Liberalism is, in practice, the philosophy of the removal of barriers.
In its modern iteration, there are two strains of liberalism; what could be described as neoconservatism, or right-wing/classical liberalism, and neoliberalism, or left-wing liberalism. However, both of these philosophies are undeniably of the liberal tradition.
The desire to remove barriers comes — in part — from the first sentence of a document that would most certainly be one of the most important books of the liberal bible if one were to be published:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The two statements from this sentence — penned by Thomas Jefferson in the United States Declaration of Independence — that have had the most profound impact, but have been extrapolated to mean different things to the different evolutions of liberalism, are “all men are created equal”, and the unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness.”
To Jefferson, “equal” would have meant equal in the eyes of God — and this, at the time, would have been perfectly evident to all but the most pedantic writers in British magazines. But in the modern, less Christian and more materialistic world, “equal”, to all intents and purposes, has become a synonym for “the same” (maybe those pedantic Brits had a point?).
To right-wing liberals, all people are equal in that it is equally true all people are economic actors. For them, that’s the most important aspect of a person. They’re producers and consumers, contributors to the growth of GDP.
To left-wing liberals, all people are the same in a less measurable, perhaps a more Jeffersonian way. They’re equal in that firstly, they all (ostensibly) have the same potential; and secondly, they all have the same intrinsic value. The cultures they come from, the traditions they represent, and the beliefs they hold, whilst not exactly the same as ours, are equally as valid and valuable as our own, so they deserve equal space, respect and prominence in our society — representation one might call it…
And, whilst these things aren’t all exactly the same, the assumption is that people want more or less the same things, and are aiming for more or less the same end goals and the same type of society, so they’re all equally compatible. The neoliberal multicultural dream. The more we break down barriers between groups of people, the closer we’ll get to that utopia.
“The pursuit of happiness” to Jefferson would have meant within the constraints of the moral standards of the time, those being predominantly Christian moral standards. But as secularism and liberalism have amalgamated — both on the Right and the Left although to different extents— and have slowly removed the barriers of Christian morality, as society has become more atheistic, the moral constraints on the pursuit of happiness have slowly been eroded.
Indeed, even at the time, it was acknowledged that religious morality was needed to constrain the type of liberalism envisioned by the Founding Fathers. John Adams, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote in a letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts in 1798, that:
“[…]Should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The pursuit of happiness, for right-wing liberals, has come to mean something more akin to the pursuit and ownership of property, and by extension wealth, as is one’s natural right as first described by the person from whom Jefferson drew inspiration, John Locke. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness is — apparently — wrong! And this has, of course, transmuted in many cases to become an explicit celebration of avarice and narcissistic ambition. I could give examples, but I’m sure there’s plenty we can all think of for ourselves…
For left-wing liberals, the pursuit of happiness has come to mean the pursuit of almost anything that makes one feel pleasure, regardless of moral, religious, or social taboos against them. From euphemistically labelled alternative lifestyles and the explicit celebration of unusual sexual proclivities, to the championing of “fat acceptance” that frequently crosses over into the championing of obesity, to the acceptance of drug use and liberalisation of drug laws. The pursuit of hedonism…
The parents of neoconservatism, or right-wing liberalism, who ushered it into the world and cemented it as the dominant philosophy of Anglo-Saxon right-wing parties were of course the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, and the former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
Their project was an economic project, and as such the barriers they were interested in removing were those which would, or could, stifle or slow economic growth.
These leaders got to work deregulating internal markets, lowering barriers to international trade, cutting tariffs, and lowering taxes.
Thatcher had very little time for nostalgia, aesthetics (beyond her personal image), community, tradition or the human condition — all things which may be barriers to economic growth and market efficiency.
“And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” she said in an interview in Women’s Own in 1987.
Economic growth was her due north, and free markets were her compass.
This attitude is best expressed in the architecture of the buildings that started sprouting up around the time of her premiership and since. Towering glass and steel and concrete boxes and tubes, devoid of cultural and geographical specificity, which could be dropped in any modern metropolitan city from Shanghai to Dubai, and wouldn’t look out of place. Towering testaments to commerce, to market efficiency, and to nothing else.
Right-wing liberals also see all work as interchangeable. What matters is that it pays. They’re indifferent to the community that’s built up around certain industries and jobs, they’re indifferent to the sense of dignity one achieves by doing a job which provides them with status of some sort. If an industry is uncompetitive or it’s inefficient to continue doing in one country as opposed to another, they’ll watch it move overseas with indifference, sure that those factory workers who lost their jobs will find work of another sort. The invisible hand of the market will provide… apparently.
Having lost the economic argument in 1989 with the pulling down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and having suffered the stagnation and economic misery of the 1970s, the modern left-wing adopted a version of Thatcher’s and Reagan’s market liberalism. Indeed at the time, it seemed to be the only economic model that had any legitimacy left.
With its adoption, we saw the introduction of China into the WTO and the final passage of NAFTA under Bill Clinton, and Blair championing the EU single market and even arguing for the adoption of the Euro.
In the UK social liberalism swept the country and even in the US it made significant advances like Clinton’s Proclamation 7203, which introduced Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
John Major ended polytechnics removing the distinction — or the barrier — between academic universities and education and technical universities and education, and Blair liberalised everything else; from the immigration system, to how universities are funded.
With the system for funding higher education changed from State funding to student loans, the barrier to entry that was good grades was — for all intents and purposes — abolished (some universities have acceptance rates as high as 97.6%), instead replaced with one’s ability to pay — the cost of which the government, through its proxies in the banks, was willing to lend anyone, and even pick up the tab for if one is unable to pay it back (which happens about 83% of the time).
Barriers to entry in the form of the ability to pass entrance exams for selective grammar schools had the final nails hammered into their coffin under Blair — although it was a process that had started well before him with Harold Wilson — and, despite the evident failure of the comprehensive school experiment in the 90s — one which I was unfortunate enough to suffer an education through — nothing was done to reverse it.
The barrier that is our national border was all but erased under Blair, and New Labour threw open the gates to mass immigration letting in unprecedented numbers of people to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to former government advisor Andrew Neather.
By the time Blair was done, he’d even completely liberalised the Tory Party! There was no social conservatism to be found in David Cameron’s Conservative Party, as evidenced by the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013. And we’ve gone so far that now — in the year 2022 — many on the Left, and even some Tories are happy to see the barrier removed between what it means to be a man or a woman.
Some people have noticed that this double-barrelled liberalism, from both the Left and Right, hasn’t necessarily made life better. They’ve noticed that barriers and load-bearing walls are often the same things; and when you remove a load-bearing wall, cracks begin appearing in the ceiling that is our society, that is our civilisation.
The over-expansion of university education has led to a mountain of debt most of which will have to be paid by the taxpayer; to elite overproduction and a simultaneously over-educated but poorly-educated, over-opinionated but lacking-in-wisdom, unimpressive and resentful generation obsessed with puritanical virtue signalling and vapid activism; and to a phenomenon called degree inflation (or credentialism), which is defined as the “inflation of the minimum credentials required for a given job and the simultaneous devaluation of the value of diplomas and degrees.”
People have noticed the astronomical amount of immigration in recent years has added to the strain on our public services; has contributed to rapid inflation of house prices as demand has outstripped supply; has contributed to the suppression of wages in predominantly working-class jobs, and potentially contributed to a decrease in on-the-job training as it’s cheaper and easier to fill jobs from abroad with people who have already received the training.
It’s also been noticed that the character of many of our towns and cities is changing; the religions observed within them, the languages spoken within them, the foods sold within them, the clothes worn within them, and just the general vibe and atmosphere when one visits them. They no longer feel familiar to the vast majority of Britons. In some places the only accurate way of describing what’s happened is ghettoisation.
None of this is to say there shouldn’t be diversity in our towns and cities, I firmly believe that some level of diversity is a good thing; it’s to ask, what’s the limiting principle?
The decline of community in the UK has also been noticed. As the economy has become more knowledge-based and credentialised, as people have left home for education and work, as strangers from faraway places have moved into houses that once contained friends and familiar faces, people have been left feeling evermore alienated, ever more alone. It was recently found that in Britain one in ten people don’t even know their neighbour’s name, and in London, that increases to one in eight, and nine out of ten Londoners couldn’t identify all their neighbours in a police lineup!
Last year Onwards reported the “proportion of under-35s saying they have just one or no close friends has trebled in 10 years, from 7% to 22% while the share with four or more has fallen from 64% to 40%.” And that people “under the age of 25 are three times more likely (48%) than people over the age of 65 years old (15%) to distrust their neighbours.”
And, despite the fact politicians have been talking about it since at least the financial crisis, people have noticed we’re still living in an hourglass economy, and people are still being forced to work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. For the majority of people gone are the days when a single salary could support a family. Research has found that this year a third of workers have looked for a second job to deal with the rising cost of living and that the majority (77%) of workers would work overtime or extra shifts to earn more money if the opportunity were available to them.
Post-liberalism is really a discussion about what we want society to look like, how we want it to function, and what are the appropriate barriers that will enable us to have that society. It’s a look back over the past and an acknowledgement that some things were better before. So it asks the question, what can be rescued and rebuilt from the past following the assault of double-barrelled liberalism? What shouldn’t liberalisms have torn down?
It’s an acknowledgement that the promises of the liberal utopia haven’t emerged and that material prosperity in the form of iPhones and other widgets isn’t enough to sustain the human spirit. It’s an acknowledgement that perhaps the modern liberal shibboleths have some serious downsides.
Is diversity only a strength? Is free trade and globalisation only beneficial? Are we sure that leaving mass communication in the hands of the market is a good idea? Is sending everyone to university really the best thing for them or society? Does everyone really need exactly the same type of comprehensive school education? Do we want a society where both parents have to work full-time to provide for their children? Is it really ok that so many children are now being raised by one parent? Is an economy based on financial services really good for everyone? Is it beneficial that manufacturing jobs have declined so substantially? Does it really not matter where things are made? Is it really better for everyone to switch professions multiple times throughout their life, rather than having a stable career for 30 years and retiring comfortably at the end of it with a gold watch? Is it desirable that children should have to move away from their hometowns to pursue an education and career? Are we happy with the bland, non-specific and uninspiring architecture that’s swallowing our cities and towns?
The biggest problem post-liberalism has though, is it’s not really a movement. It’s a loose-knit group of people—largely online — who have all noticed the excesses of liberalism, and are asking a fairly similar set of questions. Many of the people identified with the movement, or who are proving to be thought leaders in areas with which post-liberalism is concerned, may not even identify themselves as explicitly “post-liberal”. And there’s certainly no substantial body of work on post-liberalism, no equivalent of On Liberty or Two Treatises of Government or The Road to Serfdom.
On the economic front, there’s been little impressive work; more wish lists put forwards than road maps describing how to get there. However, some good work has been done by the likes of Oren Cass at American Compass and by the Conservative MP Danny Kruger et al. at The New Social Covenant Unit.
It would be remiss of me not to point out that the SDP also has some good ideas on this front.
Post-liberalism also seems to have an aesthetic component; people nostalgic for the beauty of a tweedy Britain, a Britain of red post boxes and phone booths, of Tudor thatched cottages and neo-gothic grandeur hewn from Bath stone, for Victorian terraces and cobbled streets to Georgian terraces of yellow brick. It’s about creating an environment that’s beautiful and specific, that you could drop someone in and they’d know just by looking around them that this is England.
Again, there are not many people doing work on this, although there’s lots of chatter about it on the internet — but there’s lots of chatter about everything on the internet —entire Twitter pages and Instagram accounts are dedicated to it, and Ed West has written some very good articles; but the people doing the best work on it are a small group called Create Streets, which advocates for “gentle density places which residents and neighbours can love”.
Most of all, post-liberalism seems to be about defining something that is us, as communities, as a people, as a nation, as a body politic, as a culture, and as a civilisation (which is ironic given that post-liberalism is itself so poorly defined). It’s a rejection of the dogmatic focus on the individual and ever-expanding freedoms because we seem to have reached the point at which some liberals seem to be trying to free themselves from reality — sometimes to comic effect. It’s about social and cultural particularism and trying to insert some surety into a world of liberal moral and cultural relativism.
What post-liberalism cannot afford to do — but as with all online ‘movements’ that aren’t overtly left-wing is in danger of — is be swallowed wholesale into a world of edgy online shitposting, to become a synonym for quasi-fascist as alt-right did. It can’t become crude or racist, tied to supercilious internet provocateurs, thoughtless reactionaries, or cantankerous contrarians.
I think, the quote that best sums up the ethos of post-liberalism comes from the great C. S. Lewis:
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
