Postliberal Politics

The Coming Era of Renewal

Adrian Pabst

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509546824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment.

Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – postliberalism – that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the destabilising inhumanity of 'just-in-time' free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote embedded, mutualist markets.

This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash.?

1
Resolving the interregnum

During weeks of lies and cover-up about Covid-19 by the Chinese government, international flights out of the epicentre in China’s Hubei province continued to operate, turning a local plague into a global pandemic. When Wuhan was finally closed off, videos emerged of the local authorities forcibly removing residents from their homes and rounding up suspected carriers of the virus. As people were sent to mass quarantine camps, they were told that lockdown was for the good of the community and the state, equated with the Communist Party. Beijing’s primary concern was economic growth and the image of the ruling regime. In the West, the US and UK governments delayed the lockdown as they initially seemed to privilege population-wide ‘herd immunity’ to protect the economy. This amounted to a policy that could have seen hundreds of thousands of weaker members of society die.

While the early response of the Chinese showed merciless indifference to the human suffering of Wuhan’s population, that of the US and the UK was built on economism and utility. Either way, a sacrificial logic was at work that put material and ideological interests ahead of human survival and security. The coronavirus crisis has exposed the limitations of both China’s model and that of the Anglo-Saxon West. Neither model addresses the underlying conditions that left us vulnerable to pandemics like Covid-19: an overcentralized state eroding local institutions; globalized markets diminishing the resilience of the national economy; hollowed-out civic institutions combined with weak relationships of trust and obligation.

The past forty years have been dominated first by ultraliberalism in the West and then by antiliberal authoritarianism in China. Events of the past decade – from the 2008 global financial crash to Brexit and Trump, from the rise of Xi Jinping to the pandemic – have revealed the weaknesses of both systems. They are vulnerable to the forces of capitalism, nationalism and techno-science. No alternative ideology has so far captured the popular imagination or built a consensus capable of commanding majority support. We seem stuck in an interregnum where the old order has collapsed but not been replaced by a new settlement. In the words of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who coined this term, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.’¹

Zombie order

We still live in the long interregnum that began with the financial crisis. No single ideology or system has supplanted the dominance of liberalism since the Soviet Communist implosion in 1989. In the West, national populism is here to stay but struggles to govern and address the grievances of its new working-class base. China and other authoritarian regimes flex their economic muscle but lack the independent institutions and social trust on which vibrant societies depend. While the American-led Atlantic era is fading, the Chinese or Asian century has not yet begun. The paroxysm of pandemic and protest that we witnessed in the US and the UK may end up being the defining moment in the decline of the liberal West, but is it a prelude to the death of liberalism itself? That is the fear of the Western establishment, who see the return of 1930s totalitarian rule in every populist insurgency. It is the hope of the West’s rivals in Moscow, Beijing and beyond, for whom America’s mutation into a semi-failed state confirms the superiority of authoritarianism.

But besides the demise of the West and the rise of the rest, there is another possibility. The Western liberal order will continue to stagger on – sclerotic yet stoic, decadent yet durable, inert without either real reform or complete collapse. ‘That may well be the fate of the liberal order over the next generations,’ writes the American commentator Ross Douthat, ‘a kind of sustainable decadence, a zombie existence punctuated by periods of temporary crisis and alarm that continues indefinitely.’² As the post-viral economic cataclysm unfolds, the liberal West looks like the undead: not coming back to life but equally refusing to die.

Could the populist insurgency revitalize the West? Up to a point it has proven to be a corrective to some excesses of liberalism such as austerity, job-exporting trade deals and pressure on wages as a result of mass immigration. Yet going left on the economy and right on identity is hardly the same as a new political consensus. That would require a coherent governing philosophy, but unlike the neoliberal model of Thatcher and Reagan, which drew on thirty years of Hayekian thinking, populists lack the intellectual resources to build a different settlement. With few exceptions, left populism has not survived contact with actual voters. Right populism, by contrast, is successful in ejecting liberal elites from power and has an inkling of what needs to be done. Yet it lacks the concepts and policy tools to bring about transformative change.

This is perhaps most apparent in its failure to take on crony capitalism. Populists of different stripes in Poland, Hungary and Brazil fund increased state spending with foreign capital based on low tax and deregulatory incentives. Competitive fiscal dumping is part of protectionism, besides a clampdown on cheap foreign labour. The national-populist alternative to liberal hyper-globalization is market nativism disguised as the promise of economic patriotism. In times of polarization, populists resort to Leninist tactics of political purges and institution-wrecking while people yearn for a measure of economic and social stability.

As the academic Michael Lind has argued, insurgents are right to oppose technocratic neoliberalism but wrong to embrace what he calls demagogic populism.³ Populists are just as elite as the establishment. Both have failed to offer a political vision that is anchored in a sense of the transcendent ‘we’ – the bonds of belonging to neighbourhoods and nations. Instead, the ultraliberal left and the antiliberal right indulge in variants of identity politics that fuel each other. Both erode the cultural and civilizational foundations of the West, a sense of common purpose and shared destiny.⁴

Whether the Western imperium disintegrates or reinvents itself, the authoritarian alternative is unlikely to displace liberal democracy altogether. Both China and Russia are already struggling with the effects of deglobalization: from new trade barriers to the loss of foreign direct investment and of technological transfer.⁵ The worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression of 1929–32 will likely reverse rising living standards for some time and diminish the greater international prestige on which one-party state rule rests. With hour-glass social structures and a new class of rapacious oligarchs, China will double down on its fusion of state capitalism with bio-surveillance. Anglo-Saxon capitalism could yet prove more resilient and innovative than Leninist tech totalitarianism.

Liberalism, populism and authoritarianism will endure, just as patterns of daily life will be re-established and old habits will take hold of us once again. Pandemics or protests pose no existential threat to liberal empire, populist power or authoritarian regimes. No governments or political systems have so far fallen. The strange non-death of economic globalization, which brought about the financial crash of 2008, testifies to the durability of capitalism, which is compatible with variously more market-driven or state-orchestrated systems. Far from collapsing under the weight of its own inner contradictions, global capitalism continues to expand and is sustained by a novel mix of Hayekian ultra-loose monetary policy with Keynesian state subsidy. Capitalism is not just built on greed, debt and destruction. It is also politically promiscuous, getting into bed with any ideology – liberal, populist or authoritarian – that backs the impersonal forces of finance capital and techno-science at the expense of the dignity of labour and democratic self-government.

Since the end of the Soviet bloc and the crushing of the Chinese democracy movement in 1989, both liberals and authoritarians have tolerated grotesque disparities of power, wealth and social status while proffering the myth of meritocracy. Now the fallout from the pandemic threatens a decade of discontent. For all these reasons, Covid-19 may change little except to intensify existing and sinister political-economic developments, tending to both mass surveillance and mutual atomization.⁶ The West is stuck in limbo between a populist insurgency and a counter-putsch by the neoliberal establishment. Meanwhile authoritarian systems combine political stagnation at home with aggressive expansion abroad. How to resolve the interregnum?

A postliberal space

Yet the current crisis can also be seen as an exception that suspends previous norms and received wisdom: ever-greater globalization; endless mobility; the hollowing out of the state and the public realm; treating nature as a consumable resource; or elevating the individual will into the highest moral arbiter. For those lucky enough to be able to work from home, a relaxation from the rigour of exhausting commutes, time-starved lifestyles and over-priced Pret lunches wolfed down while checking email has given rise to a rethinking of priorities. Are high salaries worth it if they come at the cost of being a stranger to one’s own children, raised chiefly in nurseries? What will it profit a woman or man if she or he gains the next promotion, but loses her or his family life? To those who had no choice but to continue to go to work – the heroic but underpaid shop-workers, nurses, bus drivers and so forth – the crisis heightened the importance of their vocation and contribution, exposing the fallacy that the labour market rewards the most useful or meritorious members of the community most highly.⁷

The pandemic and the first lockdown created the conditions in which to rethink all these things and more. The journalist Jason Cowley expresses this hopefulness well: ‘[C]ommunity was being rediscovered through enforced social isolation – consider those 750,000 volunteers fo...