There is a particular strain of thought on the Left that I find really irksome – for lack of a better word, let’s call it “communitarian liberalism”. It is essentially utopian in outlook because it avoids several aspects of hard reality. And if ever there was a time for the Left to put aside non-achievable aims and be as pragmatic as possible, now is really the time.
A good way of understanding this philosophy (for it is an all encompassing way of looking at the world) is to look at relevant examples of it in print. The Guardian should really run its own section just for adherents, edited by George Monbiot. Here’s one such snippet from today:
…”the Brexit vote, the rise of Ukip, the NHS crisis, the election of Donald Trump and the advance of the far right are not the opposite of neoliberalism, they are the ideology’s culmination.”
No, they aren’t – this is a comforting lie the Left continually tells itself. The reason that the Right are winning so much at present is because they feel safe enough to abandon some of the hard lines of the Old Right and wander into the Left’s traditional areas. The vote to Leave the EU was about people turning away from neoliberalism, not embracing it. The rise of UKIP is fundamentally about people rejecting globalism, a critical part of neoliberalism. For now we come to the crux of the matter: the communitarian liberal section of the Left wants to reject neoliberalism while embracing globalism, and wants a style of communitarianism that keeps all of the stuff about liberalism – gay rights, women’s rights, multiculturalism – that they like without beginning to examine the contradictions involved. They want people to come together and stop being so individualistic all the time but are not willing to see that in order for this to happen, people need to have something to rally around, and sadly, often need something to rally against. There needs to be a genuine group feeling in order for communitarianism to really flourish, and that is usually around national and regional identities whether the Left likes it or not. This is why the Left’s rejection of “Englishness” is so poisonous for them electorally – these are the subsets people identify with, not the old class based dead horses the Left continues to flog. Also, as soon as genuine communitarianism takes effect, socially liberal values suffer, since by definition the standards by which people should conduct themselves become the concern of the entire group. Clement Attlee would understand this principle completely and if he could time travel to 2017, would no doubt be arguing the same.
The far-right meanwhile are just practicing a more realistic form of anti-neoliberalism than the Left engages in. Figures like Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump are not neoliberalism writ large, but rather a reaction against it. You could say not a very cogent one, and on that I would agree with you, but the figures of the New Right do not represent a championing of the old neoliberal order but are rather an explicit attempt to demolish it.
I’m a liberal and see communitarianism as something both conservative and negative in nature. I think neoliberal economics has its good and bad sides. The bad sides can be ameliorated through a reasonably active state in certain sectors, such as health and education, with a viewpoint to trying to even the field by giving as many people active access to the real economy via whatever means practically work. So this is easy for me: I am broadly pro-immigration and pro-market while being very socially liberal and don’t think communitarianism is actually a very good thing to pursue, thus I have no circle to square here.
If you wish to know why people in places like Stoke Central are really turning away from the Labour Party, it is because they want to reject globalism and multiculturalism and are tired of Labour sounded conflicted and confused on this point. So communitarians, here’s your choice: go native, or give up communitarianism for liberalism once and for all. The halfway house isn’t working for you.
Also, some of the liberal values the left does support are not easy to fit together. How much do you value multiculturalism? Some cultures are traditionally sexist and homophobic. Unless you are willing to throw gays and women under the bus, you have to be willing to oppose those cultures.
Is it not also ‘utopian’ to believe that leaving the EU will make the UK great again, give back control? Or to believe that enfettered capitalism – or the nearest anyone dare move towards that – will provide adequately for all our people? It’s just a matter of what flavour of utopia you aspire to.
As it happens, it appears that leaving the EU to make the UK great again is a utopian view that is shared by Jeremy Corbyn.
That’s a very simplistic and misleading characterisation of Corbyn’s and Labour’s position on leaving the EU. Unlike most political leaders, he at least understands the complexities of what lays ahead and – more than most – the issues which led to the Leave campaign winning. When making policy decisions it’s best to acknowledge the facts as they are, rather pretend they don’t exist. Sticking our fingers in our here’s and singing la la la – the response of many politicians and citizens to the referendum result – will not help those who are most in need of help, the people Labour exists to represent.
Let’s not forget, under Corbyn’s leadership, around two thirds of those who voted Labour in the 2015 general election went on to vote Remain in the referendum. This was slightly better than Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP managed in super-pro-EU Scotland. Quite an achievement considering the demonstrably hostile media environment towards Labour’s Remain campaign fro the mainstream media (see the very good research by Loughborough University and UCL plus the BBC’s own acknowledgement that they neglected anyone outside the Tory and UKIP Leave and Remain campaigns in order to maintain ‘balance’).
All over Europe, left liberal parties have been haemorrhaging support, and voters, for a long time. Labour’s decision, under New Labour, to turn it’s back on the people and communities it was established to support has been the driving force behind the success of the Leave vote. I wish that were not the case, but there is no other honest way to interpret the facts. The recent research by the BBC, which crunched data from a sample of over 20% of referendum voters, showed clearly how the lost generation of the electorate who have stopped voting – a huge number of whom are in traditional Labour constituencies – came out in force for the referendum.
If we want to get anywhere now, and avoid an even greater and faster rise of the further and far right, we must be honest about what has happened and come up with ways to fix the deep divisions which exist in the UK and across Europe. Not withstanding Labour’s dire position in the the polls and the long odds against them forming a government for a long time to come, I can’t see any other political leader showing any sign at all that they understand what is really happening in communities around the UK. Sniping at Corbyn may be gratifying for some people, but it won’t get us anywhere.
UKIP turning away from globalisation ? By courting Trump and every other two bit petty right wing tyrant they can find on the planet ? Delusional.
There’s an old saying everyone seems to have forgotten. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
The USA is the first world empire ever to have the power to redefine empire itself. And yet we refuse to use this power. The world is festering with terror and fascism, and we are in the unique position to turn the table on it by the force of academic authority. If American Leftist academics got together and hammered out a manifesto of genuine Liberal Enlightenment philosophy, although it wouldn’t actually save the world, it would come pretty close.
Everyone’s saying that neoliberalism is destroying the world by making everything into a commodity. But that’s not quite true. The same powers that are bringing commodification to almost everything are keeping it away from the one thing that really needs it: civil debate. Everyone is free to lie, bemuse, and bewilder; and no one is free to seek the truth.
Anyone who rallies a platform superficially against conservative lies is hailed by the Left as a hero. That’s not the way toward progress. All it’s doing is giving conservatives something to laugh at.
It was the Left that correctly predicted that industrial production would cause global warming, for physical reasons. Now it’s happening. Our physics was correct, and now we have the opportunity to decide on something physical to try to stave off catastrophe. But nooo, instead we get Naomi Klein, making it all fuzzy and spiritual, essentially spitting in the face of all the physicists who risked their careers to make the truth known. And what do we do? We praise her just because her rant happens to say yes it’s happening.
That’s what’s destroying us, our attempt to deconstruct reality. That’s why millions of Americans voted a devil into office. Because they were so sick of us theorizing that they were willing to sell their souls for simplicity.