Liberal Authoritarianism

The British State expands

Freedom is ancient, despotism is modern.

Mme de Staël

The United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has wasted no time in revealing his authoritarian nature. His first month in power has, to be sure, featured the worst spate of civil disorder to take place in the UK in many years, and, whatever the underlying causes, this undoubtedly required a police response. But the Prime Minister’s approach to this mini-crisis has been highly illustrative of his character. Almost his first meaningful action when the recent riots broke out was to give carte blanche - through executive fiat - to police forces throughout the country to use live facial recognition technology (which has just effectively been banned by the EU Parliament due to its intrusiveness) to engage in ‘preventative action’ in restricting people’s movements. Now, we learn that Sir Keir has also set in train a review of the law regulating social media so as to permit the micromanagement of ‘legal but harmful’ speech online, which will likely see social media companies being required to remove content that apparatchiks deem to be ‘misinformative’. His instincts have as a result been revealed to point not towards understanding, or the solution of problems, but merely towards control. Faced with the first opportunity to exercise power, in other words, Starmer has found his knee uncontrollably jerking. And it has jerked in the direction of China.

Starmer, it is plain, is one of those socialists for whom the appeal of socialism lies not so much in its amelioration of poverty, but rather in its provision of a rationale for the imposition of a perfect order on society - the construction of a ‘great social machine’, as Sydney Webb once put it, within which every individual must be made to fit. There is the touch of the Javert about him; he is one of those men who, all things considered, prefers the stars, who ‘know [their] place in the sky’, to people, who have an irritating tendency to exhibit free will. There is also in the air around him a quality that CS Lewis called ‘Saturnocentric’, which Michael Ward summarised as a combination of the ‘astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious’. It is no surprise at all that Starmer should once have made his living as England & Wales’ Director of Public Prosecutions: this is a man who would take to the political task of steering public policy regarding criminal prosecutions like a duck to water.

It should also be no surprise that Starmer was once a human rights lawyer. Some have found it difficult to square these two aspects of his character. Silkie Carlo, the prominent civil liberties campaigner, for instance, remarked in a recent interview concerning the use of live facial recognition how strange she found it that Sir Keir, who purportedly is a human rights advocate, would embrace a technology that seems almost designed to usher a Chinese total surveillance system into the UK.

But this confusion is based on a complete misunderstanding of what human rights are all about. Human rights law long ago abandoned any residual loyalty it might have had to anything so laughably quaint as civil liberties. What human rights promises, indeed, is the exact opposite of civil liberties - namely, the most complete form of tyranny that can be imagined, achieved not in the form of anything so dramatic as individual dictatorship, but in the form of a system of total and continuous regulation of each and every human interaction in the name of perfect autonomy and equality. Most people do not have anything like an adequate conceptual framework, or even the terminology, to understand this - which is why people like Carlo go so badly wrong in their interpretation of the actions of the Keir Starmers of this world. But I will do my best to elucidate it for you here.

The first thing is to understand what is really meant by ‘liberalism’: that is, the ideology that holds that the purpose of political power, in the form of the State, is to liberate. Here, the important point to emphasise is that, while many people still have a vague notion in their heads that this means that the State should be small, it is of course a recipe for the biggest State that there could possibly be. The essence of liberalism is the construction of a relationship between the autonomous individual and the State which guarantees, and fosters, that autonomy, and this means that the State must intervene in society in literally every single aspect in order to ensure that all individuals maximally enjoy the exercising of their autonomy at any given moment. Any social institution, whether concrete or abstract, which might constrain individual autonomy - family, church, community, employer, business, social norm, cultural taboo - must be broken down insofar as it provides a constraint, with the result being that there is prima facie no barrier that may be permitted to exist anywhere against State action.

The important corollary of this is that since the State must maximise individual autonomy it must also maximise individual equality - in the sense that all individuals must at all times be made to enjoy perfect equilibrium of both opportunities and outcome. Liberation always gestures towards the absolute abolition and prohibition of hierarchy of any kind, because where hierarchies are found to exist, individual autonomy is in some sense or other inhibited for those who are lower in that hierarchy than higher in it. Liberal government must then always work to ensure that nobody can find himself in a position of superior status to anybody else. And liberalism, therefore, in its relentless drive to liberate, also constructs a relationship between the individual and the State in which the latter guarantees to the former that, in perpetuity, it will instantiate itself as a great moderating force in society to ensure that nobody is ever able to occupy a position of ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis anybody else.

The inconsistencies and self-contradictions in all of this are evident to anybody with two brain cells to rub together; it is definitionally impossible to reconcile autonomy and equality in practice, because, since everybody is different and has different sets of abilities, as soon as anybody exerts their autonomy in any meaningful sense it will inevitably produce inequalities. The fact that a free market necessarily produces big differentials in wealth are an obvious example of this.

But this irreconcilability is, as the kids say these days, a feature of liberalism, rather than a bug - it is the reason why there needs to be a liberal State at all. Communists (and this is one of the admittedly good things one can say about Marx and Engels) at least had a notion, as harebrained as it may have been, that there would one day not need to be a State, and that it would ‘wither away’ once scarcity was in effect abolished. Liberalism has no such notion, because it posits the complete regulation by the State of all human interactions in perpetuity. And it needs to do this, because it has to always make a plausible claim to be creating the conditions in which the irreconcilable imperatives of autonomy and equality can be somehow in fact reconciled.

Liberals are therefore perfectly happy to accept trade-offs in this regard, because the making of trade-offs itself justifies the ongoing existence of liberal government. There must be somebody (John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Thomas Piketty, etc.) to declare to what extent inequalities in wealth are to be tolerated and on what basis, and to what extent redistribution should occur so as to optimise the relationship between autonomy and equality - and, naturally, a vast administrative State to fine tune that calibration from year to year, day to day, moment to moment. And this, of course, indicates the extent to which socialism and liberalism are tied together - and are really to be thought of as features of the same phenomenon, since liberalism will necessarily entail some degree of socialist redistribution and socialist redistribution will always necessarily take place on the basis of attempts to liberate the weak from economic dominance.

This all means that liberalism is to be understood to be quintessentially adjudicative in nature. The liberal State posits itself as a kind of omniscient and omnipotent referee, constantly umpiring a vast game conducted between millions upon millions of autonomous and equal individuals. It is a permanent, pervasive, and potent third party, always present in any given circumstance to interject so as to make one person a little more equal vis-à-vis some other person or persons, or to make one person a little more autonomous. One cannot escape from it, because escape is what it cannot permit - that would ruin the perfect system of optimisation which is always and everywhere to take place. And it has no principled limit, precisely because liberation itself has no logical limit - liberalism never has anywhere to go but onwards, downwards, and further in.

The result of this is a liberal authoritarianism which people do not really have the vocabulary to describe even as they sense that it is in motion and relentlessly advancing all the time. It has long gone past the point at which it could be rationally justified (there were formal inequalities that needed to be torn down; there were people in our societies who were living in de jure or de facto bondage) and has now shifted into fifth gear, such that we can properly begin to discern its pathologies and disastrous consequences. But the important point to re-emphasise is that ‘liberal authoritarianism’ is not an oxymoron; it is the inevitable playing out of the main predicate of liberalism itself, which is, to repeat, the repudiation of inequality, since equality is the necessary corollary of liberation conceived as the very purpose of government.

This makes human rights the perfect technology of liberal government, and of liberal political reason, because human rights law postulates the existence of a vast network of rights that drape themselves like a blanket over every feature of human existence and thereby always provide the justification for adjudication on the part of the State at any given moment. Everybody has the rights to freedom of association, to health, to education, to non-discrimination, to life, to freedom of expression, to privacy, to food, to housing, and so on and so forth - and the fact that these things cannot be made perfectly reconcilable with one another, and that anybody’s rights have to end where other peoples’ rights begin, allows there to spring into being an entire modulating framework designed to administer the necessary adjustments and compromise between competing rights claims - and it is in this practice that liberal government finds its justification and complete expression.

This happens judicially through the absurd conceit of ‘proportionality’ (whereby courts exercise purported oversight over the trade-offs authorities make between the protection of rights and the ‘public interest’) but ideally it happens internally within the institutions of government themselves (and also, of course, within private institutions), because the very existence of the permanent third party and its known motivations causes people to modulate their own conduct accordingly. Human rights therefore set in train, and legitimate, a total system of government based on the reconciliation and modulation of rights claims that could be made by anyone, against anyone else, at any time. It is the constitutionalisation, as it were, of Alexandre Kojève’s ‘“instinct” or “program” regulating all individuals completely and finally’ (as described by Kojève’s biographer, Jeff Love).

This connection between human rights and liberal authoritarianism is not widely understood, but is obvious when one thinks about the way human rights typically feature in our legal landscape - not as a way to restrain State power in general (think about how human rights activists completely vacated the scene during the Covid lockdown era) but as a way to determine who gets what from the State at a given point in time. Human rights do not limit State power per se, but only as a means of shaping the scope of executive decision-making so as to guide it towards liberation and equality - or to help decision-makers in an individual case find an appropriate reconciliation between those two imperatives, or between competing claims.

The appeal of this to somebody like Starmer, who likes everyone to fit nicely together into a grand, intricate and orderly social machine, is obvious - as is the idea that he might be the one who ultimately gets to press the buttons and pull the levers so as to fine-tune that machine to its absolutely perfect modulation. So the fact that he had a career as a human rights lawyer before entering into politics is absolutely fitting, and there is nothing unexpected or self-contradictory about his apparent lurch towards authoritarianism when in office. Authoritarianism is entirely in keeping with the zealous adherence to human rights - it is just that we do not really not have a way of conceptualising the phenomenon of liberal authoritarianism as such, and therefore imagine the two things to be somehow contradictory when they are in fact closely linked.

In closing, it is worth also mentioning something about how democracy fits into this picture. Starmer, like any good liberal authoritarian, does not like democracy. He does not like it in the narrow sense of people voting for things which government puts into effect (overseas readers may not know that he was one of the doughtiest champions of the attempt to overturn the 2016 EU referendum result), and he does not like it in the broad sense of public participation in politics. What he likes is operationalised bossiness, and that is really the stock-in-trade of liberal authoritarian practice at ground level: a supercilious demand for participation in the liberal project which also always imbues the subject with a vague feeling of shame for having failed to realise in advance what was expected of him.

This is why Starmer has taken to the task of suppression of ‘legal but harmful’ speech with such alacrity, and it is this that is likely to set the tone for his period in office. We are going to have to participate in realising the particular vision of autonomy and equality which Starmer’s government have in mind for us, and we are going to have to get used to being chided, in the manner of a bad dog who has made a mess in the kitchen, when we fall short of what is expected of us. We may be allowed to exert our right to freedom of expression in response - but only in the sense that it is modulated by the State-as-umpire, and reconciled with all of the other rights with which it might potentially conflict, and only therefore in such a way that the power of the liberal State over society will be extended, rather than curtailed. The State will get bigger in the economic sense (it always does under a Labour government). But it will also get bigger conceptually, and in its role with respect to the constant supervision of society. It will become both more liberal and more authoritarian - and my strong suspicion is that in five years’ time we will therefore have a much better handle on what liberal authoritarianism entails than we do at present.