In Britain, the USA and across Europe an active cultural war is being fought between liberalism and nationalistic reactionaries. I regret that British Liberal Democrats are playing so small a part in this conflict – fought through the intellectual media and think tank world, within Christian churches (and within Judaism) and across university campuses. Anti-liberal tracts and articles spill out from well-funded think tanks and newspapers in the USA, Britain and elsewhere. Liberal rebuttals are fewer. But Allen Lane/Penguin have just published one full-length rebuttal: ‘Centrists of the World Unite: the lost genius of Liberalism’, by Adrian Wooldridge, who has spent most of his career on the staff of The Economist.
In over 300 pages Wooldridge takes us from the 16th and 17th century origins of liberalism to its contemporary dilemmas. His underlying theme is that liberalism – defined as ‘the belief that society starts with the individual rather than the collective that power is so dangerous that it needs to be restrained, that truth can be striven-for only through open discussion’ – has twice been successfully reinterpreted to meet the challenges of social, economic and international changes, and that we now need a third confident reinterpretation to counter the anti-liberal onslaught we face today.
Political liberalism in Europe, he declares , ‘was born out of an aversion to the twin extremisms unleashed by the French Revolution’, of Jacobin terrorism and authoritarian reaction. With the example of what seemed like the successful constitutional revolution in America to encourage them, liberals curbed the powers of monarchs and state churches, reformed and extended education, and promoted freedom of the press. When mass industrialization, overcrowded cities and corporate concentration made small-state liberalism inadequate, the New Liberalism of welfare provision, industrial regulation and anti-trust supported a second blossoming of progressive governance. That in turn faded under the turmoil of the First World War and its chaotic aftermath – to be rescued again by Keynesian social democracy and Rooseveltian international liberal order, to provide the framework for the thirty glorious years of post-1945 growth and international cooperation.
The end of the Cold War was hailed as the triumph of global Liberalism. But Wooldridge traces, and regrets, the parallel splintering of political liberal thinking into three warring factions: economic, managerial and ‘left’ liberalism. Free market liberals, incorrectly claiming to be ‘classical’ liberals while rejecting the moral elements of liberal philosophy from Locke and Smith onwards, have promoted ungoverned globalization and sidelined democracy and social cohesion. Managerial liberalism, personified for him by the technocratic European Union as well as the proliferation of international organizations and regulatory agencies, has forgotten the need for elites to maintain democratic accountability and social acceptance. Left liberalism worries him most, from personal experience of years living in California: the pursuit of minority rights beyond majority acceptance, intolerance of dissent and the emergence of a post-modern intellectual elite.
His 200 pages of historical analysis are powerful and persuasive. His 100 pages on how we should again reshape the ‘balance between democracy and technocracy, managerialism and self-determination and globalism and localism’ are much less confident, and too heavily influenced by current American trends and crises. He urges liberals to work to ‘remoralize the ruling class’ – rightly reminding us of early liberals’ moral commitment to individual and social improvement. But he doesn’t explain how to achieve this. He puts forward ‘the case for liberal paternalism’, with governments providing liberal education for their citizens and nudging them towards healthy and productive lives, but doesn’t resolve the tensions between elite leadership and popular acceptance. He supports vigorous anti-trust action to break up the growing concentration of financial and technological power, but doesn’t address the question of how to reconcile multinational capitalism with national democracy. He calls for stronger borders to reinforce national solidarity, without examining the push factors in immigration or the demographic challenges posed by ageing societies.
He is however right to warn us that the illiberal right grasps that politics is ‘downstream of culture’, and that we can only hope to defeat the current upsurge of illiberal reaction by engaging in arguments as broad as theirs. Britain, like other democratic societies, has become far more liberal over the past 50 years. We should celebrate that achievement against those who want to take us back to authoritarian hierarchies, ‘trad wives’ and ethnic-national conflict. We have to define a liberal reordering of the market economy which limits the adverse impacts of globalization and recognises the painful and delicate choices to be made in strengthening sustainability and mitigating climate change. We need to promote a stronger sense of shared citizenship, with duties as well as rights in public life instead of passive acceptance of state provision. And we have to rebuild a liberal international order, starting with cooperation with our neighbours and bringing other countries in. A third intellectual reinterpretation of liberalism is essential to successfully pushing back anti-enlightenment reaction and oligarchic (or state) capitalism. Even as we campaign on immediate issues that matter to the daily lives of voters, we also need to engage more actively with questions like these.
* William Wallace is LibDem peer, a former vice-chair of the Federal Policy Committee and convenor of the party's 1997 manifesto team.
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11 Comments
On liberalism and nationalistic reactionaries I was pleased to read that the Pope says “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems”. I was also pleased to hear Donald Trump ‘accuse’ the Pope of being a liberal.
On elite leadership and popular acceptance, I am sure that most people can be persuaded of the benefits of multilateral relationships that the Pope mentions. Someone or some group (call it an elite if you like) has to make certain decisions, but election results show the biggest key to popular acceptance is the hope for more economic wellbeing and hopefully the current crisis will teach people there is a link between good international relations and their economic wellbeing. Yet, unless the economic benefits of any international order (or even order within a nation) are shared much better among people there will not be that necessary popular acceptance.
Lord Wallace is right that the intellectual response to illiberalism has been underpowered, and that the problem runs deeper than electoral politics. The Wooldridge book sounds like a useful contribution (I’ve just ordered a copy), though the gap he identifies between historical diagnosis and practical prescription is a familiar one. The hardest thing to articulate is not what liberalism stands for, but what it does when confronted with concentrated wealth, democratic erosion, and the real grievances that the illiberal right has learned to weaponise.
What liberalism needs now is economic credibility, not just cultural confidence. It has to have a serious answer to the question of who actually owns the economy and on whose behalf it is run. Shared citizenship means very little when wealth and power are as concentrated as they currently are. Economic radicalism is not an import from the left. It belongs to the liberal tradition. We should own that.
My own work through A Just Society is trying to do some of this from a liberal rather than socialist starting point, making the case that economic radicalism and liberal values are not in tension but are in fact inseparable. https://ajustsociety.uk/
Lord Wallace is right that we need a third reinterpretation of liberalism, and correct in his observation that the illiberal right understands politics is downstream of culture. But I think the prescriptions here reveal exactly the problem they’re trying to solve.
“Remoralize the ruling class” is asking the people who hold power to be nicer about it. That’s not liberalism. That’s noblesse oblige. And “liberal paternalism” is an oxymoron. If your offer to people who feel the system is done to them is “we’ll do it to you more thoughtfully,” you’ve already lost.
The instinct throughout, both in Wooldridge’s book and in this review, is to reach upward: better elites, smarter nudges, reformed institutions at the top. But the crisis of liberalism isn’t a crisis of elite quality. It’s a crisis of power concentration. People aren’t angry because the ruling class lacks morals. They’re angry because they have no meaningful control over the decisions that shape their lives. And it shows in poor lifetime economic prospects and immediate financial insecurity.
The liberal answer to populism isn’t better centralism. It’s dispersing power.
@Tom Reeve. Re your second paragraph, that is exactly what we do. Look at the election leaflet that has almost certainly fallen through your door in the past few days. It will describe all the good things Lib Dems have done or will do for you. Politics IS “done” to ordinary people and we lean into that.
Thanks for comments. Tom, the problem of how to reconcile elite leadership, widespread participation and local democracy is one of the central problems of liberalism – to which Mill and many others have answered ‘we have to educate our citizens’ to reconcile the tensions. The EU symbolises the problem: to maintain and regulate a social market economy on a continental scale we are stuck with a remote, elite-led set of institutions that it’s easy for populist politicians to attack. Yet without something like this we’d be left to US dominance and rule by state or American capitalist leadership. Yes, we should emphasise active citizenship and local autonomy; but a lot of problems have to be managed well above that level.
Thanks for your comments, William. I take your point that we need institutions to run large and complex systems, but the question is, what are the underlying values and assumptions that guide them? And for whose benefit are they run?
This is important because the evidence – and lived experience – shows disproportionate gains for certain economic groups at the expense of those on median and sub-median incomes. With low incomes and limited wealth, there is little to cushion them from economic shocks. The hollowing out of public services in the name of efficiency, including the persistent underfunding of the NHS, only makes this worse.
So when Mill’s answer is invoked, that we need to “educate our citizens” to reconcile these tensions, I’d gently push back. The millions who feel shut out of the system don’t lack understanding. They understand perfectly well. They can see that the economy works for some people and not for them. They suspect decisions are made remotely by people who will never live with the consequences. Education isn’t the missing ingredient. Agency is.
I’m not arguing against institutions. But the liberal reflex to reach for better management from the top is itself part of the crisis. If our answer to populism is “trust us, we’ll run it more competently,” we’re offering a better version of the thing people are already rejecting.
“we’re offering a better version of the thing people are already rejecting”
What are the options?
A Going “backwards” – to
1 ethno-nationalism, which may or may not have liberal elements like the rule of law, free markets and free trade but which privilege one group over others.
2 “might is right”
B going “forward” – to what? Socialism/communism has failed. Trump’s takeover of Venezuela is perhaps part of a mopping up operation – will Cuba be next? How much “equality” do people actually want? How much is achievable? History (in the Hegelian sense) has ended in that there is no where else to go after a liberal democracy – the only way is backwards. Or perhaps not.
C Going sideways – to societies where there is rule of religious law. Islam seems to be standing up to the “might is right” model – aided of course by the geopolitical realities of the Gulf and Afghanistan. The Communists could not bring down the Orthodox Church, and I think the Pope will win his spat with Trump
D secular liberal democracy, where the pen is mightier than the sword, and we exploit and manage competition and innovation via representative democracy, the rule of law and the application of human rights. It has delivered, in its various imperfect forms, a huge world wide increase in health wealth and freedom and is now grappling with the problems of success.
Thanks Tristan, but I think you may have misread the argument. I’m not proposing an alternative to liberal democracy. I’m proposing an alternative within it. Centralised technocratic liberalism and dispersed democratic liberalism are both liberal democracy. They just look and feel very different to the people living under them. The question isn’t “liberal democracy versus what?” It’s “whose liberal democracy?”
The Fukuyama framing, that history has ended and there’s nowhere else to go, is part of the problem. It treats liberal democracy as a destination rather than a living system. The person in Margate who can’t afford a decent life isn’t choosing between your options A through D. They’re living inside option D and asking why it isn’t working for them.
You say liberal democracy is grappling with the problems of success. Whose success? The system has been enormously successful for some people. But what about everyone else for whom the system has not been a success? What does success look like for them? If we can’t answer those questions, then Margate voter will look for someone who at least acknowledges their reality.
To what extent is “liberalism” a useful paradigm, when we seek to address today’s global problems – the dominance of tyranny and kleptocracy in all the major powers outside Europe?
Wooldridge “traces, and regrets, the parallel splintering of political liberal thinking into three warring factions: economic, managerial and ‘left’ liberalism.” But the economic liberals are on the side of “ungoverned globalsation”, the managerial liberals have “forgotten…democratic accountability”, and the left-liberals worry Wooldridge even more. Failure all around, it would seem!
Perhaps we should recognise that no single classical political theory gets everything “right”. Liberalism certainly hits the button when championing freedom against tyranny, but myopically neglects the crucial importance of class inequality and racial discrimination. Socialism has historically made many mistakes, but it successfully identifies the crucial need to stand up for the downtrodden against the tyrants. It’s time we all stopped being slaves to defunct political theorists, whether liberal or socialist.
Tom Reeve best identifies today’s critical need – the dispersion of power. To meet this need successfully, we will need an end to narrow-minded tribalism in progressive politics.
Thanks – I agree that tribalism between progressive traditions is part of the problem.
I’d push back slightly on liberalism myopically neglecting class inequality, though. The New Liberal tradition – Hobhouse, Hobson, Beveridge, Keynes – was explicitly about addressing material conditions and the concentration of economic power. That strand of liberalism didn’t ignore inequality. But, it was mostly drowned out after the 1980s by the free market faction.
@ Tom Reeve
“Whose success? The system has been enormously successful for some people.”
If you believe this week’s Economist (am impeccably liberal organ) “some people” include the world’s destitute. In 1990 43% of the global population lived onless than 1.25US dollars a day. It’s 13% below an equivalent adjusted number today. I expect those numbers come from the UN, and the reason is (mostly) growth in China, India and Indonesia.
Much more supporting data is in Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenmemt Now.
You are of course right to point to the likes of Margate.