The future of liberalism

The Liberal, a very thoughtful liberal publication out of Great Britain, has an excellent review by Simon Kovar of Julia Margo's Beyond Liberalism: Is the Future of Liberalism Progressive? in its current edition.

Beyond Liberty

It's an excellent discussion. And for everyone who is romanticizing the New Deal and postmodernist contributions to the academy, it is a nice corrective for what it means to be liberal.

As Kovar argues:

"Paddy Ashdown posed the question starkly: are those seeking coalition interested in pluralism or merely control? The initial Liberal Democrat response to Tony Blair’s talk of a ‘Third Way’ was to argue that one already exists: it is called liberalism. For Margo, however, liberalism must “find a place in the progressive project”. Moreover, liberals must drop their traditional suspicion of the state as a social-engineer, and Margo even suggests (somewhat revealingly) that the state has much to learn from the techniques of behavioural manipulation exercised by private sector advertisers and publicists. The notion that the latest scientific research has eliminated any need to be suspicious of administrators and bureaucrats is hardly a new idea on the Left, and it is one from which Liberals should instinctively recoil for sound historical and philosophical reasons.

One traditional liberal idea praised by Margo is universal asset policy. Stuart White’s chapter, examining liberal ideas of co-ownership, profit-sharing, employee share ownership and industrial democracy (including even syndicalism), makes it clear that such concepts are not only “traditional” in the classical liberal sense – with roots in 18th Century, pre-capitalist approaches linking property ownership to personal liberty – but were revived under Jo Grimond’s leadership expressly as an alternative to bureaucratic socialist conceptions of the welfare state. Paddy Ashdown envisaged a situation in which workers would employ capital (rather than the other way round), and hire their own management. Yet such thinking faded from the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy’s leadership, and in 2005 the party pledged to abolish Labour’s Child Trust Fund. This trend is indeed to be regretted, and credibly so, from the vantage point of an unqualified liberalism, now as before an alternative to social-democratic progressivism. Both Steve Webb and David Laws use the language of the “enabling state”, an idea quite different from Margo’s interventionist state. Margo writes: “By glossing over the way individuals develop personal autonomy or agency, traditional liberalism has failed to grasp why socialisation is crucial, and hence why the role of the state in this area is so important”. Freeden’s argument deals with the first and second clauses of this sentence; and the third simply does not follow.

We also encounter the proposition that, given trends in public opinion, the present climate offers a “progressive liberal moment” . Unfortunately, as William Wallace points out in his contribution, recent trends in fact offer little succour to liberals. They suggest rather the move towards a strong state, populist politicians, and a passive electorate. To take just one example among many quoted by various contributors to this volume, 45% of Londoners say they would consider voting either for the BNP or for UKIP. That these trends do not appear to shake Margo’s analysis is perhaps not surprising, since they support her commitment to what she describes as “the interventionist left” – by which “intervention” denotes a desire for greater state activity – and the ‘interventionist’ or ‘progressive’ left has often flirted with the politics and populism of the hard and extreme right. Both Nick Clegg and William Wallace warn against the perils of populism, a sound liberal concern, and again we are reminded of the nebulous quality of progressivism, a political tendency that takes many different shades, but seldom liberal ones.

Today’s Liberal Democrats require above all a coherent liberal philosophical definition, and a narrative in continuity with the party’s rich and radical history. One positive aspect of this volume is that the strands of liberal thought are evident in the contributions of politicians as diverse as David Laws and Steve Webb: the nourishment of individuality, a critique of political and economic privilege and monopoly, and the fostering of liberal-democratic citizenship. Each of these strands has a social dimension, beginning with a commitment to education (a striking absentee from any collection claiming to strike new ground). Implicit in the subtitle is a question about whether the future of liberalism may be termed ‘social democratic’, or whether, at the very least, liberalism ought to concede the mantle of forward-thinking to social democracy. Is the future of liberalism progressive? No, it’s liberal."

It is nice to see liberals who take that term seriously and not as some kind of propaganda cover for more power-seeking motivations.

I have not lived through a period, before, where I have been more disgusted with the blurring of those distinctions for political advantage and the hubris of those who seem to argue that the essence of liberal values and a liberal education is that institutions be built where everyone gets free access rather than taking the free development of conscience, thought, expression, and experience more seriously.

The cynical manipulations for power in the more government-friendly form are clearer to me, today, than they were eight years ago, when my identification as liberal was more unqualified.

The truth was that I just got tired of being bullied. And I started to understand why conservatives would be tired of the same. And the whole experience allowed me to appreciate the liberal values and liberal education that I had too often taken for granted up until recently.

The silver lining in this political period is that once your freedom has been threatened more openly, it becomes all the more clear what you had that you were taking for granted when you so easily gave it up for a political cause. That and most of the social democratic concerns I think there are better liberal answers for and I have a clearer idea of what those answers would be. Most social democratic institutions would be better managed as liberal institutions, I think. And our best experiences bear that out more than contradict it, I believe.

This is a moment of enormous hubris for social democratic proponents, I think, seemingly willing to sacrafice as many peoples' lives to their utopian visions as they feel that they must in the name of an ideology with very few very good new ideas to offer for governance or for liberal institutions. And, in absence of better ideas, they demand power, instead, to compensate for their few good answers for serious problems we face.

There are many problems in markets. But they are problems that are best resolved by liberal means, within the market, rather than by social democratic means, hoping that government has more answers than it really does. And, in the meantime, focussing on such problems overlooks the enormous good and opportunities that markets have created for the world by the beginning of the 21st century.

Many of the problems of 21st century liberal democratic life have been created because the markets have done so well, not so poorly. We are a society of enormous abundance and choices and the various ills that come with such freedom and bounty without enough grounding in the values that make them possible.

Stronger liberal educations that we choose rather than the passive ones that many people too often accept could provide more of that grounding. But, even then, either we will take responsibility for such educations and embrace what they have to offer or we will not. And many, likely, will not, if history is any guide. Though we should always hope and work for better and work to prove history wrong when it is not our best effort.

Fundamentally, the future of liberalism is strong because liberalism is strong. Liberal values are stronger than other sorts. And they have borne out that strength so consistently for generations that should give pause to any contrary political moment or strategy.

Hubris is eternal. But it doesn't last long or take us very far. So finally we must find something more real. And liberalism, in the form that takes its root, liberty, more seriously is the substance that we are seeking. Or at least it is the indespensable starting point.