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Liberalism means many different things to many different people. But the ‘double liberalism’ (economic and social) that has dominated the West since the end of the Cold War – liberal-democratic internationalism, European integration, relatively open borders for trade and people and, at home, individualism, secularism, equality (though not economic) and multiculturalism – is finally beginning to adapt to the democratic revolt.
Or rather it is possible to detect the emergence of two broad strands of liberal response to recent events: the admonished and the militant. The latter is best represented by writers like AC Grayling and Oliver Kamm, most (though not all) supporters of a second Brexit referendum, and all those who like to preface the concept of sovereignty with the weasel word “notional” (yes, I mean you Andrew Adonis and Will Hutton!).
Consider this perfect expression of unrepentant, militant liberalism from Oliver Kamm in Prospect magazine last year: “In the era of Brexit, Corbyn and Trump, it’s natural for us in the despised metropolitan media liberal elite to engage in soul-searching. I’ve done it and arrived at the difficult but ineluctable conclusion that I’ve been right all along. Our ideas have worked; they need reasserting.” I wonder how long he spent searching.
Kamm at the end of that same piece provides rather a good (Isaiah Berlinish) definition of a less militant, more pluralistic, liberalism that has evidently inspired many admonished liberals:
“Liberalism is an optimistic creed not because of misconceptions about human benevolence but, on the contrary, because it recognises something intrinsic to our nature: we all have different goals and conceptions of the good. And the things we value can’t all be realised simultaneously and made compatible with each other. A liberal society is the best method yet devised of recognising this multiplicity of aims. It stresses value pluralism in the face of political and religious dogmatism.”
Yet liberalism has not taken its own liberalism seriously over the past three decades. It has solidified into the political package I described in the first paragraph – one might label it FT/Economist liberalism – and regards itself as self-evidently for the common good and open to challenge only at the margin.
In my own language the Anywhere worldview of openness, autonomy and mobility, underpinned by the ‘achieved’ identities of the exam-passing classes, largely ignored the discomfort of the less well educated, more rooted Somewheres about rapid social change and the erosion of national social contracts. It closed the so-called Overton Window around the liberal package and excluded or vilified most opponents.
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