this book first emerged during a symposium on postliberal politics that took place in November 2019 at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, at which it became clear that while postliberalism has a compelling critique of the discredited liberal consensus, which took the world by the scruff of the neck forty years ago, it lacks a convincing vision. A way through the political paralysis that has dominated the UK since the financial crisis and the shaping of a new era seemed a distant prospect. Barely a month later, the Conservative victory in the UK general election looked like a once-in-a-generation realignment of British politics, with working-class voters in Labour’s former heartlands switching to the Tories and the Labour Party suffering its worst defeat since 1935.1 A new winning consensus appeared to take shape: ‘left on the economy’ and ‘right on culture’. But it was not postliberal.
From the outset, the Johnson government struggled to define a coherent position. It broke with the socio-economic liberalism of Blair and Cameron and combined Keynesian state activism with deregulated free trade. It flirted with social conservatism but embraced a brand of state centralism that undermines community and does little to support the family. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, I argued that the Tories had power without purpose: dreaming up revolutionary reforms that would unleash the forces of technology and accelerated capitalism and so deepen divisions just when the country needs a national politics of the common good.2 It was disruption for its own sake with ill-thought-out Hayekian antecedents.
The pandemic further exposed Conservative confusion: caught between libertarian instincts and statist solutions; appearing to ‘follow the science’ but breaking lockdown rules; hostile to local devolution yet incompetent centralizers; invoking the ‘will of the people’ while failing to foster communal solidarity. What does ‘levelling up’ actually imply? But the Tories are not alone in lacking a noticeable telos. Across the West, liberals are doubling down on the failed fusion of technocracy with ultra-progressivism. National populists champion the power of strongmen who deploy state coercion and erode constitutional norms. Behind their version of ‘left on the economy’ and ‘right on culture’ lurk forms of statism and moralism that will do nothing to secure shared prosperity or plural societies.
Despite their differences, each of contemporary liberalism, populism and authoritarianism threaten democracy and pluralism.3 They converge around state centralization, crony capitalism, tech surveillance and rival versions of the ‘culture wars’ that fuel each other – a major theme of the book. This convergence opens up a space for a politics of place and people entrusted with power and resources to shape their everyday lives; an industrial strategy to build national resilience; and a new social covenant to try to repair broken communities and recreate a shared sense of belonging and duty.
Such a politics is anti-authoritarian but not anti-liberal. On the contrary, liberty and fundamental rights are precious gifts that should not be curtailed. Yet they can only be sustained by the practice of fraternity and mutual obligations. Genuine postliberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses such as individualism, untrammelled capitalism or identity politics. Its organizing principles are community, mutual markets, ethical enterprise and the common purposes around which people associate. In short, a postliberal politics that seeks to build new robust communities.
No political party or government has so far embraced genuine postliberalism by combining economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance – the other major theme of the book. Building on postliberal thought and its philosophical forebears, my aim is to develop a political and policy programme anchored in a public philosophy of the good life. A good life, like the common good, involves a plural search for shared ends that bind us together as social beings: the quest for individual fulfilment together with mutual flourishing; a degree of personal autonomy within engaged and convivial societies; and common prosperity as part of a blossoming biosphere. The good life requires a civic covenant – a partnership between generations, between regions, between nations and with nature. This is only unrealistic as long as we accept the dominant assumptions. Covid-19 has exposed the weaknesses of the current ideologies and revealed the deep desire for security and solidarity. Now is the time. Let us build that new covenant.
Adrian Pabst
Muswell Hill
March 2021
Notes
1
Deborah Mattinson,
Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?
(London: Biteback Publishing, 2020).
2
Adrian Pabst, ‘Power without purpose: how the Tories don’t have a national plan’,
New Statesman
, 14–20 February 2020, pp. 25–7.
3
Michael Lind,
The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite
(London: Atlantic, 2020).
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who have helped me to complete this book. Particular thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Kent and at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research for their support, especially Iain MacKenzie, Jane O’Mahony and Richard Whitman at Kent as well as Jagjit Chadha and Hande Küçük at NIESR. I am also very grateful to the participants of the 2019 symposium on postliberal politics at Windsor, notably Phillip Blond, Peter Franklin, Giles Fraser, John Gray, Mary Harrington, Julius Krein, Michael Merrick, Aris Roussinos, Freddie Sayers, Will Tanner, Helen Thompson, Ed West and the late Wendy Wheeler, who is much missed.
Many ideas in these pages took shape in conversations with my comrades Richard Beardsworth, Susannah Black, Jon Cruddas, Fred Dallmayr, Ruth Davis, Paul Embery, Tobias Fibbs, Maurice Glasman, Jack Hutchinson, Wayne Hudson, Shabana Mahmood, John Milbank, Jonathan Rutherford and Liam Stokes. I owe an exceptional debt of gratitude to six friends who read (parts of) the manuscript: Christopher Coker, Jason Cowley, Ron Ivey, James Noyes, Sebastian Milbank and Richard Sawka. Their generous comments improved both style and substance, and Sebastian taught me the difference between good and bad alliteration! Of course, not all of the arguments developed here reflect their views.
I could not have written the book without the ceaseless encouragement and counsel of my publisher George Owers. It has been a pleasure working with him and his dedicated colleagues Julia Davies and Rachel Moore at Polity. Thanks must also go to Justin Dyer, whose copy-editing was brilliant.
My greatest debt is to my wife Elena and our children Alexander and Katya for their unfailing patience and love. It is to them that I dedicate the book. Deo gratias.
Prologue: a new era
For a brief moment in 2020, it seemed as if the long interregnum that began with the 2008 financial crash might finally end. After years of austerity and anger, the Covid-19 pandemic brought people together by acts of quiet generosity. Our polarized politics gave way to national unity as we rediscovered a sense of shared purpose: acting in solidarity to slow the infection rate and save lives. In neighbourhoods and across nations, people volunteered to deliver food and medicines to the vulnerable and those experiencing poverty or loneliness. Governments of all stripes paid the wages of workers and provided emergency loans for businesses. The coronavirus crisis brought out the great human spirit of decency, fraternity and kindness. Our response during the first lockdown was a communitarian moment.
Yet it proved to be a false dawn. The winners of the shutdown were tech oligarchs such as Amazon, Google or China’s Alibaba while family-owned businesses folded and inner-city shops were boarded up. And following the brutal police killing of George Floyd in the US, a wave of protests and counter-protests once more poisoned the public realm, backed by big business and fuelled by a culture of abuse on social media. After a short period of compassion and community, hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics were back with a vengeance. Both are destroying the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes.1 What comes next will be different from what came before, but the ‘new normal’ is largely an intensification of the forces that dominated the old status quo: capitalism, nationalism and technocracy. Instead of resolving the interregnum, politics seems caught in an impasse.
Across the West, the old opposition of left versus right has been supplanted by a new polarity of liberal versus populist, but neither appears to be capable of defining a new position except negatively and by demonizing the other. The stand-off between the old establishment and the new insurgent elites leaves little space for decent leadership or real democracy.2 In China and the ‘rising rest’, authoritarian one-party rule is fusing state capitalism with nationalism in ways that deny fundamental freedoms and supress democratic movements. In response to the paralysed liberal order and a divided West, the challengers in Eurasia portray themselves as peaceful civilizational states that supposedly combine pre-liberal civilization with modern statehood.3 In reality, authoritarians sow discord at home and abroad while dressing up their demagogy as strength compared with liberal-democratic weakness.
Locked in a national and global struggle, none of the three dominant ideologies looks set to be hegemonic: liberalism neither dies nor renews itself; populism is effective at ejecting liberals from office but in power amounts to little more than complacent boosterism; authoritarianism taunts Western democracy without offering any viable long-term alternative to the challenges of the modern world.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a crossroads: a moment of decision about journeys taken and prospects ignored. We can either revert to liberal individualism, or slide ever more into demagogic populism, or accelerate towards authoritarian control. Alternatively, we could build a politics on the things that matter to people: our families and friends; the places where we live and work; the relationships of support and community that sustain us; and the institutions that provide security. Key to this conception of politics is the idea that we are embodied beings who flourish when we are embedded in interpersonal relationships and institutions giving us meaning as well as agency. Such a politics is postliberal and communitarian – one that avoids the excesses of liberalism without succumbing to the errors of populism or the oligarchic criminality of authoritarianism.
Communitarian postliberalism
Postliberal thought is not new, and it draws on intellectual traditions stretching back to Aristotle, Catholic social thought and communitarianism.4 But in recent years it has too often become associated with a politics that is antiliberal and antimodern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class. A true postliberal approach eschews crude forms of solidarity built on ethnic or religious homogeneity and instead embraces the pluralist heritage of ethical traditions forged in the nineteenth and the twentieth century – including personalism, one-nation conservatism and ethical socialism.
The postliberal politics which this book develops is emphatically not antiliberal. Rather, it begins with a sense of the limits of the liberal project: the damage done by individualism; liberty reduced to the removal of constraints on private choice; individual rights disconnected from mutual obligations; the erosion of intermediary institutions by the combined power of the free market aided by the centralized state; global disorder based on coercion, trade deficits and permanent war.5 By contrast, postliberalism views human beings as relational and freedom as a balance between autonomy and self-restraint. Rights are not just indissociable from duties but also ineffective without them. States and markets only generate shared prosperity together with social cohesion when they are embedded in strong civic institutions and structures of self-help that sustain a sense of belonging. A genuine international order requires cooperation between nations and peoples anchored in social and cultural ties, fair trade as well as military restraint.6
Postliberal politics is communitarian in new ways. It links the deep desire for community that was manifest during the first lockdown to the recognition that most people belong to more than one community and that they are also part of free, newly shaped associations beyond given communities. The communitarianism which this book defends is also corporatist and internationalist. Democratic corporatism seeks to reconcile the estranged interests of government, business and organized labour. To protect people from the pressures of state and market power, we need to strengthen all the intermediary institutions that help constitute society: trade unions, universities, local authorities, business associations, faith communities, as well as all other components of our social fabric like pubs, post offices and public libraries. And since this cannot be done within the boundaries of nation-states or by one country alone, we also need a new account of international relations and global politics.7
A new era
To resist the temptations of reverting to technocratic liberalism or sliding into authoritarianism, communitarian postliberalism requires a shared political and policy programme anchored in a public philosophy. At the heart of it is a vision of national renewal based on a reconstruction of our shared interests and underpinned by principles of contributive justice and reciprocal obligations. Instead of pinning our hopes on a single political leader or party, we need to build a broad communitarian consensus that puts society above politics and the economy, rebuilding the social fabric that binds communities and countries together. Postliberalism recognizes the true purpose of politics as the conciliation of estranged interests through the pursuit of the common good. The economy only works well when it serves shared prosperity rather than vested interests. All this has to be translated into public policy, joined up to combine greater economic justice with more social stability and ecological balance.
The national interest is intertwined with international solidarity. Nations and peoples, sometimes under religious inspiration, form bonds of trust and cooperation with one another within states but equally across borders. The nation-state and the working classes have not been and should not be swept away by globalization or the rise of a professional-managerial class, but going forward the task is to forge new cross-class and cross-cultural coalitions both nationally and internationally. Postliberal politics promotes an internationalist vision anchored in nations and civic institutions as a constructive alternative to globalism and nationalism; of an international order founded on establishing trust and friendship rather than calculated self-interest.
A novel popular consensus is necessary to resolve the interregnum: the period between the previous and the next settlement. Liberalism’s old hegemony has ended but not yet been replaced by a new worldview. To command majority support, politics has to start with what most people value: family, friendship, locality, community and country. Reasonable hope for a better future has to be rooted in ways of life that involve a sense of sacrifice and contribution to the common good. It is about cherishing freedom, a sense of fair play and the places and concrete communities where people live. All these values rest on lived solidarity: relationships of ‘give-and-receive’ that give our daily lives meaning.
For all the suffering it has brought, the Covid-19 pandemic represents a moment to rebuild the common life which lies at the heart of a healthy body politic. Now is the time for such an alternative that is centred on trust, dignity and human relationships. The coronavirus crisis could further accelerate the dominant forces of our age, or it could herald something more hopeful: a new era of renewal.
Notes
1
Anne Case and Angus Deaton,
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
2
Lind,
The New Class War
.
3
Weiwei Zhang,
The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State
(Shanghai: WCPC, 2012).
4
John Gray,
Postliberalism: Studies in Political Thought
(London: Routledge, 1993); David Goodhart, ‘A postliberal future?’,
Demos Quarterly
, 1/1 (2014),
https://www.demos.co.uk/files/apostliberalfuture.pdf
; John Milbank and Adrian Pabst,
The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future
(London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016); cf. Giles Fraser, ‘A post-liberal reading list’,
UnHerd
, 22 November 2019,
https://unherd.com/2019/11/a-post-liberal-reading-list/
.
5
Paul Collier and John Kay,
Greed Is Dead: Politics After Individualism
(London: Allen Lane, 2020); Patrick Porter,
The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump
(Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
6
Fred Dallmayr,
Postliberalism: Discovering a Shared World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
7
Raghuram Rajan,
The Third Pillar: The Revival of Community in a Polarised World
(London: William Collins, 2019).
IPOSTLIBERAL TIMES
Have we not been here before? Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, economic liberalism has been in question. The 2011 Tottenham riots, which spread to other parts of Britain, shone a light on community breakdown and the limits of social liberalism.1 Five years later, after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory, the populist backlash was not merely a rejection of the consensus based on the double liberalism championed by The Economist. More importantly, it was also a stirring of the double desire for earning and belonging – the dignity of work and a sense of shared identity.2 Both are grounded in a quest for esteem and recognition.
Yet in each instance, party politics did not live up to the task. Red Tory and Blue Labour had some intellectual influence on David Cameron’s Big Society narrative and Ed Miliband’s vision of One Nation Labour, but the party leaders and their main advisers retreated to variants of progressivism as the default setting. In the wake of the Brexit vote, Theresa May tried but failed to develop a new working-class conservative politics that rejected Thatcherite economics and Cameron’s modernization drive in favour of a more traditional Toryism that accentuates the good that government can do to make markets work while also repairing the social fabric. As the Guardian columnist Martin Kettle suggested back in 2016,
These are still early days, but May’s speeches, both before and after becoming prime minister, are unified by postliberal thinking. […] Brexit is in part a revolt against a set of characteristics of modern liberalism. We have a new political agenda that no political party can afford to ignore. Whether we consider ourselves liberal or not, we increasingly inhabit postliberal times.3
Not unlike Miliband and Cameron before her, however, May abandoned a postliberal vision of renewal in favour of a position defined by the old orthodoxies of the free market supported by the bureaucratic state. Her government watered down industrial policy and corporate governance reform while pursuing free-trade deals for a Global Britain that were disconnected from the national economy.4 A lack of intellectual depth combined with poor leadership sealed her fate.
Since then, people’s support for populists such as Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni (the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party), Jair Bolsonaro or Boris Johnson has not been matched by a coherent politics or policy programme to tackle legitimate grievances to which progressive politics – from Bill Clinton via Tony Blair to Barack Obama and David Cameron – contributed significantly during the two decades of rampant globalization. Yet for all their rhetoric about defending ‘the will of the people’ against corrupt elites, populists have done little to address the resentment and humiliation experienced by millions. The long interregnum that began in the wake of the financial crisis has not been decisively resolved by the populist insurgency. Meanwhile liberals are not taking their defeat lying down. The liberal counter-putsch we saw with the protests following the violent death of George Floyd is ultimately part of the same culture war on which demagogic populists thrive.5 The postliberal times we entered a decade ago are still with us, and Covid-19 is another moment in their unfolding.
Notes
1
David Lammy,
Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots
, rev. ed. (London: Guardian Books, 2012).
2
Jon Cruddas, ‘One Nation – caring, earning and belonging’, speech given to Civitas think-tank, 14 October 2013,
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/earningandbelonging.pdf
.
3
Martin Kettle, ‘Brexit was a revolt against liberalism. We’ve entered a new political era’,
The Guardian
, 16 September 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/15/brexit-liberalism-post-liberal-age
.
4
Adrian Pabst, ‘Postliberalism: the new centre-ground of British politics’,
The Political Quarterly
, 88/3 (2017): 500–9; Nick Timothy,
Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2020), pp. 1–28.
5
Sohrab Ahmari, ‘Power putsch’,
The Spectator
, 4 July 2020, p. 14.
1Resolving the interregnum
During weeks of lies and cover-up about Covid-19 by the Chinese government, international flights out of the epicentre in China’s Hubei province continued to operate, turning a local plague into a global pandemic. When Wuhan was finally closed off, videos emerged of the local authorities forcibly removing residents from their homes and rounding up suspected carriers of the virus. As people were sent to mass quarantine camps, they were told that lockdown was for the good of the community and the state, equated with the Communist Party. Beijing’s primary concern was economic growth and the image of the ruling regime. In the West, the US and UK governments delayed the lockdown as they initially seemed to privilege population-wide ‘herd immunity’ to protect the economy. This amounted to a policy that could have seen hundreds of thousands of weaker members of society die.
While the early response of the Chinese showed merciless indifference to the human suffering of Wuhan’s population, that of the US and the UK was built on economism and utility. Either way, a sacrificial logic was at work that put material and ideological interests ahead of human survival and security. The coronavirus crisis has exposed the limitations of both China’s model and that of the Anglo-Saxon West. Neither model addresses the underlying conditions that left us vulnerable to pandemics like Covid-19: an overcentralized state eroding local institutions; globalized markets diminishing the resilience of the national economy; hollowed-out civic institutions combined with weak relationships of trust and obligation.
The past forty years have been dominated first by ultraliberalism in the West and then by antiliberal authoritarianism in China. Events of the past decade – from the 2008 global financial crash to Brexit and Trump, from the rise of Xi Jinping to the pandemic – have revealed the weaknesses of both systems. They are vulnerable to the forces of capitalism, nationalism and techno-science. No alternative ideology has so far captured the popular imagination or built a consensus capable of commanding majority support. We seem stuck in an interregnum where the old order has collapsed but not been replaced by a new settlement. In the words of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who coined this term, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.’1
Zombie order
We still live in the long interregnum that began with the financial crisis. No single ideology or system has supplanted the dominance of liberalism since the Soviet Communist implosion in 1989. In the West, national populism is here to stay but struggles to govern and address the grievances of its new working-class base. China and other authoritarian regimes flex their economic muscle but lack the independent institutions and social trust on which vibrant societies depend. While the American-led Atlantic era is fading, the Chinese or Asian century has not yet begun. The paroxysm of pandemic and protest that we witnessed in the US and the UK may end up being the defining moment in the decline of the liberal West, but is it a prelude to the death of liberalism itself? That is the fear of the Western establishment, who see the return of 1930s totalitarian rule in every populist insurgency. It is the hope of the West’s rivals in Moscow, Beijing and beyond, for whom America’s mutation into a semi-failed state confirms the superiority of authoritarianism.
But besides the demise of the West and the rise of the rest, there is another possibility. The Western liberal order will continue to stagger on – sclerotic yet stoic, decadent yet durable, inert without either real reform or complete collapse. ‘That may well be the fate of the liberal order over the next generations,’ writes the American commentator Ross Douthat, ‘a kind of sustainable decadence, a zombie existence punctuated by periods of temporary crisis and alarm that continues indefinitely.’2 As the post-viral economic cataclysm unfolds, the liberal West looks like the undead: not coming back to life but equally refusing to die.
Could the populist insurgency revitalize the West? Up to a point it has proven to be a corrective to some excesses of liberalism such as austerity, job-exporting trade deals and pressure on wages as a result of mass immigration. Yet going left on the economy and right on identity is hardly the same as a new political consensus. That would require a coherent governing philosophy, but unlike the neoliberal model of Thatcher and Reagan, which drew on thirty years of Hayekian thinking, populists lack the intellectual resources to build a different settlement. With few exceptions, left populism has not survived contact with actual voters. Right populism, by contrast, is successful in ejecting liberal elites from power and has an inkling of what needs to be done. Yet it lacks the concepts and policy tools to bring about transformative change.
