On Post-Liberalism - Part I

‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.’ - John Adams, 1798

Part II of this article will be published tomorrow, Thursday 27th April. For more of Taz’s writings, browse his Substack here.

Liberalism is, in practice, the philosophy of the removal of barriers.

In its modern iteration, there are two strains of liberalism; what could be described as neoconservatism, or right-wing/classical liberalism, and neoliberalism, or left-wing liberalism. However, both of these philosophies are undeniably of the liberal tradition.

The desire to remove barriers comes - in part - from the first sentence of a document that would most certainly be one of the most important books of the liberal bible if one were to be published:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

The two statements from this sentence - penned by Thomas Jefferson in the United States Declaration of Independence - that have had the most profound impact, but have been extrapolated to mean different things to the different evolutions of liberalism, are “all men are created equal”, and the unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness.”

To Jefferson, “equal” would have meant equal in the eyes of God - and this, at the time, would have been perfectly evident to all but the most pedantic writers in British magazines. But in the modern, less Christian and more materialistic world, “equal”, to all intents and purposes, has become a synonym for “the same” (maybe those pedantic Brits had a point?).

To right-wing liberals, all people are equal in that it is equally true all people are economic actors. For them, that’s the most important aspect of a person. They’re producers and consumers, contributors to the growth of GDP.

To left-wing liberals, all people are the same in a less measurable, perhaps a more Jeffersonian way. They’re equal in that firstly, they all (ostensibly) have the same potential; and secondly, they all have the same intrinsic value. The cultures they come from, the traditions they represent, and the beliefs they hold, whilst not exactly the same as ours, are equally as valid and valuable as our own, so they deserve equal space, respect and prominence in our society - representation one might call it…

And, whilst these things aren’t all exactly the same, the assumption is that people want more or less the same things, and are aiming for more or less the same end goals and the same type of society, so they’re all equally compatible. The neoliberal multicultural dream. The more we break down barriers between groups of people, the closer we’ll get to that utopia.

“The pursuit of happiness” to Jefferson would have meant within the constraints of the moral standards of the time, those being predominantly Christian moral standards. But as secularism and liberalism have amalgamated - both on the Right and the Left although to different extents - and have slowly removed the barriers of Christian morality, as society has become more atheistic, the moral constraints on the pursuit of happiness have slowly been eroded.

Indeed, even at the time, it was acknowledged that religious morality was needed to constrain the type of liberalism envisioned by the Founding Fathers. John Adams, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote in a letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts in 1798, that:

‘[…]Should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’

The parents of neoconservatism, or right-wing liberalism, who ushered it into the world and cemented it as the dominant philosophy of Anglo-Saxon right-wing parties were of course the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, and the former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

Their project was an economic project, and as such the barriers they were interested in removing were those which would, or could, stifle or slow economic growth.

These leaders got to work deregulating internal markets, lowering barriers to international trade, cutting tariffs, and lowering taxes.

Thatcher had very little time for nostalgia, aesthetics (beyond her personal image), community, tradition or the human condition - all things which may be barriers to economic growth and market efficiency.

“And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” she said in an interview in Women’s Own in 1987.

Economic growth was her due north, and free markets were her compass.

This attitude is best expressed in the architecture of the buildings that started sprouting up around the time of her premiership and since. Towering glass and steel and concrete boxes and tubes, devoid of cultural and geographical specificity, which could be dropped in any modern metropolitan city from Shanghai to Dubai, and wouldn’t look out of place. Towering testaments to commerce, to market efficiency, and to nothing else.

Right-wing liberals also see all work as interchangeable. What matters is that it pays. They’re indifferent to the community that’s built up around certain industries and jobs, they’re indifferent to the sense of dignity one achieves by doing a job which provides them with status of some sort. If an industry is uncompetitive or it’s inefficient to continue doing in one country as opposed to another, they’ll watch it move overseas with indifference, sure that those factory workers who lost their jobs will find work of another sort. The invisible hand of the market will provide… apparently.

Part II of this article will be published tomorrow, Thursday 27th April.