Liberalisms: many styles and failures

I argue here that several modern “liberalisms” have failed their proponents (and the rest of us). They were too optimistic, too dreamy (though some were extremely aggressive or cavalier). They were all, I think, substantially light on history and factual evidence. Some claimed to be in the same sort of freedom-loving territory as much of modern conservatism.

I have form in all this. I was probably overly-optimistic about the democratic process which economic growth might bring to formerly very poor countries. And I was weakly in favour of Bush junior’s invasion of Iraq. I was and remain pro-capitalist (and interesed in the institutions which should provide guard rails around its excesses.

Thirty years ago Manchester University Press (whom heaven preserve) published my Life On a Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress. What follows here is a reconsideration (not a renunciation) of that manifesto, taking into account some of the good and bad news that has filled the last 25 years. Broadly, the book asserted that modern industrial capitalism could, with any luck, deliver for the Third World what it had delivered for the West, provided it wasn’t scuppered by the luddite green thinking then common amongst the educated young.

I argue now that various liberal dreams have taken a beating recently. In the face of many super-modern threats, I argue that conservatism’s pragmatism will prove invaluable. Also: that pragmatic decency depends on a revival of character, by which I mean stalwart, honourable, reality-based adulthood at work in our leaders, masses, and in political, economic, and social institutions.

More below

Liberal failures abroad and at home: Liberalism vs Realpolitik, 2025

Very different sorts – tribes – of 1980s Western liberals have had their hopes and dreams dashed both in their expectations of the wider abroad and of their home countries.

It is to my point that I would be upset if the economics guru Martin Wolf of the Financial Times found a huge amount to disagree with in what follows. I haven’t read him for years (not since I abandoned the FT as being the Guardian for those with stocks and shares. That is: their hearts and minds were soft-left liberal but their wallets were largely selfish. I haven’t read his two most famous books: 2004’s Why Globalization Works  (with which I imagine I would largely have agreed) and 2024’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism which is gloomy about the advent of demagoguery (as I am, of course).¹Martin Wolf is a Davos-man personified. That is a reason for some scepticism, I fancy. Still and all: his comments on 2025’s globalisation in a Davos/FT piece strike this economics ignoramus as being about right. (As of 11/01/25 this was not behind a paywall.) Wolf’s second book probably does not wholly contradict the first. But it is true that he now admits to being more pessimistic than he was. Me too, a bit, though I am powerlessly willing-on the day when older, solider, better world views re-invent themselves for the modern age.

Conservatives – of whom I am one type –  can take only grim pleasure in the liberal failures I hope to identify. Realpolitik (aka, conservative cynical pragmatism) is tantamount to a wary acceptance of the selfishness of persons, whilst the dreamy sort of liberalism is au font an optimistic faith in the goodness of human nature. When liberals stumble, it usually shows the world shaping up to be a worse place than anyone would like.

I am not cheating when I say that liberal democracy is not dreamy, or even terribly ambitious. It is about the transactional plurality which makes politics out of the factionalism which can, if push comes to shove, descend into civil war.

Let’s unpick a few cases.

The Neo-cons

In the 2000s and thereafter, the military-minded interventionist Neo-cons ( widely seen as “liberals mugged by reality”) didn’t succeed in Iraq or Afghanistan. So much for Western hopes for redemptive soldiering. [Footnote: One might make a case that Iraq is a healthier society now than it was in Saddam’s day. My own support for Bush’s Jnr’s intervention was impertinent, as would be any opinion I might now come to about its aftermath.  Back then, it seemed to me unconscionable to leave Saddam in place, not least because of his abuse of UN sanctions and aid. I may have been unforgivably complacent in thinking that the results might take 50 or 100 years to work out well.]

To be fair to the Neo-cons, they might claim that it takes long-term commitment (we used to call it “boots on the ground”) to make or mend societies after a vital foreign intervention against autocracy. Some Americans wonder if US failures abroad (even way back when, in Vietnam) stemmed from lack of resolve. But even if that’s a good analysis, it prompts the thought that the Neo-cons may have been culpably naive in not noticing or not minding that their home polity lacked resolve. [Footnote: Sensible and good people on all sides wonder if the West was right to let events in Libya (2015) [footnote: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-31521282] and Syria (2013) [footnote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23892783]  unfold without Western  intervention.]  In short, the Neo-cons may have let their half-abandoned liberalism – their optimism – overcome their nascent but idiosyncratic conservativism, or pessimism. The pragmatic lesson seems to be that democracy cannot be spread by long-range missile, at least not instantly.

Neo-liberal capitalists

Seen gloomily, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s neo-liberal capitalism produced willing Western markets for state-heavy capitalist manufacturing in autocratic China. There was a decent but dreamy thought that China might become more liberal as its population was enriched. One day, that eventuality may unfold. But neo-liberal capitalism wasn’t the main engine of such “Global South” economic growth as there’s been.  The Chinese and other illiberals seem to have been better crypto-imperialists than the West, and patchily spread more wealth with their investments. So much for  Western hopes for post-colonial redemptive capitalism.

To be fair to the Neo-liberal free market philosophy, it may never have considered how much unscrupulous state muscle was required to be a big player in, say, Africa. And its do-gooding agenda never appealed to the no-questions-asked, usually kleptocratic, power brokers on the ground.

Abroad and at home, the bigger message may be that neo-liberal economists may have been overly impatient with the social democracy understandings required even by their brisk, small-state capitalism. Such habits were too vestigial in the Global South, and perhaps too stubborn in the West.

At home, Neo-liberalism may fault both the political classes and the citizenry for their half-hearted embrace of its mantras. But even barn-storming capitalism met democratic obstacles, even as it does seem to have dramatically increased Gross Domestic Product.

Capitalism’s 20th Century creative destruction looked less fun from a dole queue. Our 21st Century has disruptions which add to the bewilderment and resentment felt by millions, especially amongst those who had believed that being working class offered a protection against the ravages of progress. After 1945 they and others – trusted a Labour Party committed to class-based resentment politics, but by 1995 the party had unglued itself from that rhetoric. (They have in very recent times allowed themselves to slip back into it.) Even trades unionism lost power, or rather became the preserve of the state’s employees..

UK domestic politics do not read-across to US politics directly. But many 21st disruptions do seem to be in common across the whole Western scene. Creating “post-industrial” society has hurt those who haven’t been to universities far more than those who could monetise their degrees and  digitalisation. Two classes have been created: the Anywheres and the Somewheres (not to be so identified until the 2010s). The Anywheres are digital technocrats who build the modern media, but vitally include the creatives and opinionisers. These latter humanities graduates have been regimented by Theory into a formidable force. The Anywheres think state-based polities are boring; that human rights are innate and universal. The Somewheres believe in their families, regions and nations and cling to anything familiar about any of them.

Some modern disquiets unite almost all of these new classes. Anywheres and Somewheres are equally distrustful of the competence of their political leaders. Anywheres and Somewheres are alike cuplable in living in (separate) echo chamber worlds. Both groups disdain to commit to engage in party politics. Both groups feel that their economic and political well-being are unreliable. Both are increasingly anxious about their mental health. 

The largest single shock to Western self-confidence came in 2007. TV audiences in the UK saw queues at Northern Rock’s ATMs. Neo-liberal economics’ vaunting optimism had already created scandals. Now there was a completer picture of the scandals, bubbles and crashes of the first years of the 21st Century. Rich and poor, Anywheres and Somewheres, graduates and non-graduates, old and young, Socialists and Conservatives, were all shaken.

Soft-left liberal green liberals

Conventional soft-left liberals were never much drawn to Neo-liberalism but probably felt or at least hoped that the World Bank and the IMF might know their business and do some good in the Third World (now rebranded as the Global South, a coinage usually ascribed to Theory and its advocates). By the end of the 20th Century, it was clear to many soft-left liberals that 50 years of their economics and aid hadn’t made as much headway in poor countries as they expected. They could be thankful that – whether stemming from vulgar or virtuous economic strategies – there was rising affluence in many poor countries. But the great liberal dream didn’t happen: affluence did not produce democratic movements quite as expected. And in those cases in which liberals, albeit holding their noses, dared hope that Western military intervention would release native democratic impulses, the forces of darkness overruled them pretty easily. [Footnote: It is not even clear that Freedom House optimism was justified.]

To be fair to soft-left liberals – and to Neo-cons and neo-liberal economists – it may simply be that the West has simply been too impatient about its various hard and soft involvements with the poor of the world. It would of course be a comfort, if only one could know it, that the future is unfolding well. In 2050 Western mis-steps in the 2000s and thereafter may seem at least partly vindicated in the rearview mirror.

When Westerners looked out on the poor of the earth it was almost always assumed that what was needed was the banishment of poverty and the advance of representative democracy, or at least of responsive government. 

It may be too gloomy to suppose that the cultivation of tolerably responsive government and flourishing markets absolutely requires the background – the history – of the political and legal institutions which underlay the development of the West’s successful democracies and economies and even its successful imperialists (in, say, India and the US).

And yet it does not seem unnecessarily grim to stress that right now, many modern non-Western states do not have responsive government, are riven with profound factionalism (ethnic or religious), and often have strongman leaderships.  Such states are not obviously ripe for liberalism but are amenable to the cash, rhetoric and digital manipulations of Autarchy, Inc.

The Western mind could accept with something like equanimity the difficulties liberal interventions encounter in the Global South. Nearer home, liberal failures have been more shaking.

Western Whig History

Liberals have always believed that economic vigour and political good order have been mutually reinforcing. They wrote Whig History to tell this story.  They charted that process and progress in Europe from at the least the 16th Century until the 20th. 

It is quite possible that economic freedom and political order can no longer be seen as handmaidens, even where they have seemed to be so for centuries.

The galling fact is that in Western countries where liberalism was born and become well-entrenched, it has not really blossomed politically quite as expected. In most of continental Europe, the UK and in the US demagogic incursions against liberal democracy are staging unexpected successes.

The heart of the matter is that representative democracy seems to have produced a vacuum which demagogues have filled. They do so without coherence. They dread to seem wishy-washy. They long to seem no-nonsense and commonsensical. But as much as they accuse conventional politicians of indulging in fudge, the populists are seldom clear whether they want an interventionist political economy or laissez-faire capitalism. That is, of course, a false dichotomy. There’s no getting away from the need for a Social Democratic politics and economics. Still, nothing else so well captures the range of approaches each state may take to ameliorating the inherent brutality of unbridled capitalism. State intervention vs laissez-faire; high tax vs low tax;  socialist welfare vs insurance welfare; aggressive redistribution of income vs marginal redistribution of income. Each of these tensions has a spectrum running from “Free Market” through to “Socialist”. All them overlap as well as compete: they can be mapped in Venn diagram terms. All Western political parties are either honestly conflicted more-or-less broad churches on these matters, or haven’t faced up to the facts of the matter.

Plainly, the Western political malaise is not just or even mostly a failure of neo-liberal economics. After all, in western Europe economic life has not been all that free in recent decades. Indeed, the man or woman in the street could be forgiven for not having much idea whether the state’s economic or social involvement has been too great or too small, and has been competent or incompetent. In the US, which perhaps has freer capitalists, economic inequality and poverty are even more of an issue than in most or Europe. Its economic vigour, contrasted with much of Western Europe’s lethargies, simply shows that The West’s liberal democracies are not easily corralled into types.

The Scandinavian and Nordic countries have avoided demagoguery, and enjoy or endure high taxes and lower rates of inequality and poverty than the general western norm.  Australia, New Zealand and Canada, seem poised between Western Europe and the US in their tax takes.  A decent conclusion may be that societies that like discipline can make a go of it and that those that prefer liveliness (one thinks of the UK and USA) have to brazen it out when it comes to the pangs of inquality.

Digital technology is in the mix as a destabiliser. It has unleashed economic and political forces which are inherently disruptive. It is at least possible that major digital companies can produce huge income, co-opt politicians and evade regulation in ways which weren’t open even to the oil, coal, railway and motor car capitalists of the past. Meanwhile, the same technologies have revved-up a fissiparous population which amongst many other modernisms, including a waning interest in facts and analysis, has come to despise almost every aspect of representative democracy.

Some UK history

There is a decent case to be made that the UK has been a special basket case of late. One can adduce: a very expensive COVID bill; work-shy youngand middle-aged people who can’t or won’t engage with the modern workplace; the bill for expensive adventures in capitalism in the early 2000s; a social-media induced cult of mental fragility.

Until quite recently (say, 2008) anyone standing to the right of strict socialism could warily agree that economic and personal freedoms seemed to be at least compatible with one another, but also with social and political order.

Social Democracy was, in effect, the creed of the UK’s One Nation Tories from at least the 1930s, and became the Conservative/Labour intellectual fudge called Butskellism in the 1970s. Thatcherite rhetoric about a People’s Capitalism caught the imagination of many and went on to be the underpinning of the Bairite Labour Party rething from the 1990s. Thatcherism was a brilliant recalibration toward the right and was perhaps the first sign that an entrepreneurial spirit amongst the working class (as it used to be called) could underpin something rather less socialist than lumpen tendencies Social Democracy sometimes overlapped or even embraced.

The failure of multiple dreamy liberalisms seems to be the failure of globalisation. It’s as though we all believed that more jumbo jets, container ships, transcontinental pipelines, worldwide webs and markets, in short, more connectedness, must lead to affluence and order for all. The West had its own history to back up the thesis and could now spread its benison to all humanity.

Liberalism’s long march

Historically, many reformers (whether thrusting liberals or reluctant rightish conservatives) believed that unfettered, plebiscitic democracy would be fractious. They accepted that the accord between elites (even meritocratic, elected elites) and the enfranchised masses was fragile, contested and not sentimental. It teetered on the brink of being avowedly transactional, but it didn’t quite attain to be that much of a deliberate deal. The constitutional settlements of the world’s democracies depended on the emergence of leadership cadres prepared to have very little power and on the willingness of the masses to vest trust in the competence of parliaments and administrations.

All that is now much more in question than it was 50 years, let alone a hundred years ago.

The flux of power seems to have run like this:  the old plutocratic aristocracy of land and resources after about 1600  increasingly had to share its power with upwardly mobile capitalistic merchants and traders. There was plenty of dissension in all this. Still, democratic enfranchisement seemed to produce broad societal acceptance that things were moving in the right direction, with parliamentary government its near-guarantee.

My impression is that the modern Somewhere western masses don’t particularly mind the inequalities in society, nor care much who leads them. Their heads are not full of theories nor even great dreams for society, or of a Great Society. They don’t feel themselves to be members of a class, whether of resentment or entitlement, nor of the political parties which are designed to defend such old orders. It is more that modern Western society has too many unrecognisable features, too many confusions. “Washington” and “The Establishment” don’t seem to have a grip. I guess the left-behinds feel that the over-educated near-intellectuals have been in charge long enough and that Trump and Farage not only better represent their frustration, they promise to blast, bounce and bombast the stasis away. That the Somewheres have been seduced by a Trump/Musk demagogic tag-team which weaponises their own phones, and includes a pioneer of AI, the electric vehicle and space exploration is merely proof that the universe is still full of great jokes. Oddly, though, all this hyper-modern history is oddly reminiscent of the technocratic innovations spurred on by France’s three great Kings Louis.

What we know is that neither Trump, Farage nor any of the other demagogues in the West have an allegiance to a brand of political or economic theory. It is enough that they do not sneer at the heartfelt prejudices – the instincts – of the masses who have not been to university. It is enough that they are anti-intellectual. It is enough that they are not liberals.

Along the way, we can note that the demagogues do not argue that they are egalitarians. They don’t even say they are anti-globalisers, or anti-capitalists. They are not in any old sense, class warriors. They are not even racist about their fellow-citizens who were born abroad, unless they are recent and illegal arrivals. Modern Western demagogues are all, so far as I can see, united in wanting to be highly selective in who can now become an immigrant. And, led by Trump, they are sceptical about allowing Chinese cheapness to rob their followers of job prospects.

Ageing Western societies will have lively rows about managing immigration and conducting trade wars. Trump and other Western demagogues will prove to have been right all along, or too wrong about too much to have been more than a useful safety valve and a good example of what not what to do about modern disquiets.

That does now seem to have soured. It may be that the political elites have lost not merely their character, nor even just their instinctual passion to preserve what they can of what used be called their class interest. They have lost faith in their intellectuals. What if neither Keynes nor Hayek held the keys to the kingdom? What if a Biden quietly adopts much of a Trump playbook only for the Democrats to lose to the Republicans and for neither to be clearly the champion of a distinctive economic approach? And what if America stays plenty rich enough to hold out opportunities galore to those who can grasp the chances it offers, and dynamic enough to brush aside those who don’t straighten up and fly right?

It can’t be that the left behind Somewhere masses have become angry because they have discovered that neither Hayek nor Keynes understood the modern economy. After all, the Somewheres are defined by how little they have read or been taught.

Even the university-educated Anywheres are mostly characterised by having received a very biased and limited history. Their soft-left, liberal, green liberalism is mostly half-baked and ill-informed. That is why it has strong certainties. What is more striking now is that there is so much bewilderment amongst the intellectuals whose thinking – whose battle lines of left or right – were based on lines of argument which were beginning to be very old 60 years ago.

I am an economic ignoramus. I have been trying to understand macroeconomics (the economics of nations rather than families) for about 65 years, I have tried to believe that there was something I could understand in Boulding and Lipsey, in Schwartz and Brittan, in Hayek and Keynes, in Maudling or Healey, but none of these textbook writers, economic journalists, economic gurus or Chancellors of the Exchequer made much sense to me.

In a way, this dull wittedness has been my good fortune. I was proof against strongly-held economic opinions or left or right.  In middle age, I became a semi-detached supporter of the Institute of Economic Affairs because I did believe that, historically, societies which did well humanly became capitalist economically. I hugged to myself a little-observed tenet of IEA belief (which the institute itself tended to underplay). This was that it was interested not only in free markets, but in the “institutions” which underpin them.  In particular, I thought that capitalism could do good work for society only if society could civilise it. In short: regulations mattered as much as freedom. I count professional formation amongst elites as prime amongst the institutions which are necessary to capitalism and most lacking today.

Curiously enough, after decades of thinking the Economist and the Financial Times were probably rather wise, by the early 1990s I decided that they were unthinkingly liberal. The Economist was too brisk in its assertion that it was classically liberal (when actually it was socially too “progressive” for that claim to be true). And the FT, it seemed to me, was The Guardian for those who were more invested in their stockmarket studies than in their mitherings on wider society.

I remember thinking that even Samuel Brittan was too liberal-left in his prejudices to be as interesting as I yearned for him to be (if only I could understand what he was saying). Above all, I remember thinking that Martin Wolf was a heart and soul soft-left liberal. All the same, I am pretty sure I would have taken comfort from reading his 2004 book, Why Globalization Works, had I bothered. I do more or less believe that an interconnected planet of mildly affluent, well-informed citizens will – sooner or later – conduce to an uptick in some notional World Well-being Index.

But we are, right now, at a point where the free societies of the world are unsure how to manage economics for prosperity, at home or abroad. For all that he is widely credited with being the most respected economics writer in the world, Wolf’s 2023 The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism has been viewed as a recantation of his earlier optimism. In particular, his recipe for the reform of capitalism – for its becoming civilised (or quietly social democratic) – has been taken by the soft-left to be fairly dreamy. (I deduce this having read two reviews of the book: one in the NYRB was clever but very disobliging and leftish, the other, in the New Statesman, was less disobliging, but all the more penetratingly critical for that.

For my part, I have listened to an hour of Martin Wolf being interviewed on the over-optimism of his 2004 book and his current 2023 gloomier view of what actually happened. I can claim, I think, to be largely on his side throughout whatever journey he’s been on. My 1995 Life on a Modern Planet was, as its subtitle said, “a manifesto for progress”. It was a Whig History account of how well things had gone across human history and how the post-colonial Third World could probably adopt and adapt to capitalistic and democratic progress. It was written in the face of soft-left liberal green pessimism about industrialised modernity; I guess in 2004 Wolf was writing in the face of soft-left liberal – and perhaps green – thinking. By now, he is frankly stung by his Jewish ancestral memories. People of his background are within their rights to fear demogoguery.

I dare to say that The Global South is in the grip of such illiberal forces that there is no obvious prospect that anything the West can do will make much difference. At home, here in the West, we know demagogues such as Mussolini, Hitler and Franco can take over liberal democracies: and usually with the main long-term effect of producing a revived taste for liberal democracy. We are used to being confident that the demagoguery of Latin American, emigre Hispanic dictatorships was sui generis. Qua, Wolf (2023) and Applebaum (2023) we can’t be nearly so confident that anywhere in the world is now immune.

In the West, I can’t say which part of “democratic capitalism” or “social democracy” I now more fear for. I liked hearing Wolf say that plutocrats may learn to become social democratic than they have felt the need to be so far. He didn’t say, but the news suggests some pertinent questions. What health and pensions insurance magnate might not fear assassination, nowadays? What Palisades Heights resident might not feel rather more connected to climate change, nowadays? What billionaire parent might not fear that Nepo-kids need a good dose of “ordinary” if they are to thrive?

I fear my own prescription for a brighter economy and a brighter politics is as speculative as Wolf’s. Our adults need to savour the fact-based world in which they develop in themselves a realism, a practicality, a pragmatism, an authenticity which is proof against self-absorption and credulousness, both. Kindness is OK but doesn’t rule the world. I am all for people being Rigorous Liberals whose Number One Rule is to listen to the other person. We need gently but firmly to interrogate one another. No-one speaks so well that they couldn’t speak even better if challenged. The educated need to heed the people who know another kind of stuff. The poets need to heed the rationalists, and vice versa.

Most of the liberalisms which have backfired in the last 50 years, whether they were dreamy or aggressive, have been a peculiar blend of bossiness and dreaminess. Both these traits are the reverse of proper liberalism.

I make these last few remarks because this stuff each of us can aim to fix in ourselves and our progeny. Our character, and theirs, is key.

Footnotes

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  Martin Wolf is a Davos-man personified. That is a reason for some scepticism, I fancy. Still and all: his comments on 2025’s globalisation in a Davos/FT piece strike this economics ignoramus as being about right. (As of 11/01/25 this was not behind a paywall.)