No enemies on the left? Social liberalism and totalitarian progressivism
It might seem that there’s very little more that can be said about the so-called ‘culture wars’ of our time. However, I believe that the nature of what is happening at the moment has been misunderstood or misrepresented by people on both sides of the battle.
The problem is that the issue has been framed, in my view wrongly, as a dispute between ‘social liberals’ and ‘social conservatives’. My contention here will be that the most dangerous enemies of social liberalism as properly understood are not on their right but their left, and that both liberalism and conservatism face a new enemy — one which I have given the (admittedly unwieldy) title of ‘totalitarian progressivism’.
What is social liberalism?
Ask those who accept the label and you will likely hear, not a philosophy or a set of principles, but rather a laundry-list of the policies they support. They are against racism, are pro-choice on abortion, favour gender equality and gay rights, value diversity, and so on. But of course this doesn’t amount to a philosophy. And that’s before you get on to the blind spots, the things that social liberals might be expected to get angry about but frequently do not, such as FGM, modern slavery, antisemitism and organised grooming gangs.
And scratch a supposed ‘social conservative’ — a stereotypical older, working-class Brexit voter, for example — and you’ll find in many cases someone who is broadly secular, who has a relaxed, live-and-let-live attitude to ethnic minorities and gay people, and who has no interest in tightening the abortion laws. In fact, you would find attitudes that 30 or 40 years ago would have defined a ‘social liberal’.
Can we define social liberalism as a philosophy rather than a wish list? I think we can. I would define it as consisting of two core principles, which I will call the principle of personal autonomy, and the principle of non-discrimination.
The principle of personal autonomy. The social liberal takes it for granted that the goal of human life is the self-realisation of the individual person, and that this can only occur if that person is able to make his or her own choices, free of coercion by governments, religions or communities. Where social liberalism differs from the other forms of liberalism is that the former applies this principle to the most personal areas, such as family life and sexuality.
The principle of non-discrimination. Partly this is a consequence of the principle of autonomy. If a person can be discriminated against as a consequence of his or her choices, then he or she is not truly free to make them. But the non-discrimination principle also applies to characteristics which the individual has not chosen. Race, sex and sexuality are the most obvious candidates here. Hence the opposition to racism and gender inequality, concern for gender pay gaps, and so on.
Defining social liberalism in this way enables us to realise what a core part of our modern outlook it is. In the UK, social liberalism came to the fore in the 1960s in the reforms championed by then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, and has remained the dominant cultural force ever since. There was a rather weak attempt at a cultural backlash in the late 1980s/early 90s (Section 28 and John Major’s ill-starred ‘back to basics’ campaign come to mind), but these had little impact on the progress of social liberal assumptions in both public opinion and policy-making. I would argue that every UK Prime Minister since Major has been more or less a social liberal.
So if this is social liberalism, who are its opponents?
Social conservatism
The social conservative takes issue with the notion, alleged to be central to liberal thought, of an abstract individual, divorced from the social relations that shaped him or her. Indeed, in this critique there are no ‘individuals’, only actual people: men and women, Englishmen or Frenchmen, members of specific families and kinship networks, Jews, Christians and so on.
Crucially, for the conservative, the social structures which he champions — family, faith, community — are seen to have evolved gradually over the ages, proved by experience and lodged in the hearts and loyalties of multitudes. The liberal deification of the individual serves only to weaken these bonds, to fail children, and lead to rootlessness and alienation. The consequences, in this view, include such social ills as divorce, single-parenthood, crime, delinquency and educational failure.
The conservative is also sceptical about the other key tenet of liberalism, non-discrimination. To be a member of a community involves according ones’ primary affections and loyalties to ones fellow members — and by definition to discriminate against non-members. In fact, if humans are defined by their particularity, then discrimination becomes almost inevitable. If for example women are distinguished from men by their different role in the reproductive process, then differential treatment that recognises this (and, more controversially, secondary sex-based differences and social roles that are believed to flow from it) is legitimate. Such an outlook can of course — but need not, and in many cases does not — lead to racism, misogyny and homophobia.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that this social conservative critique of liberalism is at least partly flawed. This is because I do not see liberalism as making a statement about the human essence, but about the proper role and province of government. That is, liberalism is not saying that people are abstract entities devoid of inherited social belonging, but rather that governments and legal systems ought to treat them as if they were. So for example, where my freedom is at stake the state does not ask: what are the rights of a male, Jewish Londoner, rather: what are the rights and duties of any citizen?
However, the contention of this piece is that the conflict between these two worldviews is not the main issue today. This is because liberalism faces a different challenge, this time from the left, in the form of what I have called totalitarian progressivism.
Totalitarian progressivism
Marxism, liberalism’s previous challenger on the left, is moribund, certainly in its original form. Bereft of its champions in the former Soviet Union and Maoist China, and bereft of its support — always scantier than its adherents assumed — among its supposed target group the working class, Marxism today has morphed into something else. Totalitarian progressivism retains key elements of Marxism — its Manichean division of society into good and evil, progressive and reactionary, dominant and subordinate classes, as well as its revolutionary ruthlessness and contempt for ‘bourgeois’ freedom and the rule of law. But it replaces that ideology’s class fetishism with a new focus on alleged victim groups defined according to a bewildering ragbag of characteristics — race, gender (never ‘sex’), sexuality, religion (usually Islam), disability, and on and on. Its origins lie in Fanon, Marcuse, academic postmodernism and the post-colonial and gender theorising of generations of post-Marxist academics.
The challenge to liberalism of TP (as I’ll henceforward refer to it for brevity) bears some interesting resemblances to that of conservatism. Like the latter, TP believes liberalism’s focus on abstract rights to be a mystification of actual social processes. Like the latter, it points out that ‘fairness’ and ‘freedom’ in the abstract are meaningless because they fail to take into account the real situation of those whose interests they claim to champion.
However, whereas the conservative critique has the purpose of defending traditional structures, TP aims to subvert and destroy them. For TP, oppression exists as a necessary function of western capitalist society. Regardless of evidence, black people, women, gay people, trans people etc. are always structurally oppressed, and those who seek to deny this (including, and perhaps especially, members of the supposedly oppressed groups themselves) are either themselves the beneficiaries of the system, or else dupes, traitors or lackeys of those who are. There is particular vitriol poured on members of supposed victim groups whose own opinions are in conflict with the standpoint that is ascribed to their group within the ideology.
I take the key tenets of this ideology to be the following:
a) Society consists, not of formally equal individuals, but a hierarchy of power and victimhood. One’s place in the hierarchy depends on objective characteristics such as race, gender (or gender identification), sexuality and so on.
b) The values traditionally associated with the Enlightenment, and hitherto regarded as central to our own society, such as equal rights, personal freedom and scientific rationality, far from being universally valid, are in fact mere ideologies which serve to promote the power of a white, male power structure over subordinate groups both within and outside western societies themselves.
c) The ways in which western societies differ from what they were a hundred or even two or three hundred years ago, which to liberals are both obvious and to be celebrated, are essentially meaningless. Slavery and segregation may have ended, women and black people may have received the vote, careers may have been opened up to previously excluded groups, homosexuality decriminalised and gay pride parades commonplace. But to the believer it is as though nothing has changed. The power structures and the oppression are still what they were.
d) Anyone who denies the above (or dissents from the policy positions that are deemed to flow from it) is not expressing a legitimate opinion which can be argued against, but is merely serving his or her own interests within the power structure. Hence the dissenter is not an opponent to be challenged, but an enemy to be silenced.
There are of course important problems with all these propositions. It is important to note that a), while claiming factual truth, is entirely unfalsifiable. That is, there is no possible evidence that one could present (legal equality, universal franchise, the existence of people of colour, women and gay people in leadership roles) that would be recognised by the ideology’s adherents as demonstrating its falsity. Indeed, if one were to call them out on the unfalsifiability problem, they would doubtless respond that the empiricist, rationalist world-view of which this principle is a feature is itself a repressive ideology which serves to cement the West’s unjust dominance. This of course makes rational debate with a believer close to impossible.
It also means that even where a request for evidence is not rejected entirely, it is met with blatant cherry-picking, in which examples of racism or disadvantage are chosen at random and counter-examples dismissed with scorn. Furthermore, c) allows these cherry-picked examples to be taken from an almost unlimited timeframe. When it comes to highlighting the essentially repressive and racist nature of Western society, a racist opinion expressed by Lord Nelson or Thomas Jefferson will do as well as something that happened to a black person on a bus last week.
Another problem is the heterogeneity of the supposed victim groups. At least classical Marxism had a single clear focus, the proletariat. But what, exactly, are TP’s various client groups supposed to have in common? Gay people? Feminists? Islamists? Trans people? Not to mention that uber-victim group, the Palestinians? At every point where the claims of two of these groups intersect, there is conflict and a jostling between them for recognition as the more oppressed, and hence to be deferred to. In TP, the victim group is sanctified, but who that is in a particular case is endlessly contested. This results in splintering and vicious in-fighting within the movement.
A key tenet of TP is ‘intersectionality’. This is the belief that a person’s status in the victimhood hierarchy derives not from his or her individual characteristics, nor even membership of a particular group, but rather in the ‘intersection’ of all the groups of which that person is a member. So the oppression suffered by a disabled black lesbian, for example, is not merely the sum of the oppressions suffered by each of those categories — though that presumably would be bad enough — but rather a distinct (and one assumes far worse) oppression suffered from their position at the ‘intersection’ of those groups.
It is important to understand that these multiple identities do not lead to an understanding of the person as an individual, with all of the potentially idiosyncratic attitudes and characteristics that this would imply. There is still a correct understanding — given by the theory — of the perspective that the person with these group memberships ought to have, and the person is judged on whether she actually has them or not. If she does not — if she rejects the perspective that a person in her position ought to have — then she is a traitor or a dupe, and the legitimate victim of violent vituperation.
Antisemitism
A huge issue with TP is its apparent proneness to antisemitism. This on the face of it is odd. After all, TP claims to be opposed to all forms of racism and prejudice. How then could it provide a welcome to the oldest, and at some notorious historical junctures the most deadly, form of racism to disfigure western civilisation? However, there is less of a contradiction here than may appear.
Firstly, TP is an ideology which seeks to reracialise Western society, because it sees society as inevitably characterised by relationships of power and dominance between groups. Antisemitism differs from other forms of racism in that the stereotypes with which it characterises Jews are precisely those of power and dominance. Thus for the antisemite Jews are seen not as ignorant or stupid (the epithets racists typically accord to other groups) but rather the reverse. Jews are, in the antisemite’s view, an elite — powerful, shadowy and infinitely cunning. For an ideology of racial power disparities, this traditional stereotype is highly attractive.
Typically, the believer will not deny that antisemitism has at various times in the past been a feature of Western society. However, those were times when Jews were poor and powerless, an underclass comparable to black and other ethnic minorities today. But, he will argue, such is not the case now. Jews are middle class and affluent. Indeed, as ‘white’ people, Jews partake in white privilege, and therefore are the enemies of today’s real victims of racism. Then of course there is Israel, which is seen in the familiar demonology as a white settler colonial state which displaced a native population with the help of the imperial powers (primarily Britain), and which is racist, not because of particular racist acts, but in its very essence.
Nor does it help, faced with these accusations, to argue that Jews are not all white, or not all rich, or not all powerful, or that Israel is a liberal democracy, or that their understanding of Israel’s history is wrong, or that a majority of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern, not European origin. Such empirical arguments are beside the point, because, like the rest of the worldview, this demonised view of Israel is an article of faith, and therefore not susceptible to rational criticism.
By extension, of course, because the vast majority of the world’s Jews maintain some form of positive identification with Israel, Israel serves to further demonise Jews as a whole — unless they swallow the whole TP anti-Israel narrative. Some of course do so, and have a particular usefulness to the movement as a result. The true believer who happens to be Jewish can attack Israel ‘as a Jew’, and is therefore deemed useful in both reinforcing the critique and deflecting accusations of antisemitism.
Yet there is a contradiction at the heart of this tactic. An important move in the anti-Zionist narrative is the denial that the Jews are a people, and therefore a denial that the right of self-determination –sacrosanct when it comes to more favoured groups — can properly be claimed by them. Judaism, it is asserted, is a religious faith and nothing more, hence there is no ‘Jewish people’ to which national rights can be allowed. However it is vanishingly rare for the Jewish believer in TP to be also a believer in the Jewish religion. Hence by their own definition they are not Jews at all. Their very claim to be speaking ‘as Jews’ contradicts their claim that there is only a Jewish faith, not a Jewish people. This claim also cuts across the professed belief in self-identification. So that whereas I (a heterosexual biological male) could presumably, according to the dogma, self-identify as a woman tomorrow, no questions asked, my (somewhat more plausible) claim to be a member of an entity called the ‘Jewish people’ would be met with violent rejection.
The struggle against Totalitarian Progressivism
It is clear from the foregoing that I regard TP as a dangerous and destructive ideology. For the most part the older arguments, such as those between social liberals and conservatives, as well as those between economic liberals and statists, have been conducted, at least in the UK over the last several decades, with a degree of tolerance and respect for democratic norms. However, the emergence of this new ideology from its previous academic ghettos has resulted in a wholly new situation, in which those norms are themselves attacked as merely narratives upholding the dominant social order.
We might of course think that the sheer lunacy of TP would prevent its widespread adoption. And certainly it is a serious liability for any political party which embraces it. Sadly, however, that may not continue to be the case.
In the first place, politics is always downstream of culture. The beliefs inculcated in the universities today move into the schools and workplaces tomorrow, along with the graduates who have absorbed them. The fact that within the academy itself such beliefs are not merely argued within a tolerant atmosphere of debate, but are imposed as an orthodoxy (by militant student and professorial activists, ideologically committed HR departments and complaisant or cowardly administrators) makes this process all the more dangerous.
Secondly, the elites who rule large sections of our civic and cultural life tend to be predisposed to accommodate rather than challenge these beliefs. Specifically in the UK, there was a huge shift in the ideological makeup of the elite in the latter part of the 20th century. Prior to that, the old conservative elite, public-school educated, committed to patriotic, imperial and conservative values, was dominant throughout what became known as the Establishment. They ruled in the House of Lords, the Inns of Court, the officer class, the Church of England and — through the Conservative Party’s dominance during much of the period — the House of Commons.
This elite gradually lost confidence in its own superiority and values during the post-Second World War period. Suez — described by C.P. Snow as ‘the last charge of Eton and the Brigade of Guards’ — was a massive blow, brutally highlighting the UK’s reduced position in the world. At home, the Profumo scandal and the Lady Chatterley case made them a laughing stock. The turn towards decolonisation and Europeanism abroad and social liberalism at home were symptoms of this. There went hand in hand with a personnel change in many major institutions as they were colonised by the ‘sixties’ and later generations of erstwhile student radicals. The Blair government’s reform of the House of Lords was another factor, effectively replacing a hereditary conservative elite with an equally unelected liberal one.
Yet even this does not fully explain the apparent complaisance of existing elites in the face of this new doctrine. Perhaps an answer lies in the early experiences of those who now form the elite.
A traditional conservative of the 1950s had, or believed he had, a stable heritage behind him. In upholding his values he could feel he was continuing the traditions in which he grew up, and keeping faith with his forebears. Thus each necessary adaptation to new circumstances or demands for inclusion by formerly excluded groups would be felt as a painful adjustment, if not an actual betrayal.
The new liberal elite, on the other hand, have grown up with an entirely different formative experience. Theirs was the experience of breaking with the past, of being part of a new, rebellious counter-cultural force. Hence, beyond the actual positions and values espoused, went an entirely different set of assumptions as to how society’s values are formed — not by received tradition and reverence for elders, but rather rebellion and reverence for youth. And these values are not static, but are endlessly changing, as each new generation seeks to remake the world for itself.
This perspective generates a deification of youth, so that when a new generation comes along with a new set of beliefs, their elders’ response in many cases is uncritical acceptance. These kids, they rationalise, are merely doing what we did in our time. So who are we to question? After all, we don’t want to turn into our parents, do we?
Of course I by no means prefer the instinctive hostility to new ideas characteristic of the old conservative elite. As a part of the generation of rebellion myself, I too grew up detesting its snobbery, misogyny and racism, and its pig-headed reluctance to accept that the age of Empire was over. But surely, between the viscerally reactionary and the nihilistically iconoclastic, between the idealisation of ancestors and the idealisation of youth, there has to be a better way?
In my view this better way can only be found in a restatement and reinvigoration of liberal democratic values. Its wellsprings are to be found in a variety of sources within Western history. In John Stuart Mill, in Thomas Jefferson (as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, not as slaveowner), in Abraham Lincoln and William Wilberforce, in Galileo and Darwin, in the Pankhursts and Martin Luther King. All of them rebels, all of them both guardians and progenitors of traditions, who variously championed individual freedom, responsible government, scientific rationality and human equality. Against the bigotries of the reactionary and racist right, and the bigotries of the totalitarian left, these are the role models we need, and the principles that should guide our actions.
