I should probably add here that I attended this conference, and while membership of some secretive reactionary cabal under royal patronage would be a gratifying experience, it is as divorced from reality as the rest of the review, which is a classic example of the conspiratorial hysteria with which ageing liberals console themselves for the collapse of their ideological dreamworld.
Despite Pabst taking great pains to demarcate a Left-wing post-liberal space from that of the national populist right, the reviewer goes on — and on, and on — to claim that he “can’t resist the temptation to promote national-populist — and alt-right — conspiracy theories about ‘the fusion of woke capitalism with extreme identity politics’” that “Post-liberalism is a right-wing, nationalist project seeking to incorporate and hegemonise sections of the left by splitting it from its social liberal base.”
If this is the Left among which Blue Labour aims to carve out a post-liberal movement, then the project surely has little chance of success. With Labour so internally divided, and further from power than they have been in decades, the chances of guiding the party towards a humane post-liberal ethos and then leading it to electoral victory seem impossibly remote. So why waste time on a failing political party whose activists hate you and everything you stand for?
This is the essential conundrum of Blue Labour, and the reason for its perpetual marginalisation. Post-liberals should leave political tribalism to Americans: politics is simply the means to reshape the state in your image, and parties are merely useful vessels to do so. Logically, the conclusion is that the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged; it is already making post-liberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial north, without any serious intellectual direction or engagement.
Whether we like it or not, post-liberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did forty years ago.
The key to victory is surely to utilise the power of the state through democratic means to break the anti-democratic liberal hold on the political system and advance post-liberalism from a matter of debate among a tiny handful of academics and writers to a functioning political programme. Yet Pabst, with a watchful eye on the authoritarian statism of China and Russia, and on the illiberal democracy of Hungary and Poland, views the untapped power of Leviathan with alarm. “Unmediated state sovereignty on the model of Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan risks authoritarian control at home and anarchy abroad,” he warns, so “the challenge before us is to turn the existing platforms into public utilities owned by the people, not the state, and to run them as mutuals – with private providers competing on the provision of services.”
These are noble goals and a vast improvement on the alternatives, yet there is an avoidance of the practical path towards implementing them. How do you break the power of global corporations and the tech oligarchs? How do you unprise the grasp of what Pabst terms the “sham clerisy who dominate much of the media, education and the civil service” on the national institutions they have commandeered for themselves?
Little platoons, however right and just their cause, can function only within a broader army structure to nurture and guide them. The only viable means to victory, then, is surely by employing the power of the state just as the neoliberals did, and the most realistic means of doing so is through the nascent statist centre-right. The managerial-technocratic Labour Party, which has junked the economic radicalism of the Corbyn manifesto while doubling down on liberal identity politics, certainly doesn’t intend to.
If post-liberals do not do this, authoritarians will, as we see in China’s crackdown on oligarchs like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma and on tech platforms. Paradoxical though it may seem, the path to a radical localism surely lies through a resurgent state which must then give away the power it has reluctantly assumed to bring about necessary reform. It is as if post-liberals have adopted the teleological assumptions of liberals, that the arc of history will drop power into their laps, without also adopting their hunger for power, and their willingness to use the state to achieve it.
Pabst is correct to state that both the Conservative party and the Republicans remain beholden to capital, and superficially adopt post-liberal language to win popular support while continuing disastrous liberal policies. Yet there are reasons for hope. As the Marxist Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbado observes in his new book The Great Recoil, the new statism is a distinct phenomenon from the crude populisms of the decade’s first half and is still a malleable force, waiting to be shaped.
The task of doing so can be taken up by either Right or Left, or by a post-liberal synthesis of the two. Younger conservatives in America, as defined in Park McDougald’s incisive survey of the New Millennial Right as the conservative analogue of “millennial socialism”, are “frustrated with the politics of their elders”, and want “a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal”. In time, they will capture the institutions of conservatism, just as in time the millennial socialists will capture those of the Democrats.
In Britain too, much of the energy on the younger Right is towards forging a confident, developmentalist conservative state that corrects the most harmful errors of liberalism, and spreads economic growth and social solidarity across every corner of the nation. Time may be on the post-liberals’ side, in the long term, but only if they do not waste today’s narrow window of opportunity on either preaching to the unconvertible or shrinking from their most viable path to power.
Throughout his book, Pabst diagnoses the problems with unerring accuracy yet avoids the obvious conclusion. There is a missing element, the how, by which post-liberalism triumphs. A war only ends when one side wins decisively: post-liberals are unwilling to deliver the final blow, instead mourning their ostracisation from a rump political left which despises them as existential enemies.
Without a Constantine to convert, without the power of a Rome behind them, post-liberals will find themselves trapped in the political catacombs forever, meekly hiding from a savaging in the amphitheatre. They cannot convert the liberal clerisy from within: they will be forced to defeat them from without, before authoritarians do. The gap between conservative and socialist post-liberals has always been largely cosmetic: perhaps the future of Blue Labour now lies in shaping a dirigiste, paternalist and communitarian Red Toryism.
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