“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“

Attributed to the 19th-century writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it loosely translates as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”: perfect for a worldly-wise 900 words on why the latest brand new thing isn’t so new after all.

Now that the internet has turned comment journalism into a blood sport, world-weariness and using French words is, I regret, passé. And yet Karr’s epigram is as relevant as ever.

Last week, the MPs that formed the breakaway Independent Group announced the creation of a new party, Change UK. The irony, as many people have pointed out, is that the party’s purpose is to undo change – by keeping Britain inside the EU and by refloating the wreck of Blairism. Perhaps, as good Europeans, they should have called themselves Plus Ça Change UK.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

It’s not as if renewing New Labour is even a new thing to do. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he promised a “new kind of politics”. When, just three years later, Ed Miliband became leader, he dropped the ‘New’ from New Labour, but claimed to represent a “new generation” with “different ideas, different attitudes” and a “different way of doing politics.”

Five years later, the Labour Party was bored with that and turned to an old leftie, Jeremy Corbyn. But even he promised a “new kind of politics” – a “kinder politics”. By the start of this year, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and the others could take no more of their comrades’ kindness and left to form The Independent Group – recalling the events of 1981 when the ‘Gang of Four’ quit a leftwing Labour Party to form the SDP. Plus ça change…

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Though we seem to be stuck in an unending cycle of confected newness, a genuinely new kind of politics is tantalisingly close to breaking through.

It comes in several varieties and therefore has different labels attached to it – ‘communitarian’, ‘Blue Labour’, ‘Red Tory’, ‘hard centre’, ‘post-liberal’. Some or all of these have caught the attention of the mainstream political parties. For instance, Tony Blair flirted with communitarianism, as did Ed Miliband. The Conservative Party had its ‘Big Society’ moment under David Cameron, with related ideas influencing the early part of Theresa May’s leadership (i.e. when she was still popular). However, in each case it soon became clear that the party establishments were only after a fresh semblance of ‘newness’. Once it all got a bit too challenging, the same old same old reasserted itself.

So is the post-liberal agenda an ideological mirage – a vague set of ideas that appear on the horizon of politics only to vanish as one gets closer?

I wonder if a map would help. If we were to triangulate from the familiar points of the political spectrum, might we find the post-liberal promised land? Perhaps, but the traditional Left-Right political spectrum (past its sell-by date anyway) is of no use. If post-liberalism fits anywhere along the line, it is somewhere in the middle. Blue Labour would be a bit to the Left, Red Tories a bit to the Right – but overall they’d occupy the space as, er, the liberals they disagree with.

Further reading

Vanilla liberalism is past its sell-by date

By Peter Franklin

Maybe we need to add another spectrum. The first is reserved as a spectrum between the economic Left and the economic Right – partisans of public ownership and state planning at one end and fans of the freemarket and laissez- faire at the other. The second spectrum is about social and cultural issues. This would run from support for constraints on individual action (e.g. drug laws, immigration controls) through to opposition to such restrictions.

The intersection of the two spectrums creates the familiar ‘Political Compass‘ chart, which is divided into four quadrants – representing the socially conservative and socially liberal tendencies of the economic Left and economic Right. At first sight this would appear to solve our problem. We can put liberals in the bottom right quadrant and post-liberals diametrically opposite in the top left. No more occupying the same space. Meanwhile we can put conventional conservatives in the top-right quadrant and their ‘progressive’ opponents in the bottom-left. Nice and neat.

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But there’s a further problem. In fact, several further problems.

The first problem is that mainstream parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left aren’t quite as distinct from one another as they would seem. Basically, they are all liberals on economic and social issues alike – meaning that what they’re mostly interested in is individual freedom of action in both spheres. The main thing they disagree about is to what extent the state should get involved in order to facilitate that freedom of action. In general (though not in every case) the liberal Left favours a bigger, more active state, while the liberal Right a smaller, less interfering one. For instance, the former emphasises redistribution to give the poor economic agency; while the latter emphasises the right of people to keep the fruits of their own enterprise.

This is not an insignificant difference in perspective; until recently it was the defining issue of politics. However, it boils down to an argument over means not ends – the ultimate and shared objective is the maximisation of personal autonomy.

The second problem is something I’ve written about in more detail here. It’s to do with the mismatch between where most people place themselves on the political compass and where the political and cultural elites place themselves. The latter are heavily biased to the bottom-right liberal quadrant – though the leftier ones spill over into the neighbouring progressive quadrant. In some countries, especially America, the conventional conservative quadrant also claims a corner of the establishment – think Fox News and the Republican National Convention.

Further reading

Can we tame democracy's demons?

By Adrian Pabst

However, when the Voter Study Group asked the American public to place themselves on the chart, a very different distribution was revealed. There were a load of people in the progressive quadrant and unsurprisingly most of them voted for Hillary Clinton. There were another bunch of voters in the conservative quadrant – almost all of whom voted for Donald Trump. The liberal quadrant was mixed but there were very few people in it – and most of those tended towards the centre of the chart. But the real surprise was the much larger number of people in the fourth quadrant – those who were neither economically nor socially liberal. In 2016, Trump won significantly more of these votes than Clinton, which proved crucial in the swing states that won him the Presidency.

It is remarkable that such a large and important group of voters have no elite institutions to speak for them – no newspapers, no broadcasters, no think tanks, no mainstream political parties. It’s therefore unsurprising that in country after country we’ve seen populist movements sweep in to claim them for their own.

Which brings me to the third problem – which is that identifying post-liberalism with the fourth quadrant associates it with populism, especially national populism. Furthermore, by defining this quadrant against social and economic liberalism, the conclusion that some people will draw is that post-liberal is just a euphemism for anti-liberal. And yet to any fair-minded person it should be obvious that Blue Labourites such as Maurice Glasman and Red Tories like Phillip Blond are not of the same ilk as Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini.

What, then, separates post-liberalism from crude populism?

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Let’s start with what liberalism means in this context. It is not mere support for individual liberty, because almost everyone (except those on the furthest fringes of politics) could sign up for that. Rather, liberalism is the belief that the maximisation of individual liberty is the main and perhaps only purpose of politics. It’s not that liberals don’t believe that other things are important in life, but that they see these things as matters for the individual, and free associations of individuals, not politics.

Post-liberals, like liberals, are pro-liberty; but unlike liberals they do not believe that the maximisation of personal freedom is the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Other things are important too – like family, community, nation, fairness and beauty – and therefore there are balances to be struck and conflicts to be resolved as an essential part of the democratic process. Post-liberals therefore believe that individuals have rights and duties. Moreover, duties aren’t just about obeying the law as a mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between individual freedoms; people also owe a duty to the common good, which can be defined and justified on grounds other than the maximisation of liberty.

For instance, we should defend free speech not only because it is an important freedom, but also because truth matters and people should be able to speak it (even if they don’t agree on what it is). Another example is environmentalism – the main reason why we should protect an endangered species is not because our children and grandchildren should have the opportunity to see it, or because it plays an important role in ecosystems we rely on, but simply because we have no right to destroy it. Consider animal welfare: the reason why we should punish cruelty to animals is not primarily because it upsets people, but because to inflict suffering on a sentient being is objectively evil.

There are very few absolute liberals. To varying extents, most accept the idea that duties exist alongside rights and that freedom, while precious, isn’t everything. However, post-liberals would go further – recognising a growing imbalance between the goal of furthering liberty and the other things on which a good society depends. Indeed, they diagnose it as the primary cause of our 21st-century malaise. ‘More balance!’, not ‘more freedom!’, is the post-liberal rallying cry.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, we need to re-draw the political compass – instead of economic and social spectrums that run from liberal to illiberal, they should run from ‘maximising liberty’ to ‘balancing liberty’. This pushes the worst of the populists – those with undeniably totalitarian, anti-democratic tendencies – right off the chart. However, that still leaves post-liberals sharing a quadrant with the less extreme kind of populist, which for reasons I describe here is far from ideal.

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The solution is to add a third spectrum to the chart – one that clearly distinguishes post-liberalism from populism. To my mind, it should revolve around the principle of human dignity – which is the idea that every person, without exception, is of infinite worth and must be treated as such. It is, therefore, incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism – because we can only achieve our full personhood in relationship to others. Though of infinite worth, we are, in this life, finite in our capacities. As such, we cannot owe the same duty of care to all – and therefore owe more to those relationally closest to us, starting with our families and extending outward to community and nation.

However, what we can do without limit is to recognise and respect the dignity of all people, no matter how close or distant our relationship to them. There are no good reasons for not doing so – just the dark motivations of prejudice and the cynical politics of divide and rule. It is on this spectrum that post-liberalism can be distinguished from populism, lifted not only into another quadrant, but onto a higher plane.

Over the next week, I’ll be counting down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

Today, numbers 10 to 1:

#10

China’s chip addiction

UnPacked features a lot of stories about China –  and especially its game-changing use of technology. But for all the ways in which the Chinese as moving faster into the future than we are, there are some big gaps in the country’s technological prowess.

One of the biggest is the subject of an Adam Minter piece for Bloomberg:

“Although China long ago mastered the art of making products with semiconductors produced elsewhere (the iPhone is the most famous example), it wants to move beyond being a mere assembler…

“…China is currently the world’s biggest chip market, but it manufactures only 16 percent of the semiconductors it uses domestically.”

China’s influence over the global economy and geopolitics can only grow in the decades ahead, but its vulnerabilities – technological, social, environmental and demographic – are as significant as its strengths.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#9

The Centrist Paradox

Is political polarisation a threat to democracy? Are the ‘wings’ – Left and Right – drifting towards authoritarian extremism?

That’s the standard account of what ails the body politic, but in a fascinating piece for the New York Times, David Adler presents evidence to show that the most disillusioned voters are those in the centre of the political spectrum:

“I examined the data from the most recent World Values Survey (2010 to 2014) and European Values Survey (2008), two of the most comprehensive studies of public opinion carried out in over 100 countries…

“Respondents who put themselves at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, according to several survey measures…”

This is so counter-intuitive that Adler calls it the Centrist Paradox. Who, then are these ‘centrists’? Are they latte-sipping liberals aghast at the rise of populism or are they working class populists who’ve become disillusioned with the parties of the mainstream Left and Right?

It could, of course, be both – meaning that the centre is also incoherent.

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#8

The gaping hole in the party system

Here’s another possible explanation for the Centrist Paradox: there’s a large group of voters who are unrepresented by the conventional party system. Traditionally, there are progressive parties that lean to the Left on economic and social issues and conservative parties that lean to the Right. You can also find liberal parties that lean Left on social issues and Right on economics.

But what about voters who do the opposite – leaning Left on economics and Right on social (and, especially, cultural) issues? A fascinating report by Lee Drutman for the Voter Study Group, suggests that there are a lot of these ‘Left conservatives’ – indeed they heavily outnumber the economic and social liberals who have such an outsize influence on politics.

This gaping hole has allowed populists of Left, Right and centre to disrupt the party system, but without offering a coherent policy platform.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#7

The deflationary Death Star versus healthcare

In a piece for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson refers to Amazon as a “deflationary Death Star” – a brilliant description of the company’s effect on any market it enters into.

If there’s one market whose prices definitely need deflating, it’s the ruinously expensive US healthcare industry. Therefore, the fact that Amazon is teaming up with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to sort it out may prove the most important business news of the year:

“The surprising trio of the nation’s largest online retailer, largest bank by assets, and most famous investor (Warren Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire) riding to the rescue of the beleaguered health system already rocked insurance stocks and thrilled health-care experts who have long dreamed of a technological solution to ‘bend the curve’ of inexorably rising medical costs.”

The immediate interest of the three companies is obvious – reducing the cost of providing healthcare benefits to their combined workforce. But if they succeed in developing a new and much cheaper healthcare model, I doubt they’ll keep it in-house.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#6

The opioid epidemics

America’s greatest public health crisis is the opioid epidemic – and according to Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times, the latest figures show it getting worse:

“Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths.”

In the Atlantic, Ashley Fetters brings us news of another American epidemic:

“…reported cases of three sexually transmitted diseases in the United States had reached an all-time high in 2017. Rates of gonorrhea rose by 67 percent, syphilis by 76 percent, and chlamydia by 21 percent, to a total of almost 2.3 million cases nationwide… the fourth year in a row that STDs increased steeply in the U.S.”

Inevitably, the “rise in high-risk sexual behaviors [is] associated with opioid use and addiction”.

Suicide is also on the rise again in America, and that too can be linked, in part, to opioids.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#5

The polygenic revolution

A strong contender for book of the year is Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are – by the geneticist Robert Plomin. It guides us through the accumulating evidence that genes have a major influence on behavioural traits, not just physical ones.

Quoted by Andrew Anthony in the  Guardian, Plomin is at pains to point out that the genetic influence on how we turn out is polygenic – i.e. hundreds, even thousands, of genes can be involved in influencing a single trait. We don’t understand exactly how these complex interactions work, but we can measure the correlations between the presence of particular genes and the expression of particular traits. On this basis, polygenic testing could be used to make predictions about behavioural outcomes.

Whether this tool is used to tailor support to individuals or to discriminate against them will be down to society, not science.

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Technology

#4

Amazon Go

Amazon is best known as an online retailer. But in 2018 it opened a new store in Seattle called Amazon Go. In a fascinating piece for Stratechery, Ben Thompson tells us about it:

“The trick is that you don’t pay, at least in person: a collection of cameras and sensors pair your selection to your Amazon account — registered at the door via smartphone app — which rather redefines the concept of ‘grab-and-go’.”

Think of all the different systems that have to be coordinated to make it all work. But then that, in a nutshell, is Amazon’s grand strategy – expanding in all directions, not just to achieve unbeatable economies of scale, but also to create a unified retail ecosystem in which it controls and seamlessly integrates all the interfaces between each bit of the overall operation. No other retail or logistics company will be in a better position to fully automate just about everything it does.

This year, there’s been a lot of debate over how Amazon treats its workers. In ten or twenty years time we could be asking ‘what workers?’

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Capitalism

#3

Yes we’re richer, but where did all the wildlife go?

The counterpoint to the crisis of capitalism in the West is the massive fall in global poverty. And, as well as the world getting richer, we also see long-term trends on literacy, violence, longevity and access to sanitation all moving in the right direction.

Yet the good news is no excuse for ignoring the trends heading in the wrong direction. In the Guardian, Damian Carrington writes about an especially dramatic and disturbing example:

“The Living Planet Index, produced for WWF by the Zoological Society of London, uses data on 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, representing more than 4,000 species, to track the decline of wildlife. Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%.”

At what point do we call a halt?

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#2

Americans against hate speech… and political correctness

One of the most encouraging stories of 2018, was a study, published by More in Common, which demonstrates that Americans do indeed have more in common than one might think.

In a must-read piece for the Atlantic, Yascha Mounk highlights the key findings:

“Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that ‘political correctness is a problem in our country.’ Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24…”

These majorities were pretty consistent across ethnic groups too.

Meanwhile 82% of Americans “believe that hate speech is also a problem.”

It’s great that’s there such an overwhelming constituency for common-sense and against bigotry. If only there was a politician ready and able to represent it.

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#1

Social Credit System

I’m afraid I’ll have to conclude on a dystopian note; but there’s no other way of seeing China’s Social Credit System. This is the government plan to quantify and gamify the ‘good behaviour’ of every Chinese citizen in the form of a single score – a bit like a financial credit rating or points on a driving license, but applied across a whole range of different activities.

In a report for ScienceAlert, Peter Dockrill says that citizens will get a higher score for acts “like paying bills on time, engaging in charity, and… recycling” and a lower score for “[being] late with payments… jaywalking or smoking in non-smoking areas.”

The rewards of a high score will likely include “better credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services”. Low scorers will be second class citizens, restricted in movement and opportunity.

Quite clearly intended as an instrument of social control, the regime is making no attempt to hide that fact:

“According to China’s Communist Party, the system will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.”

Pilot programmes are already in place with the system due to go national in 2020.

How long, I wonder, before we get something like it too?

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Technology