I had an out of body experience a couple of months ago. I found myself watching an episode of The Rest is Entertainment, presented by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman, in which they interviewed Adam Curtis about his latest BBC documentary Shifty.
The presenters were extremely effusive in their praise of the documentary (personally I found it pretty uninspiring and Curtis running on autopilot, but I digress). Osman was particularly excited by Curtis’s use of the song “The Land of Make Believe” by Bucks Fizz. Curtis went on to explain, as he also points out in the documentary, that the song was written by former King Crimson band member Peter Sinfield as a critique of Thatcherism. And yet despite Sinfield presenting himself as this anti-Thatcher vanguard, he went on to live as a tax exile in Spain. And what was Curtis’s conclusion to this conundrum, which Hyde and Osman responded to with rapturous applause (and which also featured as the thumbnail to the video on YouTube which was doubtless why I clicked on it in the first place)?
Never trust a liberal
And I just watched this trio of media commentators —the film maker who hates being defined as left or right and has been the darling of the BBC’s factual programming for decades; the writer whose jolly murder mystery novels have captured the hearts and minds of middle England; and the Guardian journalist who writes witty and engaging — but entirely safe — columns every week, and I just wondered: who on earth they thought these “liberals” — who they very definitely were not — were.
The tendency for people to define liberalism as whatever they don’t like is something that has long annoyed me. I used to take Nick Cohen to task for doing so. Since then, Nick Cohen has rather fallen from grace and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people critique him for being a liberal as proof of his wrongheadedness on numerous occasions.
As time has gone on, I’ve come to realise that this is part of a wider problem we now have with definitions in modern political and cultural discourse. I’ve seen people on the left complain that leftism has come to simply mean whatever you don’t like. And to a certain extent, there are a number of definitions of liberalism that people tend to settle on, which occasionally overlap:
- Liberalism is centrism
- Liberalism is neoliberalism (i.e. the specific set of economic reforms that came to dominate Western politics from the 1980s onwards)
- Liberalism is the bourgeoisie
- Liberals are the media and political elite (this is the Curtis definition)
- Liberals are people who believe in liberal democracy (i.e. anyone who engages in a Western political system and doesn’t define their beliefs in opposition to its norms)
The problem I have, and maybe this is a me problem, is that none of these are what I consider to be liberalism.
I suppose the one I have the least problem with is the last one, because on some level it is pretty unarguable. If you don’t actively oppose concepts like separation of powers, the rule of law and representative democracy, I guess you are a liberal to some extent. But the problem is that includes lots of people who, whether they declare it or not, undermine all of those things. And it presupposes that our current political status quo is particularly liberal or, for that matter, democratic.
As for the other definitions, the one I wrestle with the most is the idea that liberalism is fundamentally middle class. I don’t think liberalism has ever defined itself as such, but it is pretty hard to deny the Marxist critique that it’s always tended to defend middle class interests. I think that this is its greatest flaw; the one it has persistently failed to rise above and the one which, in the current political climate, poses an existential threat to it.
The one that annoys me the most is the idea that liberalism is neoliberalism. This is related to the idea that it simply looks after the middle class. Historically the John Lockes, Adam Smiths and John Brights were very much looking at liberalism from the perspective of business interests. John Stuart Mill shifted it towards looking at wider issues, broadening concerns particularly to how government treats individuals and society treats women. This in turn lead to the New Liberals in the early 20th century, people like Hobhouse, Keynes and Beveridge, and eventually what came to be known as the post-war consensus in the UK (and of course the New Deal stateside, somewhat earlier).
But it turned out that threatened an awful lot of people with the economic and political clout to undermine it, which — as I understand it at least — is how we ended up with people like Hayek and Freedman eventually usurping it. When I first got involved in the Liberal Democrats, I used to tell myself that I was joining a party that opposed neoliberalism, but that illusion became increasingly hard to maintain. The hard truth is that to a large extent pretty much anyone who participates in Western liberal democracy these days also signs up to neoliberal precepts to a significant degree — myself included — simply out of habit and a lack of imagination. It’s just that I think we should be better than that.
What is liberalism to me? It is of course the rule of law, separation of powers and limited government. It’s also about human rights, human dignity, and human decency. It’s about freedom and liberation for everyone, not just a self-interested middle class or elite. And it’s about doubt, and the fear that some of those things might be contradictory and impossible to achieve at the same time.
I don’t see a lot of that in neoliberalism. More to the point, neoliberalism appears to have run its course. I can’t stop thinking about this interview with Jo Swinson (former Lib Dem leader and currently head of Partners for a New Economy):
“The irony is that the defenders of the neoliberal status quo seem to be centre-left governments in different parts of the world.” That, she argues, is one reason the left is struggling: “People have sussed out that this economic system doesn’t work.” By contrast, “the part of the right that is being successful has stopped defending neoliberalism, because they know that it’s not popular and that defending it is not going to win them votes.”
Neoliberalism has become a lead weight that is threatening to drag us down into the depths. The right realised this after the crash in 2008 and shifted gear, while centrist governments have shuffled along like zombies under the illusion that nothing fundamental has changed, while adopting tried and tested tactics such as triangulation in an attempt to fend off populism. In the UK at least, this is leading us down a very dark path indeed.
Almost a century ago, liberalism faced down the spectre of fascism and Soviet-style communism and came up with an economic model that, while imperfect and leaving a lot of people shut out economically and socially, was vastly better than the alternatives. Then it allowed itself to get co-opted by a form of turbo-capitalism which itself has now burned itself out. It’s up in the air if it can do so again, but the alternative scares me — even if this current alliance of capitalists, fascists and death cults end up buckling under the weight of their contradictions.
I consume a lot of leftist media these days, and indeed consider myself socialist in a lot of fundamental respects. Yet the hard left seems as enraptured with notions of revolution and accelerationism as the right. This was of course true a century ago as well. Maybe I should stop worrying and join their clamour to burn it all down. But I have my doubts.
Anyway, this is the first post in my attempt to try and figure out where I stand in all this. I’ve attempted to write a version of this article many times over the last couple of years. I’ve failed for the most part because I lacked a conclusion. So this is my attempt to get comfortable with the fact that I don’t have one. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some answers soon. Or at least someone will.
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