The new British Prime Minister was elected by 80.000 members of the Conservative Party; it has imposed a regressive "mini" budget and policies that most people oppose, but its only real obstacle is the actions of a handful of speculators and financiers.
The mini-crisis that followed the mini-budget symbolizes the feeling of many people towards a world where bad things happen over which they have practically no influence. This is the perception from which support for the critique of liberal globalism springs, and which significantly shapes politics today, from the left to the extreme right, and introduces confusion about how to distinguish a progressive from a reactionary critique.
The success of the "Italian Brothers" movement in last week's general election, following the success of the far-right Sweden Democrats two weeks earlier, is the latest in a series of expressions of public disillusionment with the mainstream parties. In her post-election speech, the leader of the Italian Brothers, Giorgio Meloni, condemned liberalism and globalism, the belief in universal rights and the reduction of people to the status of "consumer slaves". This has captured the imagination of many mainstream figures, both left and right, who say Meloni is "saying what we're all thinking" and represents a "communitarian challenge to the ... Kantian universalism of the EU".
The themes that Meloni points out are actually long embedded in the history of the reactionary right and lie at the basis of contemporary regressive hostility towards migrants, Muslims and the principle of equal rights. However, her condemnation of capitalism resonated much more widely, among many critics on the left.
In his new book Blue Labour, Labor MP Maurice Glassman similarly criticizes liberal globalisation, arguing for the importance of bonds and mutual obligations within the community against a world that emphasizes individual rights and autonomy. Capitalism, he writes, "treats human beings and nature as commodities," leading to "degradation, powerlessness, and inequality."
Glassman says the British labor movement is based on many sources, from Aristotelian virtue ethics to the ancient tradition of "freeborn Englishmen". From these different traditions, he claims, the labor movement can derive the ideal of the "common good" and thus raise a barrier against the plundering of capital.
A similar argument is repeated by many communitarian and "post-liberal" thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic; figures such as Michael Sandel and Thomas Frank, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin. Repulsed by the excessive individualism of liberalism, many of these thinkers now rely on Edmund Burke's "faith, flag and family" conservatism. Glassman himself calls the blue labor movement a type of "Burkean socialism."
The idea of the "common good," however, can obfuscate as much as it clarifies, and is as often used to exclude and divide as it is to include and connect. When Aristotle wrote about the common good, he excluded from his concept the needs of women, manual workers, slaves and others who were not considered citizens at the time. In early modern England, Catholics were considered not to belong to the moral community, Jews even less so. Today, migrants and Muslims often have a similar role, as people against whom the moral community is defined.
"The real cost of community," argued the late philosopher Roger Scruton, is "intolerance, exclusivity" and "vigilance against the enemy." Scruton was neither a blue-collar worker nor a post-liberal, but an authentic conservative, an old-fashioned Tory. His Burkean ideas about culture and nation, however, deeply influenced post-liberal thinkers, who began to understand the "good" through a narrow notion of the "general".
Such a limited concept of the common good can be seen in many contemporary ideas, such as the distinction that is often drawn between "working families" and "welfare parasites". This is most clearly seen in the support for the unethical deportation plan in Rwanda and the claims that Theresa May's "hostile environment" policy, which led to the Windrush scandal, was "obviously" right, while "the only thing wrong was its awful name".
The irony is that the appropriation of Burkean notions of community detracts from the importance blue Labor attaches to class. Many members of the blue labor movement point out that globalization and free market politics have led to the marginalization of class politics, and therefore the needs of the working class. At the same time, however, by asserting an exclusive moral community, they suppress class interests in the name of community or nation.
Instead of recognizing low wages or a lack of affordable housing as the result of public policies that marginalize the needs of the working class, these problems are blamed on immigrants who steal jobs and apartments. Such an approach gives legitimacy only to genuine reactionaries, such as Meloni who will agree with Scruton that the real cost of community is intolerance, exclusivity and vigilance against the enemy.
Thinkers like Glassman are right to insist that any immigration policy, liberal or restrictive, requires a democratic mandate. But that does not mean advocating for unethical policies. It is not true that every society will always be hostile to immigration; on the contrary, over the past decade the British public has noticeably relaxed on the issue of immigration, although the numbers have remained high, which seems to have confused many blue Labor and post-liberals.
Burke's conservatism is not the only possible criticism of liberal individualism, nor the only way of thinking about "communities". Over the past two centuries, there has been a more radical challenge to liberalism and a more radical notion of community, conceived as a collective movement for social transformation.
It was radicalism embodied in various figures, from the Chartist Ernest Jones and the great African-American leader Frederick Douglass, to the most militant suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst and the Caribbean Marxist philosopher and historian SLR James. They rejected liberal individualism and Burke's conservatism, aware of the importance of collective action, opposed market philosophy, and often capitalism. Today, that radical universalism is largely absent as a social force, leaving many to narrower, Burkean concepts of identity and community.
Criticism of liberal individualism and globalization is vital, but how and which aspects of them we criticize is just as important. Otherwise, we will simply normalize the reactionary politics of people like Meloni, and even believe that they "say what we all think."
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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