Liberalism, as Michael Lind has argued, is under attack because it cannot deliver the promised self-correcting markets that provide for free and fair economic competition, political renewal and cultural reconciliation.
The malign reality is it consolidates winners, economic monopolies, politically entrenched divides, canyons of class, geography, education and cultural echo chambers where opposition is cancelled.
The remedy is to dismantle concentrations of economic, political and cultural power and challenge meritocratic arguments that help reproduce them.
This might involve new anti-trust initiatives, attack on sites of monopoly political power, such as in universities, and confront woke culture
In terms of ‘postliberalism’, I get the frustrations with a liberalism conditioned by liberal economics and hyper-individualised identity politics; the production of economic monopolies, concentrated political constituencies and thought binaries.
But I would ask, are there other liberal traditions beyond both its modern and classical iterations worth excavating?
For instance in the 1870s, the neo-classical revolution contracted economics into an individualised science of society. In response the late 19th century saw a ‘new’ or ‘social’ liberalism emerge with figures such as TH Green, Hobhouse and Hobson – challenging self-interest with questions of character and positive liberty. It believed in progressive taxation, pension and social security reform, saw property rights as conditional and supported public ownership of natural monopolies.
Or take US New Deal liberalism This influenced Attlee’s post war attempt to regulate the market and challenge capital. His idea of a British New Deal, the welfare state and socialised medicine consciously echoed FDRs Second Bill of Rights – to rebuild US citizenship through the provision of fundamental economic and social entitlements.
Obviously this liberal tradition has eroded – primarily because human rights lawyers have reduced it to questions of civil and political rights, rather than economic and social rights.
New Deal liberalism agenda was in response to the domestic fascist threat and later the global fight against tyranny – could such an approach help fight against oligarchy today?
Our government would run a mile from such a radical agenda – but maybe reframing citizenship around access to housing, medicine, work, social protections, freedom from fear – could have real political, potency today. Call it a populist response to oligarchy.
To me, Michael Lind’s strongest argument is his desire to rebuild labour as an economic and social force.
Some think the present government is doing that with its New Deal for Working People: what it calls the biggest overhaul of employment rights for a generation.
I fear a missed opportunity. Today Labour is basically re-establishing the 2010 status quo ante. Removing Tory reforms and enacting new individual rights.
Nothing regarding company law reform, redefining stakeholder and worker interest in the architecture of the firm; nothing on economic or industrial democracy, nor extended contract compliance; outside of social care, very little about extending organised terms and conditions into unorganised sectors, or sectoral bargaining.
There are minor changes to the union recognition procedure – but that procedure has been a failure.
Historically Labour’s role was to extend collective bargaining with minimal legislative interventions. Today, we focus on individual rights rather rebuilding the power of labour. It’s type of thinking that views so-called ‘left behind’ communities as passive, inert: full of individuals in need of fiscal or legal remedies.
An alternative is to rebuild the economic and social power of the working class. In recent years the working class have demonstrated they are far from passive – actively reclaiming a politics which has failed them. We require a bolder response from the party of labour not least because the costs of inaction will be dramatic.
Today, politics is being reset around questions of religion and identity. Over the coming years we will witness profound community upheaval and religious strife.
On the far right, figures such as Tommy Robinson are consciously adopting Christian nationalist language and imagery to propel cultural dissent. So too Reform UK.
A distinct aggressive Catholicism will likely emerge here in the slipstream of figures such as JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Viktor Orban.
Conversely, protests over Gaza spilled into the general election and foreshadow the possible emergence of a Muslim UK party. We can also identify a more muscular Hindu nationalist political movement, with covert support from foreign governments spreading throughout the country. The politics of Harrow reflect this, so too violence between Hindu and Muslim communities across Leicester – all signalling what might lie ahead in urban settings.
Labour is basically re-establishing the 2010 status quo ante
Yet recently Britain elected the most consciously secular parliament in history.
Apart from at the margins, the Labour government is uninterested in faith and ill-equipped to build religious dialogue.
In fact, fearful of populism it will retreat into an ever more technocratic administration preoccupied with questions of policy delivery and utility as populist antidote.
That is precisely the wrong response.
Look at Labour’s plan for measurable milestones – a utilitarian politics of fiscal transfers – incapable of addressing questions of spiritual national renewal.
In contrast, in recent weeks Kemi Badenoch has developed an evangelical hostility to the progressive left and how it is embedded in the bureaucratic state. Recently she wrote of her fear of ‘a new progressive ideology’ that is on the rise, one fuelling identity politics and an assault on both democracy and the nation state. She wrote that: ‘Culture and economics are entwined… the new progressive ideology sees the nation state, and related migration controls, as a purveyor of historical injustice’.
I think Badenoch might be moving with the spirit of the times – she suggests Conservatism must become a national force equipped with moral certainty in defence of the sacred.
We have retreated from an era of muscular even evangelical secularism, the ‘new atheism’ of writers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who asserted a new age of reason, of disinterested scientism, and the triumph of liberal rationality.
Today religious convictions appear culturally ascendant, captured in public conversions by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the original new atheists, the views of Jordan Peterson, as well as footballers, rock stars and dodgy comedians.
Why this renewed interest in spiritual concerns?
Maybe it was the pandemic, when we were forced to confront death and reconsider meaning and purpose. Certainly there’s immigration and cultural tensions; the decline in our ideological traditions, political alienation, institutional distrust, a sense of social anxiety; the threats to humanity from technological change; and the effects of conflict and war.
Cumulatively there appears a distinct religious turn in response to a secular progressive ideology deemed responsible for a sense of national decline.
Two decades ago, new atheism was in part a reaction to the religious fundamentalism driving 9/11. Today, growing political movements are consciously seeking to defend a sense of the sacred.
There is a real problem here for the government – because they are asking the wrong questions. Their utilitarian milestones with their suspension of the ethical – are not the answer to those seeking spiritual renewal: politics of a different order.
Even if they deliver on these terms they are playing on a different technocratic part of the pitch.
Their opponents wish to return to moral concerns. Politicians of the left have deserted this territory.
A longer version of this speech was delivered at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Postliberalism conference in Cambridge on 13 to 14 December.
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