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Harvard is preparing to outlast Trump’s war on DEI

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Harvard se prépare à résister à la guerre de Trump contre la DEI

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Harvard is preparing to outlast Trump’s war on DEI
April 7, 2020 - 7:00am
The paper called for a reset on capitalism last year

At the end of last week the Financial Times published an extraordinary editorial. While it’s not quite the Communist Manifesto, it’s not what you’d expect from the house journal of the international business elite:

Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.
- Financial Times

The word ‘neoliberalism’ doesn’t actually appear in the text, but that reference to “reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades” is unmistakable.

It’s not that the FT editorial board has renounced capitalism itself, but clearly they’re calling time on capitalism as we’ve known it since the 1980s. The era that began with Reagan and Thatcher is over, struck down by the coronavirus.

As to what might come next, the FT draws a parallel to the Second World War:

The leaders who won the war did not wait for victory to plan for what would follow. Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, setting the course for the United Nations, in 1941. The UK published the Beveridge Report, its commitment to a universal welfare state, in 1942. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference forged the postwar financial architecture. That same kind of foresight is needed today.
- Financial Times

But there we begin to see the FT’s true — and essentially unchanged — agenda. It’s the same globalist, technocratic stuff they’ve always believed in. The precise balance between the respective roles of state and market has been adjusted, but not the underlying value system.

For all the stir caused by the FT’s shift in position, there’s no hint of a true rethink; no doubts expressed about the dangers of hyper globalisation; no regret for what the paper itself has done to further the triumph of Davos Man over the common man.

Note that reference to “basic income” — which is the liberal elite’s idea of getting radical. What working people actually want is the opportunity to earn a decent wage, which means not under-cutting them with cheap migrant labour and state-subsidised outsourcing to the People’s Republic of China.

As for wealth taxes, they might have a role if they target the genuinely wealthy instead of expropriating the prudent middle class. But I wonder how the FT’s newfound aversion to excess wealth squares with its continued publication of How to Spend It — a luxury goods supplement? Current features include ‘Five enchanting secret jewels’ and ‘An exclusive look inside Patek Philippe’s new HQ’. There’s also a handy gift guide — where you can pick up such essentials as a coffee machine for £975; a cigar cutter for a very reasonable £85; or, for those on a budget, a tube of posh toothpaste for a mere £20.

But, please, do tell us more about inequality…

Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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