That’s David Aaronovitch’s word, not mine. But he’s right: with liberalism visibly exhausted, post-liberalism is finding its voice. Not that this pleases him. Writing in The Times he makes his feelings plain:

“It may mean well but it’s nonsense. And this isn’t just because the ‘good old days’ before precocious childhood sexuality and drug addiction were also the ‘good old days’ of fumbling priests and unpunished domestic violence.”

Oh dear. Does he not realise that it’s possible to draw inspiration from what earlier generations got right without wanting to bring back the bad stuff? What makes this line of attack extra-annoying is that progressives have their own nostalgic streak. Yet when they talk about, for instance, the idealism of the post-war era, no one says ‘oh, so you want to bring back the ration book, do you?’

Further reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

However, Aaronovitch moves on to an argument that does require a serious response:

” … an appeal to mainly community-based decision-making cannot work. This is the world of climate change, the coronavirus, refugee surges and international trade. Pick the communitarianism out of that lot…

“Which is why, I suppose, when we get down to the new practicalities of what this ‘post-liberal’ moment might consist of, they seem… almost whimsical.”

Post-liberals don’t actually believe that everything should be decided by the local parish council. And yet, being a post-liberal myself, I have noticed a distinct tendency towards the parochial and the pastoral. There’s probably no better expression of post-liberal values than the lyrics of The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society. But as lovely as these sentiments are, a rallying cry of “God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties” won’t change the world.

Suggested reading

The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

If this really is a “post-liberal moment” then post-liberals need to explain what post-liberalism would do differently. Leaving aside the fluffy platitudes and the hobby horse policies, what would a truly post-liberal administration do to change the fundamental assumptions on which public policy is made in this country?

Here are five governing principles I’d like to see taken to the heart of power:

1) Prioritise investment in short supply chains

OK, this sounds ultra-technocratic — and that’s because it is. And yet it’s also of great importance. Globalisation doesn’t just happen spontaneously. It is supported by an underlying infrastructure of transport links, energy pipelines and digital connections.

In turn, this is enabled by government: construction projects are subsidised; operators given permission to dump environmental costs on other people and the natural world; economic policies encourage the offshoring of jobs and the avoidance of taxes; military and diplomatic resources are deployed to protect investments. However strong the market-based rationale for a globalised economy, it couldn’t exist without massive ongoing state intervention.

All of this effort and cost is what it takes to support long supply chains — which not only enable the beneficial aspects of globalisation, but also the concentration of power and wealth among the upper echelons of the knowledge class.

Further reading

Inflation is never coming down

By Peter Franklin

Do we have any alternative? Yes — we could shift the balance of state support towards shorter supply chains — i.e. local links and connections that help to spread-out market opportunity. While a hub airport gives executives access to markets around the world, a decent bus network gives workers access to a larger number of job opportunities within a reasonable travel time. Both have the potential to boost productivity, but the rewards of the latter can be enjoyed by more people and at a lower cost to the environment.

One can’t help noticing that in the current era of globalisation, inequality has increased and productivity growth has decreased — at least for us in the West. One has to ask searching questions about the fragility of long, expensively-maintained supply chains — from the cost-overruns associated with the underlying infrastructure and the vulnerability of the global system to economic, social and environmental disruption.

The post-liberal approach is to avoid overstretch, to build up our own communities first as the most secure basis on which to then build out.

2) Against the Matthew Effect

The Matthew effect is something I’ve already written about, here. The term was coined by the sociologist Robert Merton and it basically means the ‘more you have the more you get’. The name is inspired by a verse from St Matthew’s gospel — “For to every one who has will more be given…”

You can see the Matthew Effect at work in just about any field of study from astrophysics (e.g. the formation of planets through the accretion of matter) to economics (e.g. “the rich get richer” or “money comes to money”). Part of the job of government is to fight against this universal tendency — for instance through progressive rates of taxation or anti-monopoly laws.

However, some government policies make things worse. This is especially true when it comes to allocation of capital spending. Just think about all the public investment that’s focused on London — on the grounds that new infrastructure generates more returns when it joins up with existing infrastructure. The reason why we’re building HS2 (a connection from the North to London) before HS3 (connections within the North) is that the value of the former is supposedly multiplied by its connections to Heathrow, Thameslink, and so on.

Further reading

Is this the Tories’ real manifesto?

By Peter Franklin

It all seems so logical, until you see where the logic takes us: an ever widening gap between London and rest of the country.

Letting the Matthew Effect guide public investment might make sense in a world where superstar cities were succeeding as centres of breakthrough innovation (e.g. like Manchester during the industrial revolution). Unfortunately, in the midst of the current Great Stagnation, that’s not our world.

Real growth, as opposed to the mere hoarding of capital and talent in a few favoured urban centres, is achieved when untapped potential is released. It’s how previously under-developed countries have been able to grow so much faster than we have. It’s also why we should see neglected communities in the West as a better opportunity for growth than inflating asset bubbles in London and other centres of neoliberal excess.

The current government’s talk of “levelling up” is an encouraging sign. Let’s hope there’s some deeper thinking behind it — an economic philosophy that understands the essential sterility of the established economic order.

Suggested reading

What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

3. The median versus the mean

It’s not that the basic assumptions of neoliberalism go entirely unquestioned. Indeed the radical Left, once all but banished from the political stage, has found a new audience for socialist ideas.

Even among the most unadventurous of conservatives we’ve seen a search for new directions. For instance, at one point David Cameron dallied with the idea of an index of general wellbeing as an alternative gross national product (GNP). The initiative came to nothing, as such ideas usually do, because wellbeing is too subjective to be measured in a meaningful and consistent fashion. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need better indicators.

As the saying goes, “what gets measured, gets done” — therefore if a post-liberal government wanted to do things differently it would need a different set of measures.

GDP is an aggregate measure of economic output, while GDP per capita is an average one. As such they can conceal great inequalities — as when most of the benefits of growth are captured by then very rich. One way of correcting for that is to focus on household income and to use the median instead of the mean to calculate the average.

Suggested reading

What's wellbeing worth?

By Tom Chivers

The median is the exact midway point in the income distribution — the level at which half the country has a higher income and half a lower one. Therefore unlike the mean, it isn’t flattered by windfalls for the very richest individuals.

An even better measure than median income is median earnings. Post-liberals, who place great value on the dignity of work, would seek to boost the earning power of ordinary working people in preference to merely compensating them through the redistributive power of the state.

Of course, no statistical measure is perfect. But an economic policy that targeted median earnings and not just GDP would be fairer and more relevant to the great majority of working people.

4. Radical localism

We’re all localists now, aren’t we? After all, who describes themselves as a centralist?

And yet decentralisation hasn’t gone nearly far enough. The welcome progress made in the first half of the last decade more or less came to a halt in the second (unless one counts Brexit, of course).

Further reading

To revive our cities we must set them free

By Peter Franklin

Rebooting decentralisation within the United Kingdom requires a new approach. Instead of home nations, regions and communities petitioning Westminster for control over resources and policies, the process needs to be turned on its head.

The default position should be that control over each aspect of domestic policy starts at the most local level of government — and that a credible case has to be made for centralising it. This reverses the burden of proof — forcing civil servants and ministers to justify their existence before doubting the ability of local people to direct the activities of the state with their own communities.

For instance, it shouldn’t be for the cities and towns of northern England to argue that Transport for the North should have more power. It should be the Department for Transport that has to explain why it should have any say at all in a part of the country that it’s let down so badly.

Neither the conventional Right nor the conventional Left can be trusted to relax its grip on the levers of power. Only a post-liberal government would rethink the machinery of government from the bottom-up.

5. Deep optionality

To conventional thinkers, communitarianism is, if not sinister, then irredeemably twee. Admittedly, post-liberals are partial to the small-and-quirky. And why not? A world without colour and texture would be a grey and glassy place — as embodied by the architecture that the globalisers impose across the planet.

And yet nurturing “all the different varieties” is much more than a matter of sentiment. It has a deadly serious edge.

Wherever globalisation drives out distinction and diversity it creates fragility. Systems that are hailed as ‘seamless’, ‘open’, ‘efficient’ are in fact prone to catastrophic failure because they’re so standardised and integrated that when they fail they fail all at once. Indeed, worse than that, they provide a context in which risks can multiply, cascading from one level to the next.

Further reading

Why we should be worried about coronavirus

By Peter Franklin

We’ve seen enough examples in this century alone — military intervention in the Middle East, the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the rise of populism, the threat of pandemics, ecosystem collapses and the climate emergency.

To increase our exposure to good fortune, not bad, we need optionality, i.e. lots of little experiments. When failures are small and local, the costs are limited. On the other hand, the successes, no matter how few and far between, can be copied or adapted for use elsewhere.

A post-liberal policy framework is one which not only allows a thousand flowers to bloom, but also accepts that 999 of them may die. It is tolerant of failure in policy making, indeed it actively welcomes it if the negative consequences are limited, but the learning opportunities are not.

Neither the statist Left, with its blind faith in big government, nor the free-market Right, which panders to private sector monopoly, can nurture true diversity. This, by the way, is why successive governments have such a bad record when it comes to involving charities, social enterprises and community groups. 

*

Conventional governments of all colours continue with the wrong investment priorities, misleading measures of prosperity, and over-centralised, diversity-destroying systems of power.

So what do post-liberals want? We want different priorities, different measures, different systems.

And so if we’re attacked from both the Left and the Right — and by both liberals and authoritarians — then perhaps we’re getting somewhere.

Further reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

To be precise, this is the West’s second class war. The first, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, pitted the big-firm corporate managers and professionals against industrial and service workers, who had not shared in the gains of the early industrial revolution. During the Great Depression and World War II, that class war came to a negotiated end in Europe and America, thanks to cross-class peace treaties such as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the British welfare state.

Today, many people consider those postwar ‘settlements’ solely in terms of safety-nets that redistributed income or expanded public services like Britain’s NHS. But the class peace that lasted for a generation after 1945 in the West was based as much on power-sharing as on wealth-sharing.

By the mid-20th century, universal suffrage ensured that all working-class citizens in Western democratic nations could vote (a goal finally achieved for nonwhite Americans in the civil rights era). Yet working-class citizens exercised power in the three realms of government, the economy and the culture by more than votes alone.

Thanks to what I describe in The New Class War as ‘democratic pluralism’, non-college-educated workers had their own mass membership organisations that represented their interests between elections. Local political parties were the basis of national party federations, in which messages went up the chain as well as down.

Suggested reading

Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

In many major industries, corporate managers were compelled to negotiate with trade union representatives. On top of this, religious and civic organisations policed the movies and the media and education, to align their content with the values of working-class majorities.

Today, the petty tribunes of yesterday’s working class — the local party officials, private trade union officials, and, yes, the censorious church members —are all but extinct as social types in many Western democracies. Power has migrated upwards to national political, economic and cultural elites. At the same time, these have grown more homogeneous and insular, fusing into a single, college-credentialed, managerial overclass clustered into a few major hub cities including New York, San Francisco, London and Paris.

Neoliberalism, a combination of free-market libertarianism in economics with social liberalism in culture, has been the orthodoxy shared by Thatcher and Reagan conservatives with centre-Left leaders Blair and Clinton and Obama.

On both sides of the Atlantic, national elites have promoted the technocratic neoliberal vision of a glorious globalised future of dissolving borders, free migration of goods and people and ever-growing demographic diversity — combined, it was assumed, with monolithically liberal values and opinions.

Today’s populist politics is best understood as a counter-revolution from below against this neoliberal revolution from above. Some try to explain populism solely as a backlash by native working-class whites against increasing racial diversity driven by immigration, but this cannot explain why a third of BAME (British, Asian and Minority Ethnic) voters supported Brexit, or why nearly 30% percent of Hispanics in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

Those who argue that economics is the key to understanding populist revolts are closer to the truth, since across the West, the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt.

Centre-left parties have lost their working-class constituents to populists and conservatives, replacing them with a new alliance of highly-educated white managers and professionals allied with native minorities and many upwardly-mobile immigrants, for whom even low wages and poor working conditions in Western hub cities are better than their former circumstances.

What an exclusive emphasis on economics misses, however, is power — or its absence. Human beings care about power and agency, not just as means to income and wealth, but as ends in themselves. In otherwise quite different societies — many nations in Latin America, the states of the Southern U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, and the immigrant-packed Northern cities in the U.S. in the early 20th century — a feeling of powerlessness and exclusion by large elements of the population drove conditions in which demagogic populists thrive.

Populists such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini sometimes represent the legitimate interests and values of groups that have been excluded by a closed and nepotistic power elite. But history also suggests that populist insurgencies usually fail, through cooptation by the existing establishment or corruption by demagogues who build their own ephemeral cults of personality and personal patronage systems.

Suggested reading

How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

A new democratic pluralism is needed to bring today’s class war to an end in the way that the power-sharing pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s ended the first. This is a challenge far greater than merely revising trade or immigration or social welfare policies to win over populist voters. It requires compelling corporate executives, media tycoons and high-ranking civil servants who have grown accustomed to a lack of pressure from below to show deference to less-educated people in the national heartlands beyond a few economic, cultural and administrative capitols.

This, in turn, requires creating the functional equivalents of yesterday’s trade unions, local political machines and civic pressure groups, in forms suited to the twenty-first century. This would allow those citizens who today are alienated and atomised members of an anomic population, disconnected from the centres of national power, to once again belong to organisations that can pool their numbers and amplify their influence.

With their own lesser, local tribunes to represent their interests and values, members of the working-class majority are likely to be less attracted to Caesarist demagogues who claim to speak for the virtuous people as a whole against the treacherous few.

The details of a new democratic pluralism cannot be specified in advance, and by nature must be negotiated by different actors in society, rather than drawn up in advance in 10-point plans by intellectuals or committees. These new class peace treaties will also vary among Western democracies, depending on local conditions and cultures.

Suggested reading

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

It is possible that Britain, the mother of parliaments and the first modern industrial nation, and the one that pioneered neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher, will now blaze the trail for what has been called “post-liberalism”. Modern British history is rich in traditions that reject the extreme aspects of liberalism without rejecting democracy, from the One Nation Toryism of Disraeli to the guild socialism of members of the early 20th century English pluralist school like Cole and Laski. More recently, Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour and Philip Blond’s Red Toryism have sought to correct the excesses of neoliberalism while avoiding the trap of demagogic populism.

Can a new cross-class peace settlement unite those whom David Goodhart has called communitarian, working class “Somewheres” with metropolitan, libertarian “Anywheres” in the UK and other nations? Failure is always an option. In this case, failure would consist of a few token gestures towards alienated populists by establishment elites who remain committed to the neoliberal consensus of the past generation and have no intention of sharing real power with the powerless of all classes and ethnicities.

But we can be certain of this: the political earthquakes of the past few years are not the last. It is not the beginning of the end of a new era in Western democratic politics, but the end of the beginning.

If we are reluctant to dwell on the reality of human vulnerability at either end of life, we are unwilling to give much thought to its corollary: that (somewhere safely hidden from the more exciting business of being healthy, youthful and autonomous) there must be people caring for those who are unable to do it themselves. Someone is wiping those bottoms.

Traditionally, this job of caring for the very old and the very young has been “women’s work”. To a great extent, it still is: the OECD reports that, worldwide, women do between two and ten times as much caring work as men.

In the UK, this tends in statistics to be framed as “unpaid work”, a sort of poor relation of the economically productive type that happens in workplaces and contributes to GDP.

Carers UK suggests there are around 9 million people caring for others in the UK part or full-time, of whom up to 2.4 million are caring for both adults and their own children. Women carry out the lion’s share of this work: 60% according to the ONS. Full-time students do the least and, unsurprisingly, mothers with babies do the most. Older working women carry the heaviest load of people in employment, with those in the 50-60 bracket being twice as likely as their male counterparts to be carers whether of a vulnerable adult, a partner or a child or grandchild.

By the same author

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Second-wave feminism pushed hard against the pressure women experience to take on this work of caring. Within this variant of liberalism, caring work is routinely framed as a burden that imposes an economic “penalty” while harming the economy by keeping skilled women away from the workplace. The OECD report cited above states: “The gender gap in unpaid care work has significant implications for women’s ability to actively take part in the labour market and the type/quality of employment opportunities available to them.”

The implication is that, once freed of this obligation, women can then pursue more fulfilling activities in the workplace.

So what does this liberation look like in practice? According to a 2017 report by the Social Market Foundation, women in managerial and professional occupations are the least likely to provide care, as are people with degree qualifications. The number working in routine occupations who also donate more than 20 hours a week of care in their own homes is far higher than those in intermediate or professional occupation.

In other words, higher-earning women are to a far greater extent able to outsource the wiping of bottoms to less well-off people, who are themselves typically women: 90% of nurses and care workers are female.

These women are then too busy to wipe the bottoms of their own old and young, who are sent into institutional care. Such institutions are typically staffed by women, often on zero hours contracts, paid minimum wage to care for others all day before going home to do so for their own babies and elderly. The liberation of women from caring is in effect a kind of Ponzi scheme.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

This is a problem for our liberal society, for two interlocking reasons. Firstly, the replacement of informal family-based care with a paid, institutional variety renders caring impersonal, in a way that invites cruelty. Indeed, cases of care home abuse are well documented – see here, here or here – and the number is rising: the CQC received more than 67,500 in 2018, an increase of 82 per cent over the already too high 2014 figure of 37,060.

It is difficult to see how this could be otherwise. Caring for those who are physically or mentally incapacitated is emotionally testing even when we love those we care for. An exhausted worker on a zero-hours contract, paid the minimum wage to perform more home visits than she can manage in the allotted day, is unlikely to have a great store of patience to begin with, let alone when faced with a refractory “client”. The entire system militates against kindness.

Secondly, and relatedly, it turns out that the informal, traditionally female networks in which caring for the young and old once took place were actually quite important. Those networks also ran church groups, village fetes, children’s play mornings – all the voluntary institutions that form the foundation of civil society.

When caring is treated as “unpaid work” and we are encouraged to outsource it in favour of employment, no one of adult working age has time for voluntary civil society activities any more. If the number of people caring informally for relatives is waning, replaced by institutional care, so is voluntarism: between 2005 and 2015 alone there was a 15% drop in the number of hours donated (ONS).

The result is loneliness. Almost 2.5m people aged between 45 and 64 now live alone in the UK, almost a million more than two decades ago. Around 2.2 million people over 75 live alone, some 430,000 more than in 1996. In 2017, the Cox Commission on loneliness described it as “a giant evil of our time”, stating that a profound weakening of social connections across society has triggered an “epidemic” of loneliness that is having a direct impact on our health.

Several generations into our great experiment in reframing caring as a burden, we are beginning to count the cost of replacing mutual societal obligations with individual self-fulfilment: an epidemic of loneliness, abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes, substandard childcare. A society liberated from caring obligations is, with hindsight, a society liberated from much that was critically under-valued.

What is the alternative? Some would prefer a more communitarian approach to caring for the old and the young. Giles Fraser recently wrote on this site that caring for the elderly should be the responsibility of their offspring:

“Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. […] Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t.”

These are strong words and there is much to agree with, but the barest glance at the statistics shows that in practice what that means is “women have a responsibility to look after their parents”.

Suggested reading

How to make Britain One Nation again

By David Skelton

If we are to count the costs of liberating society from mutual caring obligations, we must also count the benefits, as well as who enjoyed them. Society once encouraged men to seek worldly success, underpinned by the imposition of an often-suffocating domestic servitude on women.

Liberalism blew this out of the water by declaring that in fact both sexes were entitled to seek some form of worldly activity and fulfilment. It is not enough to point to negative side effects of this change and say: “Someone needs to be resuming these mutual caring obligations or society will disintegrate.”

To women well-accustomed to the widespread tacit assumption that it is they who will pick up those underpants, wash up that saucepan, pack that schoolbag and so on, this sounds a lot like a stalking-horse for reversal of societal changes that, on balance, most of us greatly appreciate. In truth no one, whether liberal or post-liberal, wants to confront the enormous elephant that liberal feminism left in society’s sitting room: the question of who cares. Who, now that we are all self-actualising, is going to wipe those bottoms? There are no easy answers.