19 January 2017
Liberating Populism
“…by any other name would…?”
by J.R.Thomas
Mr Gladstone would have been very confused. His aim in his long political life (four times Prime Minister, a record not likely to be broken) was to bring liberalism to the British, a populist movement indeed. He did not start that way; WE began as a conservative, the name Conservatives was just beginning to be applied. He certainly was not a Tory, not in the original sense of an Irishman from the west given to stealing horses, or even in the sense it came to be applied, not in a complimentary way, to the English colonists in North America who resisted the independence movement. Mr Gladstone moved rapidly to liberalism and came soon to apply that philosophy to every aspect of political life, with increasing rigour and haste.
Mr Disraeli, Gladstone’s long time opponent and a politician given to expediency rather than principle, was fundamentally conservative, and also a Conservative. He dragged the Tory party, painfully, to its identity as the Conservative Party, building on the foundations laid by that mostly forgotten figure, Sir Robert Peel. In the spirit of both the times and Disraeli’s liking for holding the reins of government, he was also remarkably liberal, though of course never Liberal, and always, just like Mr Gladstone, a populist.
Enough history. Except to say that both these gentlemen would have found themselves confused and amazed by a world in which the most stinging epithet that could be flung at a politician was that he (or she) was a populist. Though they might be further astonished that that denigrated political hopeful would then search his store of naughty words and, having found the most hurtful he could, would shout back: “Liberal!”, a truly vulgar allegation to make. The recent excitements on the west side of the Atlantic were indeed punctuated by shouts of “Populist!” (Clinton camp at Trump) and “Liberal!” (Trump team to Clinton).
However did we get to this?
The meaning of words can change remarkably, and surprisingly quickly. Readers of the new volume of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s wonderfully entertaining letters may be surprised at how often he refers to having had a gay evening. Not in the modern meaning he hadn’t, often very much not so given Paddy’s taste for female company. And those of us who enquire of our teenage children if they have enjoyed some film or party or book, may commiserate if they inform us it was “sick”. But we are utterly wrong to do so; they mean it was “brill” or “fabuloso” or even, for those of us over eighty, “gay”.
So should we learn to live with a world in which “liberal” means, well, increasingly the opposite of liberal, at least in its nineteenth century understanding? Or where “populist” means exactly that, but where to be broadly supported by popular will is moving toward being thought, in the 1066 And All That way of labelling, “a bad thing”. Populism is probably a lost cause, well on the way to mean a sort of fascism-lite, giving off a smell of rallies and shouting and alarming looking burly men in black shirts and face masks brandishing staves at the back of mass meetings. M Poujade, in 1950’s France was a populist, but not popular with the intellectual elite which likes to run France and rapidly saw him and his Poujadist movement off; one suspects that they will do the same for Mme Le Pen, who, for all her present popularity, is too much a populist to survive. Mr Trump is certainly an unusual manifestation of populism; a billionaire President with a billionaire cabinet may yet turn out to define a new populism, but the likelihood (which we debate elsewhere this week in the Shaw Sheet) is that a populist electoral campaign will mutate into a relatively conservative Republican administration.
But “liberal”…. That is perhaps still a cause, a definition, a description, a label worth fighting for. Mrs Clinton and her allies undoubtedly have an understanding of what “liberal” means to them (quite apart from her liberal approach to spending on media advertising during last year’s Presidential campaign). They, and let us include with Mrs C much of the American intelligentsia, media, senior government employees, east and west coast professional persons, and quite a lot of the left of the Republican Party, tend to take “liberal” to mean something other than a Gladstonian word for “freedom”.
Liberal tends to mean to these folk “fairness” “moderation” “reasonableness”, the approach to life taken by a fair-minded and well educated person. It encapsulates current mainstream thinking (whatever it happens to be) and modern trendiness. It is, in short, what the “establishment” tends to think. (We could also try to define what “establishment” has come to mean over the last twenty years but we will leave that to another time; not persons on grouse moors though, that is for sure.) None of these concepts is of course in any way wrong or to be deprecated in itself, but it is what comes with them which might upset, say, Mr Gladstone. This modern liberalism means, or implies, or needs for its correct deployment, a measure of monitoring, approving, regulating, reporting, coercing even. It involves transfers of wealth and power to empower and reward those who have little, at the expense of those who might be thought to have enough, or more than enough. It means encouraging certain things to be done, and others not to be done. It means that there are words better left unused, and thoughts better not thought, certainly out loud. It has led to a degree of strong social self-censorship, to speakers “deplatformed” (like defenestration but generally without physical intrusion), to “safe places” in tertiary education where a rigorous application of orthodoxy is imposed. It involves, you might think, and you would be right, a certain loss of liberty in the cause of liberalism.
All this illiberalism in the cause of liberalism is, generally, kindly meant, though the effect is to remove freedom of the self and increase dependence, willing or otherwise, on the state and establishment authority structures. Its effect is to alter behaviour and discourage individuality. It certainly involves an infrastructure of large numbers of persons working for the state to ensure that the new liberal society functions properly and does not deviate, or permit its members to deviate, from those worthy objectives and the carefully designed way of achieving them.
The British political party called the Liberal-Democrats would probably go along with this thinking without much demur; indeed they are an exemplar of it. There is no American equivalent, but the American Libertarian Party would do a whole bunch of demurring if Clinton/Liberal-Democrat liberalism was put to them as the possible base of their political platform. The Libertarians, who took third place in the Presidential contest with about 3% of the popular vote (having peaked at 9%) would be a good home for WE Gladstone, should he wish to resume his political career in some miraculous resurrection. They really do believe in liberalism in the old fashioned classical sense of the label. “Do as you would be done by” or at least so long as that does not frighten the horses, perhaps best sums it up.
So perhaps we need some new labels for politics and political movements. “Left” and “Right” are too simplistic and inadequate for a world in which the far left and the far right never seem far apart, in effect if not in philosophy, and leadership of the major UK parties moves from Thatcher to May, from Blair to Corbyn. And “liberal” or “populist” does not seem to really help us either. Conservatives are not conservative, Christian Democrats still stick to the latter but not much to the former, the United Kingdom Independence Party presumably has no further objectives to pursue, and Labour is led by intellectuals who could not lay a brick or service an engine if their live depended on it. Maybe in Italy, Beppo Grillo has the right idea. He leads Five Stars, a name which means whatever you want it to mean. Which tells you all you need to know about its politics.
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