Oli Dugmore: There are two strands that I think are probably going to follow the course of our conversation over the next hour or so when thinking about liberalism. The first is what it morphed into, what it became and how much we should distinguish neoliberalism from liberalism, and the second is the greater or lesser extent to which the products of our liberal democracy are these things that you’ve outlined, whether it’s the ugliness of our built environment, sclerotic institutions or stagnation-stagflation, and a lack of growth in real terms wages. Are these things downstream of the political and economic settlement that we have? Or are they a consequence of liberal democracy not being properly implemented?
Adrian Wooldridge: Well, let me start off by trying to say a little bit about what liberalism is, because it’s a tortuously difficult question.
There are two very common views at the moment of what liberalism is. One is the right-wing view, the conservative view, which says that liberalism is about expanding the role of the market in allocating resources, and reducing the role of the state. The second is the left liberal point of view, which says liberalism is essentially about a regime based on kindness, a regime based on being nice to people, or being considerate about people, and I think both of these views are not quite right. In terms of the market vs state view, I think you can have big government liberals and small government liberals. I think Hayek was definitely a liberal; he believed in small government, but Keynes was also a liberal; he believed that the government played a very important role in regulating the economy. He could be described as a big government liberal. And I think the notion of kindness or consideration is a moral virtue, but I’m not sure it’s a political doctrine. So I would say that the essence of liberalism lies elsewhere.
I would say the essence of liberalism lies in three things. They’re three quite complicated things. One is individualism: a liberal society starts with the individual, and in the individual’s rights, hopes, and aspirations. It starts with the presumption of skepticism: we can’t know certain fundamental metaphysical truths, so we have to rely on debates and have a regime of toleration as a result of that. And it starts with a position of worry about power and the concentration of power. Those are the three fundamental things which I think define a liberal system.
Now let me just say a little bit about why those things are relevant. I think individualism, I would like to qualify by saying the individualism of neoliberalism was something that was about, let’s say, consumer choice or shopping, and I think that’s a very impoverished view of what individualism means. I think individualism must be much more a matter of self-development, self-improvement, moral control over your own desires and thoughts. So it’s not just a matter of saying let the individual choose; it’s a matter of saying let the individual make an informed, intelligent, and considered choice, and that involves educating preferences. And this is something that John Stuart Mill is very interested in. John Stuart Mill is often regarded as a sort of Hayekian libertarian; I don’t think he’s that at all. I think On Liberty is much more about self-development than it is about just letting freedom reign in the crude libertarian sense.
The other two things I’d like to talk about would be toleration, in the sense of lack of certainty about metaphysical things. Liberalism comes along primarily as a doctrine that says we shouldn’t have enforced religion; we should have religious freedom. That’s something that was immensely important in the 17th and 18th centuries. And secondly, political power. Liberalism comes along saying the king should not be a tyrant and should not have absolute power. We should constrain these things. We should constrain power because, as Lord Acton says, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Both of these things, toleration and skepticism about concentration of power, might sound a bit abstract when people are trying to put food on the table, but in fact, they’re absolutely vital at the moment. They’re central to our politics, and more important in many ways than they have been before. So I would, in my definition of liberalism, downgrade the idea that liberalism is about market choice and moral choice, the bobo, bourgeois-bohemian consensus that we had in the 1990s, and say it’s much more open to state intervention. It’s much more open to state intervention when it comes to moral issues as well as economic issues, but it’s much more focused on these other things: worries about power, worries about intolerance and worries about self-development.
I understand all of these terms, but I think, particularly as it relates to the individual, it relies on an assumption, and that assumption is rationality on behalf of the autonomous individual. I think our politics nowadays is increasingly driven by emotions, values and attention. I wonder how you reconcile that with liberalism’s view of human nature; do you think those two things are incongruous?
If you assume that individuals are naturally rational, and are not subject to emotions and social influences, then you are making a foolish assumption. If liberalism is based on that assumption, then it falls apart. I don’t think that’s what the classical liberals believed, and I think that they had a whole series of arguments which are just as relevant to today as they were before. Central to Mill’s argument, for example, in On Liberty, is not just the idea that my liberty begins where your fist ends, as it were; that it’s just a matter of physical constraints on your freedom.
He talks extensively about self-development, and what self-development means is moral development: the capacity to regulate your desires and instincts and control them. But it is also about educating preferences, as his mentor Bentham said, that there’s no difference between video games and poetry of that time. Mill says, no, that’s not true; there are higher preferences, there are things that matter, there are preferences that matter. I think all of that is true, and I think now in particular, it’s important to emphasise those things and to craft a world in which individuals can be as rational as possible, as autonomous as possible, and as capable of self-development as possible.
In order to do that, you have to put constraints on the power of information technology, on the power of these distraction machines which we see at the heart of our culture, on the power of distorting media operations to undermine our nature as individuals. So the individual isn’t just a natural thing that comes into the world and is autonomous; the individual is something that is created and needs to be protected from malign influences.
I think we’re doing that to our culture through the digital technology that we have. Our attention spans are declining. We are in an information environment which is being deliberately polluted by lies and misinformation. All of those things that those cultural forces unleashed by this very powerful technology are undermining the central elements in a liberal culture, which is the rational individual.
I’ve seen you making this argument as relates to specifically the abundance agenda. Let’s pause here and talk about that in a bit greater detail. So obviously, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote this book, Abundance, and being very reductive about their argument, essentially, liberals and progressives have lost sight of achieving their goals and have become slaves to following processes. They’ve constricted themselves, and they’ve forgotten that to govern is to do, and that there needs to be this explosion in infrastructure; building housing, building reservoirs, building public transport, whatever it is. And I think it was in a Bloomberg column that I was reading, and you said, “Yes, but…” was your argument. And you said, “We do also have an abundance of,” as you called it “stuff”. But to be honest you could say “shit” too. There is just this cheap tat, both in terms of information and products, the informational slop that is, that’s beamed into our consciousness by the devices that we all carry. It quite depresses me, to be honest with you, that all of us have this device in our pocket. At our thumb tips, all of us have at our disposal the sum total of human knowledge. Do we use them for that purpose? Sure. Generally, no, we don’t. But I’d love to hear more about your thinking on this.
Well, I think that with the abundance agenda, as the politicians say, it’s quite important to recognise that there are certain shortages of things that really matter to people, that are really grinding down the quality of our lives and of our culture. Houses being a primary example of that. Just places to live, basic places to live, good infrastructure and all of those things. And so, the “abundance people” saying that we’ve forgotten how to build these things, how to create these things, and we’ve got bogged down in procedure; there’s a lot of truth in that. I think there are other reasons why there are housing problems. But we definitely need to address those shortages. But if what they’re saying is essentially what we need to do is to go back to the Blair-Clinton agenda of centrism, which simply meant freeing up markets, reducing regulations, getting things on the move; I don’t think that’s enough because there’s another problem there. We have too little of the good stuff and too much of the bad stuff. We’re producing lots and lots of tat obviously, and it’s easier now than ever to produce tat. Manufacturing is incredibly efficient, and it’s incredibly good at producing copies, cheap stuff and fast fashion, all of those things that add very minimally to the quality of life.
We’re also overproducing information, and we’re not distinguishing between good and bad information. So the information environment is massively overcrowded and if you look at pop music or if you look at the world of TikTok, you know, things last a very short period of time. One thing is followed by another. There’s just a massive overabundance of stuff which doesn’t stick. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all of those things lasted a long time. Now, today’s bands and fashion disappear at extraordinary speeds.
I may be wrong about that, but particularly with social media and the information that we get, there’s not enough discernment as to whether news is true or false. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to show that false news travels faster and has a bigger impression than true news, particularly if it chimes in with our prejudices. There’s also a lot of evidence to show that our attention spans and our capacity to appreciate things is declining. It’s damaging our capacity to concentrate and to persevere in the long term to reach desirable ends.
Now, I think there are various ways of dealing with this. One obvious way of dealing with it is to regulate the flow of information. And I applaud all these attempts to stop children having phones in schools and things like that. But I think another very important aspect of this, and something I lay a lot of emphasis on in this book, is the notion of liberal education. That is, we should have an education in the liberal arts that puts enormous emphasis on developing our power to appreciate literature, music and art by studying them in an enduring, sustained manner. I think the more frenzied our culture becomes, the more important it is that we should learn poetry or read classic books in a sustained way. We should go back to certain central texts and learn them and digest them; treat them as a sort of lifelong resource against noise and confusion
I do think there is a huge amount of value in that statement, that I think all of us are poorer for losing that empathetic process inhabiting a different person and their worldview.
Let’s come back to liberalism. Let’s say if we accept the view that you’ve outlined so far, what good is it if we inhabit a world where the big players are illiberal powers, and you come up against people who are more powerful than us, but do not subscribe to those same values. How do you consider that problem on the world stage in particular?
Well, I think that the liberal world order is under the greatest threat it has been any time since the 1930s. In some ways, I’m not saying it’s worse than the 1930s, but there are ways in which we have warriors now, which we didn’t have in the 1930s. In the 1930s, Britain and the United States were both essentially liberal. At the moment, I think it’s difficult to call the United States fully liberal. You have a the most illiberal president that has been in charge of the country for a long time. But the United States is in the strongman camp.
You also have the world’s biggest democracy, India, run by Modi, who is in the strongman camp, along with the world’s biggest economies, the United States and China. So we are shifting in an illiberal direction extremely rapidly. When I started writing the book about four years ago, everything that happened as I was writing was bad. I thought, I must write this book to try and make a case for liberalism because things are going badly, and everything got worse. Then just as I was about to publish the book, we had the Middle East exploding into chaos. Everything is really shifting in the wrong direction very quickly.
So what can we do about that, particularly given that we’re a small country and that the United States, India and China are so powerful? I do think, however, that books, ideas and ways of doing things can actually have an influence. If you ask why it is that we had an uninspiring prime minister, is it just because Keir Starmer, personally, is so dull? I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s because we don’t have a political blueprint that seems to chime both with our values and with our problems.
So, I think if we can find a political blueprint that chimes with those two things, that addresses the real problems that we have now, but in a way that is liberal and in a way that prevents a shift either to the far right or the far left, I think that you will get a lot of dynamism in the system. I think if we get dynamism in Britain, it matters to us. And I think if you could get the similar sort of thing going on in Europe then it would matter. The United States is more difficult because the level of polarisation is so huge. I think that, nevertheless, a few good ideas that really resonate will attract people, and a few people who are really good at what they do will create dynamism.
So is Starmer not a liberal? Were his predecessors not liberals?
Absolutely. What I’m trying to argue is that liberalism has to reconfigure itself. It has to take its basic elements and rejig them to deal with new problems. What we have at the moment is a liberal consensus that was forged in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Thatcherite revolution followed by the Blairite revolution, which as I said earlier, is a sort of bobo, bourgeois, bohemian consensus. It basically says we should be pretty laissez-faire about morals, pretty laissez-faire about the economy and pretty tolerant about whatever business does.
That consensus was very dynamic in the 1990s. It began to slow down, partly because it became the establishment, and so everybody who was in the establishment believed in that consensus, and establishments become decadent. This particular establishment has become, in my view, very decadent. And the people who espouse those values, when those values cease to apply very well to the sort of society that you have, begin to make exceptions without fundamentally rethinking what they’re doing. If you look at one of the biggest problems confronting the country at the moment, and one of the things which is driving a lot of polarisation, namely immigration, what you had was basically a bunch of people in Whitehall who said that immigration is good economically, immigration is good culturally, and it doesn’t really bring any problems. So they increased the flow of people, they reduced emphasis on assimilation, and that has created a set of problems which that liberal elite have failed to deal with. As they now try to deal with this, they can’t deal with it without a sort of panic. So, I think that a number of chickens are coming home to roost, that a number of failures of that regime are coming home to roost.
So we have two things going on. First is an establishment that is entrenched, antiquated, and increasingly self-dealing. Second is a bunch of problems which they failed to predict, which they actively dismissed and which are biting them in the behinds, so they look like an establishment that doesn’t work.
If you look at the recent by-election, it’s a perfect example of that. You have the centre basically collapsing, and you have people moving to the Green Party or people moving to Reform over the question of immigration; whether you should celebrate it or whether you should revile it. The centre, because it hadn’t dealt with that problem, because it dismissed it as a problem, lost as a result.
Do you understand that result as a departure from the two-party system that we’ve had in this country?
The two-party system in this country has lasted for a very long time, and it has a sort of internal logic because of the nature of the first-past-the-post system. But it is extraordinary that you should have the Labour Party in a seat that it has had since the 1930s collapsing, the Conservative Party losing its deposit, and two parties which didn’t exist really, getting such a big sway of the votes.
So I think that we probably will end up with a two-party government, but what we have essentially is six parties competing within this system designed to create two-party rule, and it’s not clear which of those parties will come out on top. It’s a sort of roulette-like system.
But I think all of the emotional energy in this country is on the left and the right; all of the intellectual energy is on the left and right. And the centre is failing to address those problems within its own liberal terms.
I guess it comes back to the question I posed to you slightly earlier about whether or not the illiberal aspects of that by-election result, but certainly perhaps Britain’s national politics more generally, are a product of how liberalism has manifested in recent years and the connection between those two things. Would you consider this a rejection of those kinds of liberal norms as they’ve been established in this country?
I think liberalism manifests itself in lots of different ways. But this does not mean it can be anything you want it to be. As I say, there are certain fundamental values that it must embrace, but it does change over the years. I would add to the list of ways in which Reform is illiberal, as the party structure is entirely built built around one man. It’s not a real membership party. The party has no power. I think it acts as a private company. It’s a strong man, personality-focused party. I think that the Greens are more of a party, although Polanski has obviously galvanised them in a very important way. They do share a sort of populism in that they think the elites are terrible, and we need to have very radical solutions. However, I think they exist within the framework of what I would understand to be a party, more so than Reform.
I wonder, Adrian, if we could turn our attention to Trump and Maga. I would like to hear how you’re thinking about the formulation of Maga thinking and Maga government right now. It draws on a few of the themes we’ve been speaking about. Who do you think of as the influential ideologues, if you like, in the Maga court? Who is it that we should be looking at and seeking to understand if we want to understand how Trump’s imperial court governs?
You have a bunch of very interesting post-liberal thinkers, they would call themselves post-liberal thinkers, who have striking answers to a lot of questions that are troubling people. Where should power be in a modern democracy? What should national identity be in a modern democracy? What should national interest be? How should we pursue national interest? What values should hold society together? They have answers to all of these questions.
What struck me is both the vigour of these answers and also the extremism of these answers. So you have a Harvard law professor, Adrian Vermeule, who argues for the very extreme notion of a unitary executive and the imposition of values on the population. Or you have Kevin Robbins, who runs The Heritage Foundation, who has this very extreme notion of opposition to public companies, rather being in favour of family companies rooted in Christian traditions. It is a much more extreme critique of capitalism than anything that’s coming out of the Democratic Party. You also have notions of theocracy, or at least religious values, coming from JD Vance, for example endorsing aristopopulism. Aristopopulism is really a fusion of populism with intellectual ideas about what sort of society we want to create. So you have this rich intellectual current and you can’t fight something with nothing. You can’t fight post-liberalism by just saying, “These people are mad.”
You have to have a critique of their arguments, and you have to have a defense of liberalism, which I’ve tried, I’ve tried to do in my book. But never in my life have I seen fundamental liberal values that go back right to the founding of the Republic in the United States, back to the 19th century, under more serious, sustained attack.
Adrian, before we draw things to a close, if you were designing the British constitution from scratch, how much power would you give to ordinary voters?
I think power is so important in a democracy that it needs to be constrained in various ways. So, I would constrain the power of voters by having a representative system and by having certain rights which are codified in a constitution, and by having a separation of powers.
What we have in this country is very peculiar, because we have a separation of powers. Since 1688, we’ve had a separation of powers, which pretends not to be a separation of powers. We have certain constraints on the power of the executive.
I’m in favour of having a Supreme Court, that is, adding firmness to that constraint. So I would, as it were, give power to voters in a way that is indirect and constrained.
But another thing worries me, and that is this is something the populists actually argue, and I have a lot of sympathy with them. They say, “Whoever you vote for, you get the same result.” And I think that there is a sense in which the establishment, not just in Westminster, but also in Whitehall, is subject to group thinking.
That group thinking often doesn’t reflect the preferences of large numbers of people in the country, and it’s group thinking which is encouraged by the fact that they all live together in the same milieu. But it’s also encouraged by the fact they live in this London-centric world, which is very separate from the provincial world that lots of people live in. Brexit was created partly because people felt that democracy didn’t work because they kept getting the same result, because their personal concerns were not reflected in what happened. It was also as much against the Westminster establishment as it was against the Brussels establishment. That was particularly driven by immigration more than anything else. I think that group thinking needs to be broken up in various ways. I try and argue in this book that we need much more social mobility in this country, so we’re not drawing from the same narrow group of people with the same background.
But also, I think we need to disperse power. No country in the world, with the possible exception of South Korea, concentrates so much of its activity in one huge city; people feel unrepresented, not by the process, but rather, by people who come through.
[Further reading: A dream of Cambridge]
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