What Is Left of Neoliberalism and Conservatism?

If there is a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism, both in theory and practice, it is that the former is universal while the latter is particular. From the Kantian imperative to modern human rights law, liberalism sees its scope as all of humanity. In contrast, conservatism believes in minding one's own business. Of course, as historians like Domenico Losurdo have long pointed out, liberalism in practice operates a very clear hierarchy of regard, from its involvement in slavery and colonialism to today's discrimination in its sympathies towards Israelis and Palestinians. This is because at root it is about the defence of private property, from which arises an entire global order. In reality, liberalism and conservatism are simply two strategies with the same goal - their historic friction and entanglement reflecting evolving class power and the underlying changes in the material base. But the distinction between the universal and the particular remains a useful guide to understanding liberal and conservative thought and the way it is expressed politically.

Though both the recent Labour and Conservative party conferences were crashingly dull, with little of substance to report and much trivia served up to an ungrateful press, both followed the script to the letter. Labour avoided the particular by eschewing policy announcements beyond "more of the same", while the Tories indulged the particular by ill-considered asides on maternity pay and extra-judicial killing. The liberal media pleaded with Labour to offer the nation some "hope", albeit in the form of rhetorical bromides rather than anything that might inflame the passions, while the conservative media, faced with four underwhelming candidates for leader, has started to read the last rites for the party. The Labour conference prompts the question: What is left of neoliberalism? Though many commentators have seen the new government in terms of continuity with the Blair era, there is clearly a lot less on offer this time round. Likewise, the Conservative conference prompts the question: What is left of conservatism? While a leadership contest inevitably means speakers pitching to an audience far to the right of public opinion, the fact that so much on offer was little more than hobby horses points to an obvious void.

The turn to a more activist state in pursuit of a more national economy, which began after 2008, has not seen a return to the social democratic state of old. Rather it has accentuated the disciplinary features of the neoliberal state. Thus Bidenomics has been more about maintaining US energy security, with all its geopolitical ramifications in Ukraine and the Middle East, than near-shoring manufacturing jobs, while the EU's shift towards the reimposition of internal as well as external borders is clearly not intended to reduce the mobility of capital. In the UK, the prime current example, heavily-freighted with symbolism after the recent riots, is the Labour government's commitment to build new prisons. While this has been offered up as justification for wider-ranging planning reform in the face of "NIMBYism", it is clear that the Prime Minister in particular finds his comfort zone within the carceral state rather than amidst the blueprints of new public infrastructure. Perhaps the most telling example has been France, where the permanent state of exception in support of "stability" has now dropped the pretence of democracy.

The original claim of the Third Way was not simply that it was pragmatic ("what works"), or inclusive after the divisiveness of the 1980s (the communitarian and dialogic vogues), but that it was post-ideological. In other words, it was postmodern in rejecting the grand narratives of the past, specifically the nationalism and socialism that dominated from 1848 to 1989. If there is an intellectual substrate to Starmerism it is a belief in the state, arguably the grandest and oldest narrative of them all, which goes back to the 17th century and Hobbes' Leviathan. This means that not only is it not postmodern, but that it largely rejects modernism and structuralism too, hence the strong whiff of cultural conservatism and unapologetic anti-intellectualism that Starmer and his chief lieutenants give off. Liberal newspaper columnists bemoaning the lack of substance would strike traditional conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott as ironic. Starmer is saying that he is an echt conservative and his lack of fancy foreign ideas, as much as the looming Union Jack flags that provide the background to his speeches, is the proof of that. 

The Conservative Party leadership candidates have predictably all commited to lower taxes, a smaller state and a larger military, which might suggest a consensus as to what is left of conservatism. But this is mostly shibboleths and ancestor-worship. The inescapable trend is towards higher taxes because of demographics, i.e. more dependents and a shrinking working-age population, something that should be obvious when you survey the attendees at the party conference. The state has never meaningfully shrunk, even on the Tories' watch, both because of those demographic trends and because of rising expectations of the state to provide greater security (pretty much every public inquiry results in a demand for it to do more). It's also worth noting the self-interest of the politico-media class in expanding the state's activities, which in turn expands the scope for private interests to seek influence through lobbying and donations. Military spending will continue to decline, if only because the alternative is even higher taxes, and because the salience of conflict in Ukraine and Lebanon cannot detract from the secular trend towards less war. 

It's a professional failing for politicians to ignore material and social forces and imagine that they can affect the course of history, but it's also an expression of contemporary conservativism: that things will only get worse unless we intervene against the "woke mind virus", or whatever bizarre form the justification for reaction has now taken. Paradoxically, this is the exact opposite of traditional conservatism's belief in making no unnecessary change. From Edmund Burke through Michael Oakeshott to Roger Scruton the fundamental principle has been the precautionary: "first, do no harm". English conservatism since the millennium has lost its bearings, largely due to American influence (Scruton's claim that the left lost its bearings due to French influence now appears quaint in comparison). The transatlantic variety has always been more concerned with the preservation of what it see as innate hierarchies of power, from the family (anti-abortion) to society more generally (a militarised polity enforcing racial discrimination). This gives rise to such morbid symptoms as the trad wife and the prepper. In contrast, English conservatism (for it is particularly English, not British) has been relaxed about changes in personnel so long as the structure of hierarchy remains in place (the House of Lords). It has, in a word, been pragmatic. That is not an adjective that could be used to describe the Conservative Party in recent years.

Amusingly, it is liberals who have fretted most over the decline of English conservatism while the Tories have sought refuge in the consolations of pessimism or simply thrown themselves into unhinged mania. A recent example was Kenan Malik in The Observer telling us (in the words of Roger Scruton, no less) that conservatives believe in the free market and choice, when they very obviously don't. Within recent memory we had a Tory government looting the public treasury to shovel money towards "VIP" mates. Malik suggests that Tories were actually ambivalent towards Margaret Thatcher because she combined a Hayekian liberalism destructive of the tried and tested with an ostensible conservatism, but this ignores that her advocacy of the free market was in support of a reactionary social order, not unlike that other Hayek fan, Augusto Pinochet, which tells you what classical liberalism is really about. She didn't create a nation of entrepreneurs but one of rentiers, spivs & petty authoritarians (a legacy that lives on in the Labour Party as much as elsewhere). To be fair, Malik also admits (again quoting Scruton) that what really motivates conservatives is obedience, i.e. the obedience of others towards themselves, which is closer to the truth. 

The meta-narrative of modern political science is the idea that we are witnessing a realignment of voter loyalties. This tends to follow two well-worn tracks: the rise of populism in response to the discontents of globalisation; and the claim that party affiliations are now more determined by values than material interests. The common factor is the rejection of class as both an analytical category and as an organising principle for political action. In conjunction, they also serve to justify the demand that centrist politicians ease up on the neoliberal teleology and show sympathy for conservative values: the petit bourgeois and the working class must be kept onside by pandering to social reaction. With liberalism less universal in its aspirations and conservatism even more obsessively particular, the result has been a gradual merging of the two in a common "party of order" (most obviously in France) whose chief purpose is to protect society from the "chaos" of the left and various alien malcontents. Putting up Stars of David at every entry-point into the UK, as suggested by Robert Jenrick, might appear both mad and deeply trivial, but you wouldn't be surprised if the current Labour government adopted the policy.