I have the sneaky suspicion that a lot of our fellow citizens welcome state micro-management. Freedom is tough, it requires engagement, having opinions, exercise agency, getting your hands dirty. You must have skin in the game. Some people just don't have the energy or find it beneath them to get involved or even express an opinion. They will just get along. The logical panacea for these individuals is then a state that regulates all the interactions among individuals, establishes rules and as David said, "optimizes" continuously. These individuals are happy to trade off liberty to have the state t to do the thinking for them. And voila’…the state is happy to oblige and has an endless source of anesthetized supporters who will take their bromide and never threaten state primacy regardless of the predominant political party in power.
This is why John Adams said: ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’
Socialists are always atheists. The Bible constantly reminds us that we have free will but to socialists, Government is God. (Welby and his ilk are apostates.)
Would you include John Smith? Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? Martin Luther King? Kier Hardie? I would guess that outside of the most leftie students, Christian socialists are just as common as Christian conservatives.
I think many prominent people are apostates. Was MLK a socialist? I don't think a 1960s member of the Democratic Party would have been a socialist in the way we understand it . My understanding is that socialism didn't really exist in the States until recently.
Thank you - this analysis explains much of which I was only dimply aware.
Regarding China: Starmer, as Leader of the Opposition, not only did nothing to rein in Lockdown, he and his Party wanted it to be harder. It's worth remembering that one of the SAGE members remarked that they were surprised that people so easily complied with these 'chinese' restrictions. So it doesn't come as surprise to me that this PM is very much drifting in that direction, with the first hints of the Chinese 'social credit' being felt.
I wonder if one ought to demand that, for the sake of 'equality', Ministers, top civil servants, MPs , judges etc should give us a shining example and restrict their ;income', their salaries, expenses etc to the equivalent of the median income. After all, they're paid out of our taxes and The State is short of money. This would only be fair, wouldn't it.
I think the whole point is that the ‘Nomenklatura’ - or ‘party members’ - get to enjoy all the trappings of luxury and even additional pleasures (such as private roads and powers to intimidate their neighbours) not necessarily available in a free market. They don’t need salaries or expenses, they just own the place. Look at Starmer’s pension, or Goring’s art collection.
True - but shouldn't this give us lowly peasants arguments against said Nomenklatura, e.g. demanding they actually do as they preach? "For the sake of society"? After all, the hypocrisy of the lefty-greedy elites' is precisely what most of us despise.
Your point reminds me of the end of Animal Farm, when ‘The creatures outside (us peasants) looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ Unfortunately, I don’t remember this shaming the pigs into sharing their dinner.
Dear Clown, I’m afraid what I really, really think is that anyone with any power is almost certain to use at least a proportion of that power to get themselves what they want (and deserve, in their own eyes). Indeed, this is very often the reason for desiring power in the first place. It might be ‘the trappings of luxury’; for men it often includes sexual favours, and it will often include stashing away money for a comfortable and secure future for themselves and their families. Rather than ask, ‘is it all governments’, ask if it is every church, every charity, every NGO, and every committee. The only thing that holds those with power in check (‘keeps them honest’) is the good design of institutions, with checks and balances, accounts and accountability, loyal opposition, separation of powers and all that machinery.
I do not understand how public servants of any kind feel that they should earn more than the MINIMUM wage, thus reflecting the standard they have created by their meddling (governance). Why would they want to take more when they are working for the public, who have to pay their wages? They are working for the public good, are they not? Their motivations are public service, not the grubby materialism that motivates the rest of us, no? In the interests of equality of outcome, I also do not understand why ALL those paid out of the public purse do not earn EXACTLY the same amount. How do they justify any difference between the cleaner at no.10 and the PM, by their own 'liberal' logic?
I'm not 100% sure that this is true, but I was once good friends with an Irish republican who had extensive ties with Sinn Fein and he said that at least the ones in UK Parliament only took a nominal wage (there wouldn't have been a minimum wage in those days) and gave the rest of their salary to 'the cause'.
If public servants were paid only a median salary, we would get only median public servants — or very rich ones who do not need a salary! I think public servants, especially politicians, should paid much more as they are in other countries.
Google says that the Swedish prime minister earns SEK 184,000 per month which is over £160k per year. That's double the average salary for a CEO in Sweden. Regular MPs earn £63k per year. Perhaps we should pay our teachers more.
This started well - your takedown of Darth Starmer is nearly flawless - but you still have this idea in your head about liberals that seems to entail a great deal of unnecessary assumptions. Maybe you're aggregating a perception gained from contemporary academia, where 'liberalism' is indeed a dog's breakfast...? I wouldn't be surprised if this was part of the problem! The university is long gone, I don't know what to call its replacement. 'Research, Inc'...?
Frankly, there are still some liberals, such as myself, for whom your suggestion that our interest is in using the *State* to liberate is laughable, and the suggestion that we want a 'big State' entirely mistaken. The State is itself the biggest barrier to liberation in the majority of situations, especially since we reneged on a our human rights promises and backed out of the Kantian project. We could really use to distinguish two different eras of 'human rights' here - the contemporary one you correctly disembowel here, that of 'new human rights' (or perhaps 'inhuman rights'), and the Kantian 'rightful condition' before it.
Your critique of human rights here is already well-foreshadowed by the 'liberal' French philosophers (admittedly, the ones you would struggle to read without experiencing a certain amount of conceptual pain! 😂). Alain Badiou spears the 'new human rights' rhetoric in 1993's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil; Jacques Rancière's similarly foreshadows many of your points regarding the hostility to democratic ideals in 2005's Hatred of Democracy. Neither expressly identifies as 'liberal', but both are interested in liberation and, in your terms, surely must count as liberal critics of the contemporary State, as am I myself.
Equality, as I explored in Chaos Ethics, is exclusion. To render some class of entities equal requires first of all determining the condition that excludes the awkward edge cases in order to leave everything else 'equal'. In the tradition of inhuman rights, this means making us all equally powerless. Liberation (or emancipation), as I understand the project, entails an entirely different kind of equality, one that we have ceased to discuss and wilfully forgotten its contemporary conceptual roots in Kant's equality under the law i.e. the only legitimate deployment of state violence is to preserve a like freedom for all - this is not at all what we have now, as you correctly state!
The bizarre assumption that it's self-evident what equality means such that we don't have to discuss it at all is a key part of the contemporary crisis. And the exclusion of conservative views of equality as somehow 'illegitimate' was, in the first place, how we ended up collectively giving up on liberation and pursuing instead systems of distributed tyranny. For liberals who have not been drawn into inhuman rights, it has to be freedom for all or for none - and we certainly know which one Darth Starmer prefers.
Please don't count out us 'liberal conservatives' (if I may preserve our running joke!). We are just as horrified by the rise of authoritarianism, and we are not at all surprised by any of this, other than (perhaps) the speed with which we have changed gears.
"Those who will not be free will be forced to be free" - Rousseau. I've quoted that before in these pages. A little different from "Live free or die!" But the latter being the motto for the state of New Hampshire--the libtard state par excellence--an irony blazes up before us.
In that case why not ditch the word 'liberal' altogether, since its meaning is so tarnished. 'Liberal conservatives' could be renamed 'Natural conservatives'. No need to precede 'authoritarianism' with 'liberal', it's just really 'illiberal authoritarianism'. That's a better combination in the political lexicon.
I accept that the term 'liberal' is busted, but 'natural conservative' doesn't describe me very well. I would gladly call myself a Kantian heretic, but nobody today knows what that means, making it a pretty worthless descriptor. I think I shall just have to accept that my flag is in tatters, and focus on the people instead of the labels. 😁
Maybe both terms are without their historical meanings, so you could label yourself as a 'Kantian Heretic', or, just PD&I, ( pro Decency and Integrity - qualities absent in today's political 'leaders' and their unthinking minions). But, you could be right in accepting it's the people that count more than a label.!
Aye, but some of us have spent a great deal of time co-operating with conservatives and others of different political stripes to prevent that tragedy unfolding. That, after all, is why it is my honour to read and talk to you. 🙂
The inversion of the meaning of human rights from protection from government to forced coddling by government that David discusses is precisely correct. The Financial Times published my letter on August 9 where I developed this inversion in the use of the term freedom. There I wrote:
Rana Foroohar refers to the two meanings of freedom as that word is deployed by American Democrats and Republicans. (The power of choosing your words wisely, August 5). The two meanings are derived from two very different conceptions of the role of government. While she describes the two meanings as "freedom to do things" in contrast to "freedom from something – like poverty pollution or crime", may I suggest a more basic distinction.
Our Constitution delineates those things the government may not do to the citizen, such as restrict free speech, bar religious practice, prohibit gun ownership, or take property without due process. These are the freedoms Republicans defend. The Democrats would rebrand the word, a la Joseph Stiglitz, so that freedom delineates, instead, those things the government must do to or for you, such as to provide food, shelter, health care, and a job.
The distinction is between individual liberty and totalitarian control. And that is one reason why the election this November is so very important.
FDR's speech on the 'four freedoms' gets to the heart of this. In those days, politicians were well-read and thoughtful enough to understand what they were doing, even if (as with FDR) it was ultimately a bad idea.
This is exactly right, in describing what liberalism and human rights have become in the modern world.
However, liberalism has changed its meaning - so much so that people now speak about "Gladstonian liberalism" to distinguish the original liberalism from modern liberalism. True, or Gladstonian, liberalism was as much about freeing individuals from the actions of the State as anything else.
There is a worrying tendency today to jettison liberalism, for the reasons you have spoken about here, and end up with only Conservatism (using State power to maintain traditions) and socialism (using State power to overthrow traditions).
The Liberal Democrats are certainly not liberal, having been hopelessly polluted by the addition of the socialist refugees in the SDP.
So where is true liberalism in our politics today?
Human Rights were originally conceived as a bulwark against State power. They were the underpinning of liberal democracy. Democracy is much more than majority rule - it also has to encompass rights, or freedoms, for minorities - for those who lose elections. The winners do not have the right to suppress those human rights.
The socialist concept of human rights, as outlined in your article, is a perversion of what they really are, not a true expression of them. And liberalism is not socialism but its opposite.
Our politics have become perverse and awful because the concepts of liberalism have disappeared from our political discourse. The debates are all about how best to control the people, not whether it is right to control them in the first place.
My sense of this is that Gladstonian liberalism, as you call it, was always on a trajectory towards liberalism as we know it today. But that would require a long post to spell out…..
An insightful piece. It seems to me that the interests of what you describe as the conviction liberal authoritarians coincide conveniently with those of the large number of technocratic “professionals” required to service an ever-expanding State. Many of them are probably neither committed to the liberal authoritarian project nor indeed even aware of it, but - products of elite overproduction - perfectly happy to take the positions of authority and status that derive from it, while convincing themselves that they are serving the public interest or some subset of it (DEI, ESG, human rights etc). Every authoritarian regime has plenty of decent people willingly doing its bidding.
Yes, no doubt. Although I think that a lot of the people you are talking about are more ideological than than you characterise them here - they are not committed liberal authoritarians, no, but they are not merely neutral. They do have a vague sense that it is important for the state to act in order to make everybody free and equal. So they are, in a way, impeccably liberal.
You might find this interesting. It's a 15 minute talk by Dr Abby Innes. I disagree with her conceptually on a number of issues. The civil service reaction to Thatcher was more about adopting the jargon and trappings of market systems, rather than real markets, which are iterative. She's also dead wrong about Academies, which have been a resounding success. She doesn't mention NGOs which is a huge mistake, but does at least explore the way government falls into the trap of creating its own private sector/NGO monopolies for its service provision.
You're so far ahead of most people on this issue, I just thought you might like an additional dimension to the perils of state management- namely, how neoliberal government adopts the camouflage of market and choice ideology, whilst still pursuing socialism through stealth.
This view is similar to those of John Gray (the New Leviathans), James Orr and Eric Kaufmann (Taboo). The excessive expansion of 'positive' liberty/rights inexorably pushes conventional liberalism, that focuses on negative liberties (what you can't do e.g., kill, maim & steal), into hyper liberalism and on to Liberal Authoritarianism, aka progressive illiberalism.
I like your connection between positive liberties and human rights and how this requires state intervention, one of Gray’s New Leviathans.
Well expressed, as usual, David. I was flummoxed by reactions from Human Rights lawyers to my letters during the lockdowns. And I'm still scratching my head. This article helped clarify what's going on, along with other explanations you've provided.
One of the mind boggling elements is the "too big to fail" protocol which is clearly a Liberalist notion, but is also a guarantee of perpetual hierarchy of a certain group of scoundrels who ought to have been mowed down by the free market. I do see how this was and is all very Liberalist and human-rightsy; it's another cornerstone to the sort of authoritarianism you're pointing to.
There's another angle here that bothers me and has much to do with the sort of personality these "leaders" possess. Much like Turdo here in the People's Republic of Canadia. They tend to be soft, silver-spoon, mama's boys who stamp their feet when they don't get their way, don't they?
There are a lot of people like that in positions of power, no doubt, but Starmer's Labour government is a slightly different breed. Trudeau is obviously a phony to the tips of his fingernails. Starmer isn't like that - he's not fake in the manner that most politicians these days are. He is exceptionally boring, square and austere. Kind of like an unfunny Mr Bean trying to model himself on Lenin.
I agree with Chris; I think! I recognise exactly what you are describing, David, but intuitively don't associate it with the term 'liberal'; at least what I understand as classically
liberal. That said, as a self-professed 'far-right fascist' by current standards, terms mean something completely different today.
What worries most is the (poor) quality of the people who are exercising this authority. I wouldn't employ 80% of SW1 to walk my dog, let alone watch my children. I've spent the last couple of days reading Dominic Cummings' old stuff. Like him or not - and I'm on the fence, I like his approach but not some of his views - his observations on the people and processes in SW1 are truly depressing. In my professional life I was messed about by some real experts, this is amateur hour.
On this we can all agree: a big part of the problem is that the people in charge, although serious in the sense of being humourless, are not serious in historical context. They’re the kind of people who would probably be okay in the role of a deputy head of a smallish provincial secondary school.
There must be some point in the drift towards authoritarianism where the state has to move from nudging and shaming to the traditional tools of authoritarianism (torture, Gulags). I know that ‘during covid’ people lost their jobs and were socially smeared, but isn’t there some absolute taboo or red line in our society that prevents the brutal, physical, coercion that is necessary in a truly authoritarian regime? Just wondering.
I think there is such a line, but in a sense it probably doesn’t need to be crossed: the threat of losing one’s job and becoming a social pariah may be in itself bad enough. (Although political imprisonment may very well start to become a ‘thing’.) It’s important to remember nobody is twirling his moustache and plotting all of this - it’s the product of an aggregate of incentives, beliefs and personality traits.
This why so many dissenters are retired, or in academia hold emeritus positions. They can't be threatened or bought any more, so speak out. I'm retired, but still have to tread carefully when expressing my opinions socially. I get the feeling that many people have never encountered others who disagree with them (or the main stream media) on matters of UK politics, immigration, Israel- Palestine, climate change, net zero, covid, etc.. I made some caustic remarks about George Monbiot when a (very 'green') friend was hyperventilating about his article on wood-burning stoves. I was told "I don't think I can be friends with someone who doesn't like George Monbiot".
Some people just allow this guff to wash over them and don't care. Others have internalised it and genuinely feel alarmed and threatened at the prospect of hearing a contrary idea. They don't have the intellectual detachment to be able to respond with a decent question, they just react with anxiety, and an apparent desire to not be seen 'engaging with a denier'. To me it's this sort that are the greatest danger, as our public institutions are stuffed with them.
The pretence of the 'view from nowhere' is not just a governmental problem. There is now a widely adopted 'delusion of grandeur' throughout British society.
How then does this Starmer fellow reconcile the continuation of the British Crown? That seems to be a stumbling block. How can an aristocracy of variously entitled ppl be acceptable? It doesn’t jive with your overarching assessment, which is not to say it’s incorrect but maybe more coherent in a purely democratic government as opposed to a monarchy of any stripe. Starmer seems more reminiscent of the evil oligarch in the V for vendetta story. Ultimately he will be removed by his peers or the people he subjugates for the sake of “order”. Delores Umbridge type character.
The Crown, and the aristocracy, are more or less an irrelevance in modern Britain - they have no political power and their cultural power has almost entirely vanished. I've no doubt that Starmer would like to see the monarchy abolished, but he has probably concluded it doesn't really matter anyway.
"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. "
Marx had an arbitrary fantasy that relied on the complete rejection of causality, more like.
I have the sneaky suspicion that a lot of our fellow citizens welcome state micro-management. Freedom is tough, it requires engagement, having opinions, exercise agency, getting your hands dirty. You must have skin in the game. Some people just don't have the energy or find it beneath them to get involved or even express an opinion. They will just get along. The logical panacea for these individuals is then a state that regulates all the interactions among individuals, establishes rules and as David said, "optimizes" continuously. These individuals are happy to trade off liberty to have the state t to do the thinking for them. And voila’…the state is happy to oblige and has an endless source of anesthetized supporters who will take their bromide and never threaten state primacy regardless of the predominant political party in power.
There is no doubt this is true. Oakeshott called these people 'individual manques'.
This is why John Adams said: ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’
Socialists are always atheists. The Bible constantly reminds us that we have free will but to socialists, Government is God. (Welby and his ilk are apostates.)
Socialism is a religion, it worships the omnipotent state.
Socialism derives from faith and altruism, it requires the complete rejection of reason.
This is patently untrue, Bettina. Certainly some socialists are atheists but, over the decades, most have not been.
I'll re-phrase it: I have never met a socialist who believed in God.
Would you include John Smith? Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? Martin Luther King? Kier Hardie? I would guess that outside of the most leftie students, Christian socialists are just as common as Christian conservatives.
Isn't the Archbishop of Canterbury a socialist?
I think many prominent people are apostates. Was MLK a socialist? I don't think a 1960s member of the Democratic Party would have been a socialist in the way we understand it . My understanding is that socialism didn't really exist in the States until recently.
Thank you - this analysis explains much of which I was only dimply aware.
Regarding China: Starmer, as Leader of the Opposition, not only did nothing to rein in Lockdown, he and his Party wanted it to be harder. It's worth remembering that one of the SAGE members remarked that they were surprised that people so easily complied with these 'chinese' restrictions. So it doesn't come as surprise to me that this PM is very much drifting in that direction, with the first hints of the Chinese 'social credit' being felt.
I wonder if one ought to demand that, for the sake of 'equality', Ministers, top civil servants, MPs , judges etc should give us a shining example and restrict their ;income', their salaries, expenses etc to the equivalent of the median income. After all, they're paid out of our taxes and The State is short of money. This would only be fair, wouldn't it.
I think the whole point is that the ‘Nomenklatura’ - or ‘party members’ - get to enjoy all the trappings of luxury and even additional pleasures (such as private roads and powers to intimidate their neighbours) not necessarily available in a free market. They don’t need salaries or expenses, they just own the place. Look at Starmer’s pension, or Goring’s art collection.
True - but shouldn't this give us lowly peasants arguments against said Nomenklatura, e.g. demanding they actually do as they preach? "For the sake of society"? After all, the hypocrisy of the lefty-greedy elites' is precisely what most of us despise.
Your point reminds me of the end of Animal Farm, when ‘The creatures outside (us peasants) looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ Unfortunately, I don’t remember this shaming the pigs into sharing their dinner.
Yes, sadly, pointing out hypocrisy almost never actually shames the hypocrite.
I wonder Judy, if you think that the trappings of luxury are only available to Labour governments. Or do all governments get to enjoy them?
Dear Clown, I’m afraid what I really, really think is that anyone with any power is almost certain to use at least a proportion of that power to get themselves what they want (and deserve, in their own eyes). Indeed, this is very often the reason for desiring power in the first place. It might be ‘the trappings of luxury’; for men it often includes sexual favours, and it will often include stashing away money for a comfortable and secure future for themselves and their families. Rather than ask, ‘is it all governments’, ask if it is every church, every charity, every NGO, and every committee. The only thing that holds those with power in check (‘keeps them honest’) is the good design of institutions, with checks and balances, accounts and accountability, loyal opposition, separation of powers and all that machinery.
Do you think the problem with party members "enjoying the trappings of luxury" is a recent problem? How might we prevent it?
I do not understand how public servants of any kind feel that they should earn more than the MINIMUM wage, thus reflecting the standard they have created by their meddling (governance). Why would they want to take more when they are working for the public, who have to pay their wages? They are working for the public good, are they not? Their motivations are public service, not the grubby materialism that motivates the rest of us, no? In the interests of equality of outcome, I also do not understand why ALL those paid out of the public purse do not earn EXACTLY the same amount. How do they justify any difference between the cleaner at no.10 and the PM, by their own 'liberal' logic?
I'm not 100% sure that this is true, but I was once good friends with an Irish republican who had extensive ties with Sinn Fein and he said that at least the ones in UK Parliament only took a nominal wage (there wouldn't have been a minimum wage in those days) and gave the rest of their salary to 'the cause'.
If public servants were paid only a median salary, we would get only median public servants — or very rich ones who do not need a salary! I think public servants, especially politicians, should paid much more as they are in other countries.
In Sweden they are paid less than teachers.
Google says that the Swedish prime minister earns SEK 184,000 per month which is over £160k per year. That's double the average salary for a CEO in Sweden. Regular MPs earn £63k per year. Perhaps we should pay our teachers more.
Definitely!!
Dear David,
This started well - your takedown of Darth Starmer is nearly flawless - but you still have this idea in your head about liberals that seems to entail a great deal of unnecessary assumptions. Maybe you're aggregating a perception gained from contemporary academia, where 'liberalism' is indeed a dog's breakfast...? I wouldn't be surprised if this was part of the problem! The university is long gone, I don't know what to call its replacement. 'Research, Inc'...?
Frankly, there are still some liberals, such as myself, for whom your suggestion that our interest is in using the *State* to liberate is laughable, and the suggestion that we want a 'big State' entirely mistaken. The State is itself the biggest barrier to liberation in the majority of situations, especially since we reneged on a our human rights promises and backed out of the Kantian project. We could really use to distinguish two different eras of 'human rights' here - the contemporary one you correctly disembowel here, that of 'new human rights' (or perhaps 'inhuman rights'), and the Kantian 'rightful condition' before it.
Your critique of human rights here is already well-foreshadowed by the 'liberal' French philosophers (admittedly, the ones you would struggle to read without experiencing a certain amount of conceptual pain! 😂). Alain Badiou spears the 'new human rights' rhetoric in 1993's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil; Jacques Rancière's similarly foreshadows many of your points regarding the hostility to democratic ideals in 2005's Hatred of Democracy. Neither expressly identifies as 'liberal', but both are interested in liberation and, in your terms, surely must count as liberal critics of the contemporary State, as am I myself.
Equality, as I explored in Chaos Ethics, is exclusion. To render some class of entities equal requires first of all determining the condition that excludes the awkward edge cases in order to leave everything else 'equal'. In the tradition of inhuman rights, this means making us all equally powerless. Liberation (or emancipation), as I understand the project, entails an entirely different kind of equality, one that we have ceased to discuss and wilfully forgotten its contemporary conceptual roots in Kant's equality under the law i.e. the only legitimate deployment of state violence is to preserve a like freedom for all - this is not at all what we have now, as you correctly state!
The bizarre assumption that it's self-evident what equality means such that we don't have to discuss it at all is a key part of the contemporary crisis. And the exclusion of conservative views of equality as somehow 'illegitimate' was, in the first place, how we ended up collectively giving up on liberation and pursuing instead systems of distributed tyranny. For liberals who have not been drawn into inhuman rights, it has to be freedom for all or for none - and we certainly know which one Darth Starmer prefers.
Please don't count out us 'liberal conservatives' (if I may preserve our running joke!). We are just as horrified by the rise of authoritarianism, and we are not at all surprised by any of this, other than (perhaps) the speed with which we have changed gears.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Liberals don’t want a big state but end up creating one - this is the tragedy of liberalism in a nutshell.
"Those who will not be free will be forced to be free" - Rousseau. I've quoted that before in these pages. A little different from "Live free or die!" But the latter being the motto for the state of New Hampshire--the libtard state par excellence--an irony blazes up before us.
In that case why not ditch the word 'liberal' altogether, since its meaning is so tarnished. 'Liberal conservatives' could be renamed 'Natural conservatives'. No need to precede 'authoritarianism' with 'liberal', it's just really 'illiberal authoritarianism'. That's a better combination in the political lexicon.
I accept that the term 'liberal' is busted, but 'natural conservative' doesn't describe me very well. I would gladly call myself a Kantian heretic, but nobody today knows what that means, making it a pretty worthless descriptor. I think I shall just have to accept that my flag is in tatters, and focus on the people instead of the labels. 😁
Maybe both terms are without their historical meanings, so you could label yourself as a 'Kantian Heretic', or, just PD&I, ( pro Decency and Integrity - qualities absent in today's political 'leaders' and their unthinking minions). But, you could be right in accepting it's the people that count more than a label.!
Aye, but some of us have spent a great deal of time co-operating with conservatives and others of different political stripes to prevent that tragedy unfolding. That, after all, is why it is my honour to read and talk to you. 🙂
The inversion of the meaning of human rights from protection from government to forced coddling by government that David discusses is precisely correct. The Financial Times published my letter on August 9 where I developed this inversion in the use of the term freedom. There I wrote:
Rana Foroohar refers to the two meanings of freedom as that word is deployed by American Democrats and Republicans. (The power of choosing your words wisely, August 5). The two meanings are derived from two very different conceptions of the role of government. While she describes the two meanings as "freedom to do things" in contrast to "freedom from something – like poverty pollution or crime", may I suggest a more basic distinction.
Our Constitution delineates those things the government may not do to the citizen, such as restrict free speech, bar religious practice, prohibit gun ownership, or take property without due process. These are the freedoms Republicans defend. The Democrats would rebrand the word, a la Joseph Stiglitz, so that freedom delineates, instead, those things the government must do to or for you, such as to provide food, shelter, health care, and a job.
The distinction is between individual liberty and totalitarian control. And that is one reason why the election this November is so very important.
FDR's speech on the 'four freedoms' gets to the heart of this. In those days, politicians were well-read and thoughtful enough to understand what they were doing, even if (as with FDR) it was ultimately a bad idea.
This is exactly right, in describing what liberalism and human rights have become in the modern world.
However, liberalism has changed its meaning - so much so that people now speak about "Gladstonian liberalism" to distinguish the original liberalism from modern liberalism. True, or Gladstonian, liberalism was as much about freeing individuals from the actions of the State as anything else.
There is a worrying tendency today to jettison liberalism, for the reasons you have spoken about here, and end up with only Conservatism (using State power to maintain traditions) and socialism (using State power to overthrow traditions).
The Liberal Democrats are certainly not liberal, having been hopelessly polluted by the addition of the socialist refugees in the SDP.
So where is true liberalism in our politics today?
Human Rights were originally conceived as a bulwark against State power. They were the underpinning of liberal democracy. Democracy is much more than majority rule - it also has to encompass rights, or freedoms, for minorities - for those who lose elections. The winners do not have the right to suppress those human rights.
The socialist concept of human rights, as outlined in your article, is a perversion of what they really are, not a true expression of them. And liberalism is not socialism but its opposite.
Our politics have become perverse and awful because the concepts of liberalism have disappeared from our political discourse. The debates are all about how best to control the people, not whether it is right to control them in the first place.
My sense of this is that Gladstonian liberalism, as you call it, was always on a trajectory towards liberalism as we know it today. But that would require a long post to spell out…..
Perhaps you are right. I shall look forward to reading that long post! 😉
I guess if you throw God, who was at the centre of Gladstone's philosophy, overboard, you then end up creating a new God out of the State.
N S Lyons did a pretty good job with The China Convergence. I am greatly looking forward to yours.
An insightful piece. It seems to me that the interests of what you describe as the conviction liberal authoritarians coincide conveniently with those of the large number of technocratic “professionals” required to service an ever-expanding State. Many of them are probably neither committed to the liberal authoritarian project nor indeed even aware of it, but - products of elite overproduction - perfectly happy to take the positions of authority and status that derive from it, while convincing themselves that they are serving the public interest or some subset of it (DEI, ESG, human rights etc). Every authoritarian regime has plenty of decent people willingly doing its bidding.
Yes, no doubt. Although I think that a lot of the people you are talking about are more ideological than than you characterise them here - they are not committed liberal authoritarians, no, but they are not merely neutral. They do have a vague sense that it is important for the state to act in order to make everybody free and equal. So they are, in a way, impeccably liberal.
You might find this interesting. It's a 15 minute talk by Dr Abby Innes. I disagree with her conceptually on a number of issues. The civil service reaction to Thatcher was more about adopting the jargon and trappings of market systems, rather than real markets, which are iterative. She's also dead wrong about Academies, which have been a resounding success. She doesn't mention NGOs which is a huge mistake, but does at least explore the way government falls into the trap of creating its own private sector/NGO monopolies for its service provision.
You're so far ahead of most people on this issue, I just thought you might like an additional dimension to the perils of state management- namely, how neoliberal government adopts the camouflage of market and choice ideology, whilst still pursuing socialism through stealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EJWW6p3yY&t=420s
Thanks for this (and sorry for the delay - I thought I'd responded). I'll give it a listen.
This view is similar to those of John Gray (the New Leviathans), James Orr and Eric Kaufmann (Taboo). The excessive expansion of 'positive' liberty/rights inexorably pushes conventional liberalism, that focuses on negative liberties (what you can't do e.g., kill, maim & steal), into hyper liberalism and on to Liberal Authoritarianism, aka progressive illiberalism.
I like your connection between positive liberties and human rights and how this requires state intervention, one of Gray’s New Leviathans.
I like John Gray in general but haven't read the New Leviathans. My 'to read' list is big enough for several lifetimes!
Well expressed, as usual, David. I was flummoxed by reactions from Human Rights lawyers to my letters during the lockdowns. And I'm still scratching my head. This article helped clarify what's going on, along with other explanations you've provided.
One of the mind boggling elements is the "too big to fail" protocol which is clearly a Liberalist notion, but is also a guarantee of perpetual hierarchy of a certain group of scoundrels who ought to have been mowed down by the free market. I do see how this was and is all very Liberalist and human-rightsy; it's another cornerstone to the sort of authoritarianism you're pointing to.
There's another angle here that bothers me and has much to do with the sort of personality these "leaders" possess. Much like Turdo here in the People's Republic of Canadia. They tend to be soft, silver-spoon, mama's boys who stamp their feet when they don't get their way, don't they?
There are a lot of people like that in positions of power, no doubt, but Starmer's Labour government is a slightly different breed. Trudeau is obviously a phony to the tips of his fingernails. Starmer isn't like that - he's not fake in the manner that most politicians these days are. He is exceptionally boring, square and austere. Kind of like an unfunny Mr Bean trying to model himself on Lenin.
I agree with Chris; I think! I recognise exactly what you are describing, David, but intuitively don't associate it with the term 'liberal'; at least what I understand as classically
liberal. That said, as a self-professed 'far-right fascist' by current standards, terms mean something completely different today.
What worries most is the (poor) quality of the people who are exercising this authority. I wouldn't employ 80% of SW1 to walk my dog, let alone watch my children. I've spent the last couple of days reading Dominic Cummings' old stuff. Like him or not - and I'm on the fence, I like his approach but not some of his views - his observations on the people and processes in SW1 are truly depressing. In my professional life I was messed about by some real experts, this is amateur hour.
On this we can all agree: a big part of the problem is that the people in charge, although serious in the sense of being humourless, are not serious in historical context. They’re the kind of people who would probably be okay in the role of a deputy head of a smallish provincial secondary school.
The sort of people who set up a Committee of Public Safety with no idea of the antecedent.
There must be some point in the drift towards authoritarianism where the state has to move from nudging and shaming to the traditional tools of authoritarianism (torture, Gulags). I know that ‘during covid’ people lost their jobs and were socially smeared, but isn’t there some absolute taboo or red line in our society that prevents the brutal, physical, coercion that is necessary in a truly authoritarian regime? Just wondering.
I think there is such a line, but in a sense it probably doesn’t need to be crossed: the threat of losing one’s job and becoming a social pariah may be in itself bad enough. (Although political imprisonment may very well start to become a ‘thing’.) It’s important to remember nobody is twirling his moustache and plotting all of this - it’s the product of an aggregate of incentives, beliefs and personality traits.
This why so many dissenters are retired, or in academia hold emeritus positions. They can't be threatened or bought any more, so speak out. I'm retired, but still have to tread carefully when expressing my opinions socially. I get the feeling that many people have never encountered others who disagree with them (or the main stream media) on matters of UK politics, immigration, Israel- Palestine, climate change, net zero, covid, etc.. I made some caustic remarks about George Monbiot when a (very 'green') friend was hyperventilating about his article on wood-burning stoves. I was told "I don't think I can be friends with someone who doesn't like George Monbiot".
Some people just allow this guff to wash over them and don't care. Others have internalised it and genuinely feel alarmed and threatened at the prospect of hearing a contrary idea. They don't have the intellectual detachment to be able to respond with a decent question, they just react with anxiety, and an apparent desire to not be seen 'engaging with a denier'. To me it's this sort that are the greatest danger, as our public institutions are stuffed with them.
Well put. I think we can all recognise exactly this.
Well, no human being twirling a moustache...
Lizard people probably don't have moustaches.
Tentacles maybe?
Could also be a very slow transition - boiled frog approach.
Can foxes ever become lions?
I think they're totally different character types. No way do these lot have the stomach, courage or character for real world actions.
The pretence of the 'view from nowhere' is not just a governmental problem. There is now a widely adopted 'delusion of grandeur' throughout British society.
That was immensely helpful, thank you. Only downside is that I now have so many more books to read...
How then does this Starmer fellow reconcile the continuation of the British Crown? That seems to be a stumbling block. How can an aristocracy of variously entitled ppl be acceptable? It doesn’t jive with your overarching assessment, which is not to say it’s incorrect but maybe more coherent in a purely democratic government as opposed to a monarchy of any stripe. Starmer seems more reminiscent of the evil oligarch in the V for vendetta story. Ultimately he will be removed by his peers or the people he subjugates for the sake of “order”. Delores Umbridge type character.
The Crown, and the aristocracy, are more or less an irrelevance in modern Britain - they have no political power and their cultural power has almost entirely vanished. I've no doubt that Starmer would like to see the monarchy abolished, but he has probably concluded it doesn't really matter anyway.
"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. "
Marx had an arbitrary fantasy that relied on the complete rejection of causality, more like.
Socialism is totalitarian, it makes economic calculation impossible.
As such, the 'amelioration of poverty' is not a result of socialism, nor is it a desired result of socialism.
Socialism, to the socialist, is an end in itself.