Illiberals All the Way Down

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a political reflection.

Best,

Sam

ILLIBERALS ALL THE WAY DOWN

The other week I reviewed a book by Alexandre Lefebvre on liberalism. Lefebvre, an unusually warm-hearted and thoughtful political philosopher, argued that the commonplace meaning of liberalism as a sort of autonomous zone in which everyone respected one another’s beliefs had been supplanted in time with liberalism-all-the-way-down, a far more robust ethical system approaching the status of a religion in which reciprocal relations and an abhorrence of cruelty bred civil relations throughout a society.

Lefebvre was attempting to establish a backbone for a flagging social structure — since everybody more or less collectively assumes that liberalism is in decline. Even John Rawls, Lefebvre’s hero, limited his liberalism to a postulated “well-ordered society,” which seemed already to be on the way out at the time Rawls was writing. And that was before illiberalism’s apparently inexorable advance, with electoral victories in country after country.

What has been assumed is one of two or three things. One is that the victorious illiberals are just conservatives or reactionaries — deploying fairly traditional blood-and-soil arguments to oppose the march of liberal progress. (This has been the working assumption on Hungary’s Orbán, on Poland’s PiS party, and, to some extent, on Putin’s Russia.) Another is that illiberalism is fascism or authorianism only half-convincingly dressed in sheep’s clothing. (This is generally assumed to be the case for the fascist revivalist parties in Western Europe, which are widely held to care about immigration only for election purposes and then are a Reichstag Fire or two away from showing their real colors.) And then the final argument — closely connected to the others — is that illiberalism is just liberalism with a minus sign attached to it, the kids in the back of the class hooting at the good kids in the front. That certainly seemed to be the case for Trump’s term, as it was for Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson — somewhere between nihilism and a practical joke, with Trump as far as anybody could see just totally out of ideas and simply reversing all of Obama’s executive orders. The belief was that sooner or later the illiberals would all end up in jail.

But that hasn’t happened, and we are forced to revive our theses. These days I seem to be in the mood for trying on different theories for size, and here’s mine: that illiberalism isn’t just a negation of liberalism, that it is a coherent if often unstated belief system, with its own intellectual lineage, that it is coming into its own (take, for instance, the mainstream’s current widespread acceptance of a second Trump term), and that it may be more responsive to the mood of the era than hoary old liberalism.

In this piece, I’m not going to get into the deep intellectual history of illiberalism — I don’t know the whole sequence of how all these mouldering, recently-revived writers, Julius Evola, Ivan Ilyin, etc, fit in — but I don’t think that all of that is necessary. Illiberalism is capitalism, basically. Or to be more exact, it is the premise that markets are ideally self-functioning and self-regulating if and only if everybody in the market acts perfectly according to their own self-interest — and then that everything else in the society acts more or less according to the same underlying market principles. Adam Smith is the godfather of illiberalism and maybe fully encapsulates its quasi-mystical sensibility. It’s the ‘invisible hand’ that most effectively governs markets. Any attempt to overly regulate or even broadly think through the implications of market transactions has the tendency to distort. Everybody is better off doing what they do best — thinking about number one first, and advancing their own position — as opposed to somehow trying to play all the hands for everybody at once.

Dapper and dangerous. Ivan Ilyin.

A certain amount of folk wisdom comes into play here as well. The phrase “all is fair in love and war” comes to mind. The premise is that, when things really matter and the chips are really down, everybody acts in both a perfectly selfish and perfectly rational matter. Nobody acts like a liberal in their dating life or on the battlefield — and nobody really does either when, say, in eleventh hour negotiations for the closing cost of a house. Everybody is assumed to behave as best suits them and then a form of justice emerges with the logic of two negotiators bidding against each other and then settling on a best fit price.

It’s probably best to treat the near-simultaneous emergence of liberalism and capitalism as an historical accident. The fact that they seem to go together — especially in the case of America — has led to a certain amount of confusion. Their dual emergence can be explained as a transition in the nature of wealth. The rise of trading networks and manufactured goods resulted in a relative decline in the social power of the traditional land-owning class i.e. the aristocracy. For the school of thought that followed John Locke, these developments seemed very much to be of a piece. The new class that was emerging relied on an interlocking system of reciprocal relations in the marketplace and it stood to reason that that basic sense of the contract could be extended to the civil sphere as well, with governments comprised according to a similarly underlying theory of stakeholders. The ‘common sense’ with which democratic liberalism seemed to follow capitalism in America in the Revolutionary Era was mirrored by the gradual evolution of European societies in the 19th century, in which, apart from the occasional irruption of Napoleonic autocracy or left-wing revolution, history seemed inexorably to be moving in one direction: towards an ascendant mercantilist bourgeoisie and some kind of cooperative regime in place in distributing power.

But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. And throughout the period of liberalism’s triumph there was an abiding suspicion that a market economy didn’t as a matter of course lead to a cooperative approach to the public sphere. Social Darwinism — now almost entirely discredited and forgotten — was mainstream thought for much of the later 19th century. Intelligent observers, looking at the collapse of liberal democracies in Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s, more or less just assumed that liberalism was finished. The simultaneous rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union indicated to many at the time that the attempt to secure cooperation in the public sphere was naive — that power would always accrue to those who simply seized it and that the spirit of democratic cooperation was inimical to the nature of power.

The depredations, and subsequent collapse, of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seemed to settle questions of political science in favor of liberal democracies — this was what, for instance, Francis Fukuyama assumed in the 1990s — but, again, it wasn’t as simple as that. In the democratic societies, liberalism and capitalism remained an uneasy pairing, and with Milton Friedman’s revolution of ‘shareholder ethics’ in the 1970s, they may have decisively parted ways. Friedman represented a revival of Smith in very pure form — the only ‘ethics’ was to rationally honor one’s market position. The pursuit of shareholder profit owed nothing to workers, as in the older system of stakeholder capitalism, and the dodging of taxes became entirely standard for business. In an irruption of illiberalism into government, the Reagan Revolution joined cause with the free marketeers and attempted to undo the principle of liberal cooperation.

Milton Friedman. Not very liberal.

In the West, actually, people find themselves constantly with dual identities, which are sometimes liberal, sometimes illiberal. Politicians work in the ‘public sector’ where they are expected to be ‘civil servants’ working selflessly for the public good. Then, without batting an eye, they switch to the ‘private sector’ and have no other aim than to make as much money as humanly possible. Kids attend classes and have drummed into them the value of civics and reciprocity and then, at recess or after school, switch modes into illiberal competitive sports. College students go through almost identical educations to one another and then at a critical juncture have to choose between two paths — the ‘institution,’ which is the liberal entity par excellence, and the ‘company,’ which is the illiberal, and that choice tends to determine the rest of their lives.

Our language for what’s happening here is very imprecise and tends to take on a political tint — that the society divvies up either into ‘liberal,’ which is meant to be socially progressive, or ‘conservative,’ which is meant to be protective of traditional values but is also curiously free market. The better way to think about this is a fundamental division of ethical values. In liberalism, the ‘public good’ is meant to be the highest value as well as the social authority. An institution is understood as taking on a certain mandate to carry out a task and contribute to the public good. In illiberalism, what is of value is anything that be conjured up and brought to market — or that otherwise exerts some sort of force in the world. Through the ‘invisible hand,’ the utterly selfish work carried out by a company may well lead to more overarching social benefits (e.g. the creation of wealth) but it is far from incumbent, and may even be deleterious, for the members of the company to think through the wider social consequences of their actions.

Almost perfectly suspended between capitalism and its liberal heritage, the Western democracies have a notably schizophrenic mode of public discourse — with various consensuses worked out somewhere in the borderlands between these systems of ethics (Democratic ‘third way’ politics, for instance, positioning itself as an occasionally valuable regulator within an otherwise free market). But what has been emerging in the last few decades is a whole cast of characters who are illiberals-all-the-way-down. Part of what’s so striking to everyone about Trump is that he seems not to have a liberal bone in his body. Nothing is about reciprocity or the public good. Everything is about advancing his self-interest. Some of us might think that a person like that would be an odd choice to run a government, but it keeps working out for him — overwhelmingly because his self-expression seems to so many people to be more in line with the fundamentally selfish, chthonic drives of human nature than does the tempered, half-selfish, half-cooperative pieties of his liberal opponents. Logan Roy, reaching the end of his life, has a moment where he genuinely tries to think through the world and comes up with the following formula: “What is a person? It has values and aims but it operates in a market. Marriage market, job market, money market, market of ideas, etc, etc.” And, meanwhile, what is so conspicuous in both the developing world and the former Communist bloc is the enthusiastic adoption of capitalism and a market economy but with precious little interest in liberalism. Contemporary Russia and China are, as far as I can tell, illiberals all the way down. “I am looking for a gang,” the NazBol leader Eduard Limonov wrote in the 1990s and that can stand in for almost the entire political science of the Putin era. The role of the civil sphere is not to create cooperative, egalitarian arrangements with government stepping in to correct for inequalities. It’s gangs all the way up. The crowd in power is understood to be a gang, with easy interplay between financial and ‘governmental’ sectors, and the rest of the population gets in line, with the understanding that, in working out its own self-interest, some of what the ruling gang is doing may spill over to the population at large.

Illiberal all the way down

At the moment liberalism and illiberalism represent a fracture across our collective political psyche. Democracy — that utopian project of the emergent liberal societies — is no guarantee of either. Even if the spirit of democracy is fundamentally liberal and egalitarian, democracy is more a metaphor for liberalism than a manifestation of it — representative democracy in the end produces, inevitably, a gang in power that is free to not think much more about the wishes of the people than for the given time period in which it is seeking election — and it is not so surprising that the ballot box in our era is as likely as not to result in illiberal rulers. These would seem to be melancholy reflections — illiberalism is apparently on the march everywhere and liberalism in retreat — but there is hope actually in this pessimism. What is of value in liberalism is not that it leads inevitably to the better society — that was an illusion from the rapidly-industrializing, early-capitalistic era of liberalism’s creation. What is of value is that it is a better, more sustaining, more functional system than illiberalism. The proof is in the pudding there, but my belief is that the society as a whole will gradually learn the right lessons from the experiences of Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Putin, et al. Raw selfishness takes you only so far. Sooner or later, a society, to really survive, requires a cooperative system of ethics. Those ethics will not just come from the ballot box or the march of history. They need to be articulated, lived, worked for. They need to prove themselves, again and again.