Liberalism
Some thoughts on the crisis of liberalism—and how to fix it
Liberalism needs nothing less than a great rebalancing if it
is to regain its intellectual and political vitality
Bagehot's notebook
Jun 12th 2018 by BAGEHOT
BREXIT is such an all-consuming process for the British—at
once a drama, a muddle and a mess—that it is easy to forget that it is part of
something bigger: a crisis of liberalism in the west. A growing number of
countries have had their own equivalents of Brexit: Donald Trump’s victory over
Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; the election of a populist
government in Italy; the Catalan revolt in Spain; the rise of populist
authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland and, to some extent, India; the
simmering rage against what Viktor Orban calls “liberal blah blah” in the
intellectual dark-web. The list will be a lot longer by the time Brexit has
been completed.
It’s worth taking a break from the ins-and-outs of Brexit to
look at the bigger picture, partly because the bigger picture helps us to
understand Brexit better (NB: there’s more going on here than BBC bias or
Russian gold) and partly because, if we are to bring the country back together
once we leave the EU, we need to understand the causes of popular discontent.
This post will try to address two questions—why is liberalism in such a mess?
And how can it get out of it? But first a definition: what does this slippery
word mean?
There are two misleading definitions of “liberalism”. The
first (and most misleading) is the American idea that liberalism means
left-wing progressivism. This definition was foisted on the American left by
Republicans in the 1970s: the likes of Richard Nixon and George Bush senior
liked to talk about “limousine liberals” who advocated “progressive” policies
on crime and social integration so long as they could protect themselves from
the consequences of those policies (eg, by sending their children to private
schools and living in gated communities). Since then some progressives have
worn the badge with pride. But American progressivism, particularly in its
current iteration, with its growing obsession with group rights and group
identities, is incompatible with liberalism as I’m going to use it in this
blog. The second is the classical idea that liberalism means small-government
libertarianism.
I’m going to use liberalism in the British sense: to mean a
philosophy that began as small-government libertarianism but has acquired many
new meanings over the years. Liberalism was inspired by the three great
revolutions of the late 18th century—the American Revolution, the French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It began as a small-government philosophy—he
governs best who governs least—but later made its peace with bigger government.
Liberalism is a pragmatic philosophy that is constantly evolving. The central
idea of liberalism is the primacy of the individual rather than the collective.
But in his brilliant history, “Liberalism: the Life of an Idea”, Edmund Fawcett
makes clear that liberalism involves four other ideas: (1) the inescapability
of conflict, (2) distrust of power, (3) faith in progress, (4) civic respect.
Discussions of the crisis of liberalism usually emphasise
practical things. The global financial crisis destroyed people’s faith in both
the wisdom of technocrats and the fairness of the system. Liberal icons such as
Tony Blair and Barack Obama over-reached—Mr Blair in Iraq and Mr Obama in the
culture wars. A magic circle of companies and entrepreneurs piled up too much
wealth. I want to suggest a more wide-ranging explanation that focuses on the
life of the mind: liberalism as a philosophy has been captured by a
technocratic-managerial-cosmopolitan elite. A creed that started off as a
critique of the existing power structure—that, indeed, has suspicion of
concentrations of power at the molten core of its philosophy—is being misused
as a tool by one of the most powerful elites in history. Liberalism has, in
effect, been turned on its head and become the opposite of what it was when it
started out. It is time to put it back on its feet.
Liberalism at its best should preserve a delicate balance
between four opposing sets of principles: (1) elitism and democracy, (2)
top-down management and self-organisation, (3) globalism and localism, and (4)
what might be termed, for simplicity’s sake, the hard and the soft. The global
elites—that is the people who run the world’s biggest companies, NGOs, and
trans-national organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund and, of course, the European Union—have routinely emphasised the first of
these two principles (elitism, top-down management, globalism and hard
metrics). And in the process they have reduced one of the world’s richest
philosophies into a desiccated hulk of its former self—a set of arid formulae
that are united by the single fact that they advance the interests,
psychological as well as material, of the world’s most powerful people.
The greatest danger facing liberalism at the moment is that
it will double-down on this mistake. The paradox of populism is well-known:
that the failure of populist policies fuels demand for yet more extreme
populist policies as bad government creates more havoc and populist leaders
blame that havoc not on their own foolishness but on the machinations of the
global elite (as will surely be the case when Brexit fails to deliver that
£350m a week for the National Health Service that Brexiteers promised during
the referendum). But there is a liberal paradox as well. The more the people
turn against liberalism the more liberals are tempted to build walls against
the populist tide in order to push ahead their world-improving project: political
walls that insulate elite projects from popular interference and intellectual
walls that protect members of the elite from having to listen to “bigots”.
The dangerous irony is that liberalism’s retreat as a
political force is being accompanied by its advance as an institutional force:
look at trans-national institutions such as the World Bank, educational
institutions such as universities or syllabus-setting bureaucracies or
voluntary organisations, and you see the liberal elite in its pomp. Liberal administrators
are not only entrenching their power, squeezing out conservative or populist
points of view. They are moving to the left, powered by a furious indignation
at the rise of the Trumpenproletariat and its equivalents around the world. The
European Union’s response to growing popular discontent with its operations is
to retreat still further into orthodoxy. We are thus seeing the development of
a malign dialectic: the more populists seize control of the political system
the more liberals entrench themselves in their chosen caves, and the more the
liberals entrench themselves (often deliberately embracing unpopular causes)
the more furious the populists get. This is not only bad for these institutions
because it puts them at war with the wider society. It is bad for liberalism
because it prevents it from addressing its biggest challenge: recreating a
fruitful balance between democracy and technocracy, managerialism and
self-determination, globalism and localism, and quality and quantity.
In order to change this it is necessary to look at how
liberal thinkers have dealt with these dichotomies in the past.
Elitism versus democracy
Classical liberals were always surprisingly ambivalent about
democracy, given their commitment to individual rights. Liberalism began as a
revolt against the Old Regime with its hereditary ranks and fixed privileges.
It was driven by a belief in open competition and equality of opportunity:
remove all artificial restrictions on competition and you would produce the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. Liberals were the first people to
demand votes for workers, ethnic minorities (particularly Jews) and women.
But at the same time liberals were intensely worried about
the uneducated masses with their habit of clinging on to irrational traditions,
on the one hand, or demanding the redistribution of property, on the other.
America’s Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison, believed that
constitutional intricacy could solve the problem of the masses. They codified
rights in a constitution. They divided ruling institutions into rival branches
to create a system of checks and balances. They gave Supreme Court judges jobs
for life and Senators six-year terms. They removed the Senate from the
hurly-burly of politics by insisting that Senators were appointed by local
grandees rather than directly elected. Alexander Hamilton even wanted to give
presidents jobs for life, though better sense prevailed (why a man who was so
suspicious of the masses and so enthusiastic about capitalism has become a
left-wing icon is one of the mysteries of our time). Many British liberals
believed that education was the only thing that could temper democracy. John
Stuart Mill wanted to give additional votes to educated people. Robert Lowe
supported mass education on the grounds that “we must now prevail on our future
masters to learn their letters” (usually remembered as “we must educate our
masters”).
Liberals eventually overcame their instinctive fear of the
masses or “demophobia”. In America progressive liberals led the campaign for
the democratic election of Senators and the introduction of open primaries. In
Britain David Lloyd George brought the House of Lords to heel in order to pass
welfare legislation. For much of its post-war history the British Liberal Party
has been identified not with snobbery about the intellectual capacity of the
masses but with trying to make “every vote count”, often by using highly
intricate schemes. Even today Liberal Democratic conferences contain a
remarkable number of people (mostly men; mostly bearded; mostly sandal-wearing)
who will talk your hind leg off about various complicated voting systems such
as single transferable votes (whereby your vote is allocated to your first
choice and then re-allocated according to complicated formulae).
But more recently the anti-democratic strain of liberalism
has reasserted itself. It is once again respectable in liberal circles to say
that the people are too stupid (aka short-sighted, racist, sexist, transphobic,
nationalistic, bigoted) to make sensible decisions, and that dispassionate
experts need to be given additional powers.
The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union.
The EU was founded by people who wanted to make sure that Europe was never
again torn apart by Fascism and war. This meant imprisoning the two great
disruptive forces of nationalism and populism within an iron cage of rules. The
Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making
from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public. They created a
powerful European Court of Justice in order to safeguard individual rights.
They concentrated decision-making power in the hands of a Platonic European
Council and only added a parliament as a reluctant afterthought. Confronted
with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their
heels, most recently in Italy where the Italian president forbade the new
government from choosing a Eurosceptic finance minister. For the EU,
technocratic decision-making is not a bug but a feature.
The second engine of elitism is Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism: a
school of thought that had its roots in the ideas of libertarian economists
such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued that the freedom to buy
and sell things in the market is much more important than the freedom to
exercise your vote every five years. This has now been systematised in global
institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and
various central banks. Anglo-Saxon liberals argued that the best way to create
mass prosperity is to create a stable system of economic policy-making: take
decisions about monetary policy out of the hands of politicians (who will
always be tempted to buy votes by debasing the currency) and give them to
central bankers; take decisions about trade out of the hands of national
governments (who will always be tempted to make trade-distorting deals) and
sub-contract it to trans-national bodies such as the World Trade Organisation.
There are lots of arguments in favour of technocratic
liberalism. Giving central banks independence from political interference has
helped us to slay the dragon of inflation. Creating rules-based trading systems
has unleashed growth in the emerging world and flooded the rich world with
cheap goods. The neo-conservative bid to spread democracy at the point of a gun
in the Middle East turned out to be a disaster. The West’s support for
democratisation in Egypt also proved to be misguided. Democracy is the fruit
rather than the cause of economic and constitutional development: introduce
democracy before you have a liberal political regime, based on robust
institutions and a notion of the “loyal opposition”, and you are likely to
introduce elective dictatorship followed by non-elective dictatorship or chaos
also followed by non-elective dictatorship. Who can blame Europe’s Founding
Fathers for fearing a resurgence of fascism? And who, in retrospect, can fault
the European powers for their scepticism about George Bush’s democratisation
project in the Middle East?
But there is also a big problem with elite liberalism: by
insulating technocratic elites from the pressure of popular opinion—by putting
them in a comfortable cocoon of like-minded elites—it encourages over-reach.
Britain was the perfect example of this. During the Blair-Brown-Cameron years
Britain was dominated by a class of politicians who went to the same
universities, followed the same career path of a spell as a special advisor
followed by a safe seat (usually in an area of the country they had no
connection with) followed by a fast-track to a ministerial post. The Labour
Party lost its links to the old working class of trade unions and never
established any links with the new working class of casual workers. The
Conservative Party lost its links with provincial England. In this sense the
Brexit referendum was a just punishment: the result of the referendum took
everybody in the political elite by surprise, from David Cameron who called the
thing, to the commentators who predicted an easy win for “Remain”, because they
live in a self-contained world.
The most dangerous example of this over-reach in Europe is
the EU’s insistence that free movement of labour should be ranked as one of the
non-negotiable “four freedoms”. This played a major part in persuading Britons
to vote to leave partly because, as an
English-speaking country with a relatively liberal economy, Britain is
always a chosen destination for immigrants and partly because the British
instinctively feel that there is a distinction between free-trade in goods and
services and free movement of people (NAFTA, for instance, does not confer free
movement of people across North America). This, more than anything else, will
fuel European populism in the future, as immigrants flow into Europe from the
Middle East and Africa and then, once established, flow across various borders.
The technocratic elite compounded the problem of over-reach
with incompetence. The great liberal project of the past 40
years—globalisation—depended on a bargain between the elites and the masses:
the elites promised that globalisation would produce higher living standards
for broad swathes of the population. They also promised that they could make
globalisation as smooth as possible by judicious intervention. Globalisation
might exact a price in terms of democracy: decisions that had once rested with
local governments would be taken by politically insulated technicians. It might
exact a price in terms of local shocks: some groups of workers (particularly
blue-collar workers) would suffer. But it would produce a higher over-all
standard of living. The technocrats broke the contract. They not only failed to
deliver macro-economic stability. They failed to deliver the boost in living
standards in the West. They forgot about basic social justice: while
blue-collar workers were crushed under history’s progressive chariot, bankers
were saved from the consequences of a crisis that had been created by their
greed and incompetence. In Britain average incomes have been stagnant since the
financial crisis and are unlikely to resume their pre-crisis growth until the
middle of the next decade. Across Europe and America old industrial centres
have been reduced to metaphorical rubble. No wonder so many people feel that
they have sold their democratic rights for a mess of pottage. No wonder the cry
of “taking back control” resonates.
The best way to restore a better balance between elitism and
democracy is to prevent the elites from engaging in over-reach. The obvious way
to start this is to remove freedom of movement from the four freedoms. This
would do more than anything else to guarantee the future of the EU.
Technocratic policy-makers also need to be reconnected with the people they are
supposed to serve. It is a mystery why World Bank employees should be exempted
from taxes and provided with their own country club, the delightfully named
Bretton Woods. It is a mystery why European officials should have such long
tenures so that prime ministers come and go but Jean-Claude Juncker goes on
forever. Privileges need to be reined in and tenures shortened.
We also need to find ways of strengthening democracy rather
than constantly diluting it. The dominant pattern of the past few years has
been technocratic advance punctuated by periodic revolts (such as the Brexit
referendum or the recent Italian election). How about giving democracy a few
short-term wins so that voters don’t have to rely on sudden explosions of rage?
My favoured solution is to give more power to local governments: while
centralising certain decisions in the administrative state (most notably over
taxes and entitlements) we need to create a counter-balancing pressure by
handing other decisions to locally elected politicians. But there might be
other clever ways of advancing democracy. Why not elect some members of global
bodies such as the European Commission or the WTO? Or why not at least elect
them at one remove—for example by giving a role to locally elected mayors in
global bodies? A global council of mayors might do a good deal to solve this
problem: they could meet once a year and send representatives to various other
global bodies. Unwieldy perhaps, but it would at least have the effect of
linking the global sphere with the local: mayors are, for the most part,
accountable for their actions to the electorate, and might act as the voices of
ordinary people on the global stage.
Globalism versus localism
Liberalism was born global. As a philosophy, it was inspired
by an audacious claim: that in a state of nature men are endowed with certain
essential rights that apply regardless of time and place (conservatism, by
contrast, regards natural man as a fiction and human nature as a product of
time and place). As a political movement, it began as a revolt against
restrictions on free trade. William Cobden and James Bright argued that people
should be allowed to trade freely, not merely because free trade produced
economic growth, but also because there was no reason to prefer the interests
of a Hampshire land-owner to a Pomeranian peasant. Classical British liberals
supported the idea of creating a “parliament of man” and using hegemonic powers
(first Britain and then America) to create universal rulers that could enforce
universal rights.
That tradition was given a new lease of life by two world
wars and by the advent of globalisation. The two world wars revealed the
diabolical side of nationalism. Globalisation promised to deliver the liberal
miracle: sustained economic growth produced by free trade in goods and the
promiscuous intermingling of peoples and cultures. Today’s liberal
intellectuals instinctively associate nationalism with barbarism—with bloody
wars and broken psyches. Karl Popper, a philosopher who is too little read at
the moment, packed the standard critique
into a single sentence: “Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passions
and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of
individual responsibility.” The term nationalism seldom appears in
sophisticated publications such as the New York (or London) Review of Books
without being accompanied by words such as “barbaric”, “racist”, “xenophobic”
or “backward-looking”.
But there was also another liberal tradition that was highly
sympathetic to nationalism and localism: that is to collective roots rather
than universal rights. The nationalist revolutions that swept through Europe in
the 19th century were, for the most part, liberal revolutions. They were
inspired by the idea that nationalism provided the most compelling answer to
the great question of how to address problems of identity and connectedness in
a newly fluid world. “I am convinced”, wrote Alexis De Tocqueville “that the
interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular
fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity”.
Liberals railed against trans-national empires such as the
Ottoman Empire in the east and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the heart of
Europe. Theodore Roosevelt singled out the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires
for his energetic fury: “Neither democracy nor civilisation is safe while these
two states exist in their present form.” Liberals laid down their lives for the
right of self-determination for imprisoned peoples such as the Greeks. William
Gladstone divided the Liberal Party over his support for Irish Home Rule.
Woodrow Wilson founded his foreign policy on the principle of national
self-determination.
Some of the most interesting liberals looked beneath the
national to the local level. J.S. Mill sang the praises of “experiments in
living”: the more the merrier. The British Liberal Party was as much a party of
localism as free trade: rooted in particular areas of the country such as the
West Country and Wales, it celebrated local traditions and acted as a
counter-balance to the power of the London elite. This continues to this day.
Sir Nick Clegg is distrusted by his party—and reviled by its younger
elements—because he was more interested in joining the national, and indeed,
the global elite than in cultivating local routes. (Sir Nick is perhaps the
paradigmatic example of a politician who tries to represent the government to
the people rather than the people to the government.) The modern Liberal Party
pantheon consists of people who had strong local roots: Joe Grimond (Scotland),
Paddy Ashdown (the West Country), Lloyd George (Wales).
So the second great task facing liberalism alongside
reigning in over-mighty elites is reviving the national-localist tradition. As
long as liberalism is synonymous with globalisation—with global elites cocooned
in global institutions and global multinationals reaping economies of scale
across a global market—it will be destined to wither. It will wither
politically because populist parties will be able to claim a monopoly of
communal loyalties. And it will wither intellectually because it fails to draw
on the mighty tradition of liberal thinking about the importance of local roots
and the complexities of personal identity.
Liberal elites need to begin to champion localism with the
same vigour that they have championed globalisation for the past 40 years. For
a start they need to check their habit of demonising nationalism as nothing
more than an excuse for racism and bigotry—and localism as an excuse for
parish-pump myopia. Most people live their lives at the local and national
level rather than in international airport lounges. And most people also resent
being lumped together with fascists. Populism is as much a protest against
being insulted as it is a protest against stalled economic growth.
They need to do as much as possible to promote local
self-government. Britain stands in particular need of this. In the golden age
of 19th-century laissez-faire, Britain was one of the most diversified and
decentralised countries in the world: London was just one great city among
many. Birmingham and Liverpool were two of the greatest jewels in the British
Empire. But the age of neo-liberal triumphalism coincided with the age of concentration
of power in London. London-based government has sidelined local government. The
London economy has thrived while the regional economies have withered. The
Brexit revolt was as much a revolt of the provinces against the city—and
thereby of conservative-minded Country against the cosmopolitan Court—as it was
a revolt against Europe.
Rebalancing the country will be the work of a generation.
But a sensible start has already been made with the creation of locally elected
mayors in six authorities, including the two great Victorian conurbations of
Manchester and Birmingham. We need to make sure that London-based government
doesn’t neuter these mayors. We need to roll the revolution further to new
cities. We need to encourage those cities to demand their fair share of the
London-based pie: a fair share of the nation’s treasures for local museums, a
fair share of the licence-payers’ largesse for local broadcasting.
Elite liberals also need to think more seriously about local
solutions to economic problems. Over the past 40 years liberals have focused on
the ways in which the logic of globalisation can produce economic growth. They
need to focus much more on how the logic of place can both harness and promote
such growth. How can local governments make the most of their economic
resources? And how can they harness global forces to help their most
disadvantaged citizens as well as their most advantaged?
The possibilities are huge. But once again elite liberals
seem to be determined to choose the dumbest option: doubling down on
globalisation rather than recalibrating their core philosophy. The reaction to
Brexit and other populist uprisings is one example of this. Elite liberals
almost luxuriate in their rage against nationalism and the yokel masses who support
it. In Britain the 48% who voted Remain are more preoccupied with the stupidity
of the masses than they are about the over-reach of the European elite that
made “take back control” such a potent slogan.
Xi Jinping, China’s president, unwittingly got to the heart
of liberalism’s current dilemma in his speech to the World Economic Forum at
Davos on January 17th 2017. Mr Xi presented himself as the champion of
globalisation—the man who would save this wonderful process from the pitchforks
of the Trumpenproletariat. He proclaimed globalisation inevitable (“Whether you
like it or not…any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies,
products, industries and people between economies…is simply not possible”) and
declared his faith in multilateralism (“We should adhere to multilateralism to
uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions. We should
honour promises and abide by rules”). A striking number of the CEOs and opinion
formers in the crowd praised him as the last best hope of corporate man. But if
the leading champion of liberalism’s central project for the past 40
years—globalisation—is a Chinese dictator who has awarded himself a job for
life and happily imprisons people for criticising the state then we have to
recognise that something has gone desperately wrong with the liberal project.
Scientific management versus self-government
The essence of liberalism is self-government: liberalism is
at once a philosophical critique of the conservative notion that people owe
their identities to their social stations and a practical protest against the
idea that people are bound by certain social obligations to their superiors
(or, if they are lucky, their inferiors). The basic liberal philosophical
construct is the idea of the social contract: individual rights precede (and
therefore trump) social arrangements. And the basic liberal moral position is
self-reliance. We should be able to rise as high as our talents take us. And we
should be able to deliver a single pungent message to even the most
paternalistic landowner or employer: take your job and shove it. Liberalism is
the philosophy of free movement of citizens within the nation-state
(particularly from the land, where they were bound by traditional social
relations, to the city, where they could find their own level) and free
competition in talent.
But liberalism has also offered a home to managerialism.
Free competition inevitably leads to winners and losers: successful companies
can use economies of scale to destroy smaller companies.
Take-your-job-and-shove it leads to the destruction of traditional ways of life
that tolerate muddle and inefficiency. The second half of the 19th century saw
liberalism transforming itself from a philosophy of small companies (or indeed
tiny workshops) and small towns into a philosophy of big companies and urban
bureaucracies. Giant companies such as US Steel and Standard Oil first summoned
up tens of thousands of employees (when it was formed in 1901 US Steel had
250,000 employees) and then turned those thousands into disciplined armies with
steep hierarchies and precisely defined roles. Liberal bureaucrats created
national and city bureaucracies in order to wipe out the scourges of raw
sewage, pollution and general anarchy. If the great creed of liberals in the
mid-19th century was laissez-faire, the great creed of liberals in the
late-19th and early-20th centuries was national efficiency.
This obsessive predilection for managerialism has become
more pronounced in recent decades. Elite liberalism is the liberalism of
management consultancies such as McKinsey’s, rather than great philosophers
such as J.S. Mill. The great justification of managerial liberalism is its
focus on productivity: it is only by boosting productivity that we can create
the surplus that makes for civilised life. But the means to that end are often
wrong. Managerial liberalism treats people as tools rather than as ends in
themselves. It assumes that managerial wisdom lies in the heads of managers
rather than in the practical wisdom of workers. And it makes a fetish of
measurement—that is not only measuring people’s performance against various
metrics, but also giving people rewards on the basis of whether they fit
various goals.
There is ample evidence that treating people as nothing more
than cogs in a productivity-boosting machine is bad for productivity as well as
morale. The Toyota system (which divided workers into self-governing teams and
gave them responsibility for a wide range of tasks) outperformed the Taylorist
mass-production system (which treated workers as widgets) because it allowed
companies to combine quality and variety with quantity and predictability.
During the height of the competition between the two systems in the 1970s
Japanese car factories had much lower levels of wastage than American car
factories.
There is also ample evidence, expertly summarised in Jerry
Muller’s recent book, “The Tyranny of Metrics”, that metrics can be
counter-productive. They can distort results: for example police forces have
repeatedly responded to the introduction of measurement by “juking the stats”,
focusing on easy crimes (such as driving at 35 miles an hour in 30-mile-an-hour
areas) rather than hard crimes (such as breaking and entering). They can
destroy morale: people who are in the bottom quartile of performers are
probably more likely to give up than to redouble their efforts. They can
sometimes go even further than this: applied to self-regulating professions
such as academia, metrics can crush the very spirit that animated those
professions and transform them into something that is much less than their
former selves. Today’s universities are in danger of being turned from temples
of learning, where scholars introduced their young disciples into the mysteries
of their calling, into teaching factories run by number-obsessed managers and
divided into two classes: brand-name academics who are always on some junket
and part-time teachers who are desperately trying to finish their PhDs while
making enough money teaching to keep body and soul together.
This is not to say that we should get rid of metrics
entirely: it’s important to be able to identify bad performers and encourage
them to improve. But we should focus on using metrics for diagnosis and
encouragement rather than labelling and disparagement. And we should be careful
to bear in mind the high-incidence of mismeasurement. Too many examples of
using measurement (particularly in the public sector) bring to mind an incident
in “Gulliver’s Travels”. Noticing how badly Gulliver is dressed the king orders
a tailor to take his measurements for a suit of clothes. The tailor takes his
“altitude” with a quadrant and the dimensions of the rest of his body with a
“rule and compasses” and then, six days later, produces a suit of clothes “very
ill made, and quite out of shape”.
The biggest problem with managerialism, however, is not that
it is inefficient but that it divides humanity into two classes of people: the
rulers and the ruled, the doers and the done to, the thinkers and the hod-carriers.
It recreates the very division that liberals, in their salad days, set out to
destroy—though this time the people at the top are a global elite of educated
citizens, wearing their MBAs like modern coats of arms, and the people at the
bottom are the uneducated masses, condemned to spend their lives on the
receiving end of orders.
Hard versus soft
The final relationship that is off-kilter is the
relationship between the hard and the soft. Elite liberalism prefers data to
anecdote, measurement to impressionism. It favours hard sciences such as
economics over soft ones such as sociology and history. It is much more
interested in the quantity of stuff that people have to the quality of the life
that they lead. Leading liberal thinkers have opined at length on issues such
as productivity (eg. globalisation raises overall productivity even if it
causes local disruption). But they have been reluctant to say very much about
the quality of life—about the beauty of buildings or the cohesiveness of
society. To put it bluntly: liberals have started seeing the world like a
disembodied elite rather than like fellow citizens.
This is a potential disaster for liberalism for two reasons:
firstly because interesting ideas seldom come from entrenched ruling elites
and, secondly, because the most interesting problems facing policy-makers in
the next few years are likely to be “soft” rather than “hard”. How can you satisfy people’s demand for a
country that feels like a home rather than a hotel? How do you build new houses
that are beautiful as well as functional—and thereby reduce the pressure for
Nimbyism? How can you prove that growth is compatible with human scale?
There has always been a “hard” tradition in liberalism,
particularly in its Anglo-Saxon variety. Jeremy Bentham famously said that
there is no difference between poetry and pushpin (pushpin being an early
19th-century equivalent of pinball). Following his father’s example J.S. Mill
built Bentham’s crude calculus into the heart of his economics. This attitude
was reinforced by self-interest: liberals gravitated to the imperial civil
service and to local government, areas which encouraged them to treat people as
figures in a felicific calculus rather than as ends in themselves. Many of the
most interesting critiques of liberalism focused on what F.R. Leavis dubbed
“techno-Benthamism”: think of Charles Dickens’s horrific character, Mr
Gradgrind, and his determination to weigh human flesh by the pound.
But again liberalism has also contained another tradition
that is much more sensitive to the importance of “soft” issues. The greatest
exponent of this tradition is Alexis de Tocqueville. If early English liberals
focused on the evils of the Old Regime, with its unearned privileges and
higgledy-piggedly corruptions, Tocqueville focused on the evils of the
bureaucratic state, with its addiction to rational arrangements and indifference
to human variety. His book, “Democracy in America”, is a hymn as much as
anything to small-town America: the America of local town meetings where
everybody was given a chance to express their opinions and shape local
politics. Tocqueville was also obsessed by the homogenising potential of mass
society. He worried that a world bereft of a taste-making aristocracy and
dedicated to the theoretical proposition of human equality would reduce people
to the level of undifferentiated atoms: mediocre narcissists who, in their
determination to exercise their rights, reduced themselves to the level of
equal dependency on an all-powerful state.
Many avowedly liberal thinkers have emphasised the
importance of quality rather than quantity. John Maynard Keynes made it clear
that he regarded economics as nothing more than a means to an end, that end
being civilised life. He looked forward to a world in which the economy was so
productive that people would only have to work for four hours a day. The rest
of their time would be devoted to cultivating the mind. E.F Schumacher sounded
a clarion call in “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As if People
Mattered”.
The hard tradition has been dominant for the past 40 years
as liberals have occupied the commanding heights of the global economy. It is
time to give “small is beautiful” another chance.
The John Stuart Mill solution
Which brings us to John Stuart Mill. Mill is rightly
regarded as one of the great founders of liberalism. He was also one of the
great re-founders of liberalism. The first great rebalancing took place within
Mill’s capacious cranium.
Mill started off as a crude utilitarian. His father, James
Mill, was the “most faithful and fervent disciple” of Jeremy Bentham, the
inventor of the felicific calculus. He not only force-fed his son on Bentham’s
ideas, along with Greek, Latin and history, he set him at work preparing his
sprawling texts for the press. Mill’s early work bears all the signs of this
immersion in the utilitarian belief that the ultimate measure of a good society
is its ability to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number (with
no distinction being made between the higher and lower pleasures). He conceived
of individuals as pleasure-maximising machines. He argued that society only had
a right to limit people’s freedom if that freedom was likely to harm other
people. He turned himself into a high-priest of laissez-faire economics.
But as Mill matured he developed a more sophisticated
philosophy. He recognised that his father’s extraordinary educational programme
had robbed him not only of the whole of his childhood but also of a portion of
his humanity (he confessed in his brilliant autobiography that he was “never a
boy” and grew up “in the absence of love and presence of fear”) and that seeing
the world as nothing more than a giant calculating machine misses half the
point of life. He was heavily influenced by both S.T. Coleridge, Britain’s
greatest critic of Enlightenment rationalism, and Tocqueville, France’s
greatest critic of liberal individualism. He consequently set about producing a
more humane doctrine than the austere doctrine of his father.
This involved an intriguing manoeuvre—in crudely political
terms Mill moved both to the right and to the left. He learned from Tocqueville
that mass society can advance at the expense of freedom and pluralism. “Apelike
imitation” and “intrusive piety” are just two of the phrases he used to
describe the threats that lurked under the carapace of progress. He learned
from Coleridge why it is vital to make a distinction between the lower and the
higher pleasures. At the same time he learned from his soulmate, Harriet
Taylor, that women had been systematically marginalised.
Mill’s move to the left is the most eye-catching: he moderated
his enthusiasm for free markets to make more room for trade-union rights and
state activism. Employers were simply too powerful to preserve a safe social
balance, he argued. He became one of the earliest advocates of votes for women,
arguing that preventing women from voting made as much sense, morally, as
excluding red-haired men. At the same time many of his criticisms of
techno-Benthamism are marinated in conservative insights about the importance
of inter-generational ties.
Modern liberalism needs to go through its own Millian moment
(with, perhaps, the global financial crisis playing the role of Mill’s nervous
breakdown in promoting new thinking). Liberalism needs to engage with
critics—particularly its Marxist and populist critics—rather than arrogantly
marginalising them. It needs to regain its humanity by addressing the problems
of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis in general, and the problems of
managerialism and measurement in particular. It needs to move simultaneously to
both the left and the right. From the traditional right it needs to learn about
the importance of institutions and culture. From the populist right it needs to
learn to look at “progress” from the bottom up—from the perspective of
shuttered plants in Manchester and Milwaukee rather than IMF offices or
university lounges. And from the progressive left it needs to learn about the
importance of structural inequality. Equality of opportunity means something
very different to the descendant of a slave than for the descendant of a slave-owner.
In rebalancing itself it also needs to avoid two big
temptations.
The first is the temptation is simply to add a hefty helping
of identity politics to elite liberalism: introducing transgender lavatories
(or making all lavatories unisex); celebrating diversity at the drop of a hat;
seeking out the next oppressed minority.
There may be good cases for doing all these things: avoiding
discrimination on the basis of race or class is the essence of liberalism. But
far from addressing liberalism’s elitist problem, this strategy will actually
make it worse. Identity politics is a creature of the campuses rather than the
workplace. It fails to address (and indeed often contemptuously ignores) the
problems of working-class people who have seen their incomes stagnate and their
jobs removed. Many elite liberals are happy with this strategy precisely
because it doesn’t really challenge them very much: it panders to their vanity
without forcing them to step outside their comfortable cocoons.
In the end identity politics is not only incompatible with
liberalism but positively repugnant to it. The essence of liberalism lies in
individualism: liberals believe, along with Benjamin Constant, that “there is a
part of human existence that remains of necessity individual and independent,
and which lies of right utterly beyond the range of society”. Liberals
certainly need to do more to address structural constraints on individual
self-fulfilment. But they need to address these constraints as a means to an
individualist rather than a collectivist end. By contrast identity politics is
obsessed with the collective. It makes a fetish of biological characteristics
such as gender, race or sexuality. It encourages people to identify with groups
rather than stand out from the crowd. It submerges individuality into some
broader sense of identity. It also encourages people to argue that rational
arguments are subordinate to questions of identity: white men are asked to
“check their privilege” while non-white men frequently invoke their race or
gender (“speaking as a black woman) as a way of winning arguments. The price of
wokeness is the re-racialisation and re-biologisation of public discourse.
Liberals also put a premium on tolerance: partly because
they regard individual rights as pre-eminent and partly because they understand
that, particularly in the world of human affairs, people seldom know enough to
be absolutely certain of their judgements. They are averse to orthodoxies. But
identity politics is an ascendant orthodoxy: its votaries habitually deny
people with alternative views the right to speak, using the methods of the
people they say they oppose in order to get heretics sacked, and books and
arguments censored. And they do so not just because they get carried away but
because they think that it is the right thing to do. Hurt feelings trump
freedom of speech. A history of oppression trumps open debate. Identity
politics is thus the biggest challenge to liberalism’s commitment to free
speech and diversity of opinion since the red scare of the 1950s.
The other big temptation is to surrender to the populism. I
know several classical liberals who are so furious with the global oligarchy
(the people who run the global companies and dominate global institutions) and
the damage they have done to liberalism that they have embraced either Trump or
Brexit. But this is a dangerous way to go. Liberals certainly need to do more
to listen to the will of the people: the Brexit mess would never have happened
if Brussels had paid more attention to the rising cries of discontent across
Europe and moderated its ambitions accordingly. But we should nevertheless
recognise the limits of populism. It tends to ride roughshod over the rights of
minorities. It thrives on demonising elites while celebrating the wisdom of the
masses. It invariably damages the economy (thereby whipping up the discontent
upon which it thrives). It is prone to making foolish economic decisions:
witness the history of Argentina under the Peróns. Liberals need to preserve
their defences against the unwisdom of crowds in the form of bills of rights,
second chambers in parliament, independent courts and other barriers against
elective dictatorship. But at the same time they need to reduce the need for
these filters by moderating their ambitions and reacting more quickly to
popular discontent.
Back to Brexit
Which brings us back to where we started—to Brexit. It is
increasingly looking as if Brexit was one of the most expensive mistakes in
British history. Brexit has consumed British politics for more than two years
(and distracted attention from pressing subjects such as homelessness and
housing). It has cost untold billions in direct and indirect spending: a report
from the worthy Institute for Government published on June 11th notes that
Britain has allocated more than £2 billion to extricating itself from the EU
and created 10,000 new civil-service posts. And for what? It looks as if
Britain will have little choice but to remain a member of the single market if
it is to get smooth access to the EU market and prevent a meltdown on the Irish
border. The result will be that a country that once enjoyed an ideal
relationship with the EU (inside the EU but not in the euro) will soon have the
worst possible relationship: Britain will have to accept European rules without
having any representation in Brussels.
Can anything be salvaged from this mess? Perhaps a little if
the British and European establishment can be persuaded to listen to the EU
vote and adjust their policies in consequence. The British establishment needs
to recognise that the Leave vote was as much a revolt against the British
establishment as the EU establishment (a fact that is underlined by the rise of
Corbynism). The British needs to give more power to the provinces and reduce
the power of London in its economy and polity. It also needs to address the
concerns of the left-behind as a matter of priority rather than luxuriating in
the peccadilloes of the cosmopolitan elite. And it needs to temper the
technocratic approach to politics with more concern for the quality of life.
But the EU needs to change even more: it is easy to forget, given the passions
that have been revealed by Brexit and the ministerial incompetence that has
been revealed, that Brexit might never have happened (just as the recent
Italian debacle need never have happened) if the European Union had taken a
more statesmanlike approach to its business. The EU needs to rethink some of
the more dogmatic commitments in its credo such as free movement of people. It
needs to temper legalism with political wisdom.
It needs to recognise, above all, that liberalism is a
pragmatic philosophy that constantly adjusts itself in order to preserve what
really matters.
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