‘Liberalism’ v ‘Neoliberalism’
There is an odd asymmetry between attitudes to what we (humanity) learn from science and what we learn from social experience of political and economic organisation. Advances in scientific understanding remain as building blocks for further advances, even if they are superseded by them – for example classical Newtonian physics still works for modest scales of size and speed in nature, though relativistic and quantum models dispense with it for more comprehensive purposes. But the experience of different forms of political and economic organisation in society appears to be forgotten or ignored in the pendulum-swing of opinion. In the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century opposition to absolute monarchy, the hegemony over thought of religion, the application of ideas of human rights and with them ideas of personal liberty and participation in choosing the government under which one lives, became dominant features in the development of ‘the West’ in the succeeding two centuries.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the success of these ideas seemed to have come close to confirming the ‘end of history’ thesis put forward by Francis Fukuyama in the 90s. The dramatic reversal over the last decade and a half – the rapid rise of right-wing populism and the success of ‘neoliberalism’ particularly in the US – is the prompt for the view that ‘liberalism has failed’, and now increasingly with it the view that ‘democracy’ in its various but mainly ‘republican’ (representative) senses is failing. Whether or not they are really failing, the connection between the principles of liberalism and those of democracy is intimate, as the phrase ‘liberal democracy’ acknowledges, and the judgment to be made is whether we wish to see these twin pillars of the Enlightenment project indeed fail.
A key point requiring emphasis is that both the further Right and the further Left of the political spectrum see human beings very differently from how liberalism sees them. Both (further) Right and (further) Left see people as economic units, nodes in a matrix; liberalism sees them as individuals, and recognises the diversity in individuality. The idea of self-determination and choice, responsibility, acceptance of differences and the many various ways that lives can be good for those living them is central to the conception of the rights (and responsibilities to respect others’ rights) of individual human persons. Liberalism is pluralistic, it promotes the ideal of harmony over unitybecause in a diverse society the need is for different outlooks to coexist in mutually tolerating ways whereas unity requires conformity and shared identity, which prompts such concomitants as nationalism and self-identifications by means of ‘othering’ those who do not fit the mould.
It is important to clarify the very large difference between what is entailed by the terms ‘liberalism’, ‘libertarianism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. ‘Neoliberalism’ focuses on a version of capitalism not predicated on the idea that some common pooling of resources to achieve social justice is justified – though it accepts it for policing and defence. Neoliberalism is not liberalism but libertarianism, a very different animal. Its use of the phrase ‘freedom of the individual’ is specific to economic agency; it is therefore in favour of deregulation, privatisation, the lowest possible levels of taxation in order to leave the maximum amount of money in the hands of economic agents, thus leaving outcomes in what happens in society to be decided by market forces, caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. Education and health are to be bought at one’s own expense, if one can afford them, regarded not as social but as private goods. Seeking and making opportunities are the individual’s responsibility, and the rewards for success are the individual’s own, and should not be taxed to pay for what others should pay for out of their own pockets. As Mrs Margaret Thatcher famously put it in articulating this view, ‘There is no such thing as society’. Whereas liberals regard the effects of large inequalities in social and economic terms as depriving many – and usually most – of significant aspects of individual freedom, Neoliberals in effect reserve freedom to those able to buy it.
Liberalism places concerns about social injustices and inequalities of concern and opportunity among its central preoccupations; these are what the idea of human rights seeks to combat. Neoliberalism is hostile to ideas of equality and social justice. But the term ‘social justice’ itself has undergone a transmutation, as a result – so some argue – of ‘Postmodernism’. A feature of this ‘–ism’ is the rejection by some of its leading proponents of the idea that there are such things as ‘objective truth’ or ‘factual knowledge’, arguing instead that these are partisan constructs decided by those in power – not just governmental power with its control of the instruments of force in society, but ideological power in general. The point is sometimes put by saying that reality is the product of discourses, different discourses projecting different realities. This relativism seems to present a problem to the Postmodernist, critics say, for it contradicts the idea that there are objective values of equality and social justice which ought to be realised in society. What this suggests is that those who begin with the Postmodern analysis of objectivity and knowledge are not actually saying that there are no such things, but that how they have been constituted in the past should be replaced by new and better conceptions of them. This raises the question of who is to be the authority saying what they are. In line with the justification for the concept of human rights – viz. the facts attendant upon their absence – the same might be offered in reply here: that the experience of the marginalised, excluded and discriminated-against tells us.
The idea that liberalism is old-hat and has failed is a bad idea. Its central tenets are the building-blocks for what any imaginative response to new conditions and challenges in society should be. One of many aspects of this is that the concept of truth and of the application of evidence and reason in all aspects of human endeavour should continue to be fought for – only then can the competition of ideas offer best ways forward. This aspect is under enormous threat, one marker of which is Meta’s abandonment of ‘fact checking’ in favour of ‘community notes’ – aka personal opinions – as the way to manage public discourse. This is in effect to replace dispassion with passion. It is the latter that explains the facility with which populist politicians manipulate the public mind.