Welcome to the Age of Post-Liberalism

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack.

As I write, far-right anti-immigrant mobs are still demonstrating against asylum seekers throughout the U.K. Between these riots and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party leading consistently in the polls, the response of Britain’s so-called Labour government has been at once embarrassingly inept and dangerously Powellite. The same metropolitan liberals who, among other things, once derided Jeremy Corbyn for his insufficient attachment to Europe have since made a particularly rabid streak of cultural parochialism their own.

Faced with his own deep unpopularity, Prime Minister Keir Starmer continues his doomed quest to Farage-ify the Labour Party and outflank Reform. At present, this involves the cringeworthy exaltation of flags — a task characteristically undertaken by Starmer himself with all the charisma and vim of a substitute teacher. In the 21st century, centrist politics has supplied us with a never-ending stream of sentient press releases that are congenitally incapable of conveying even the slightest trace of authenticity or humanity. Sir Keir, somehow, leaves every one of them in the dust.

Anyway. Back in 2020, I wrote an essay for Jacobin that was partly about Starmer, published under the title “’Patriotism’ is a dead end for the left.” At the time, none of us could really conceive how far a Starmer-led government would swing to the right, but I do think the piece holds up especially well in light of where things have ended up. Having once presented himself as the heir to Corbyn’s project, Starmer — like many of his peers in the American Democratic Party — has since abandoned even a nominal commitment to the rights of migrants and asylum seekers.

In both cases, centrist liberals (and their reserve armies of consultants and spin doctors) have convinced themselves that this is in fact a gesture of savvy realpolitik. Between appropriating far-right narratives about immigration, empty flag-waving, tough-on-crime hokum and so on, the logic holds that there is a broad majority to be captured through the embrace of “patriotism” (at least as they understand it). The likes of historical precedent, current opinion polls and basic common sense suggest it’s a strategy doomed to fail even in the narrowest electoral terms.

I’ve been watching centrist liberals do some version of this for as long as I can remember. In the George W. Bush-era United States, they gushed at the idea of troops, cops, and former intelligence operatives running as pro-war Democratic candidates, as if this were some kind of political masterstroke that would beat the right at its own game rather than an explicit concession to its arguments. Generally speaking, the effect is invariably the opposite — and the right only comes away from each of these bouts stronger and more emboldened than it was before.

At a certain point, what was supposedly undertaken as a piece of political maneuvering becomes indistinguishable from political reality. On migrant rights, on transgender rights, on civil liberties, on the very idea of pluralism itself, the liberal steadily transforms into the post-liberal. Rhetorically, the far-right might remain a structuring bête noire against which all reasonable and democratically committed people must unite. But the actual points of distinction from it, such as they exist, are increasingly cosmetic and imaginary. Instead, it functions as a symbolic antagonist whose existence can quite literally be used to justify anything except actually voting for it.

The liberal, finally, must abandon liberalism in order to save it.

Since the neoliberal turn of the early 1990s, the cause of cultural progressivism has increasingly been what nominal parties of the liberal center and center-left have invoked to distinguish themselves from the sinister forces assembling on their right (and sometimes those on their left). Thus, the liberalism of the Obama era — having promptly decided to rescue the banks while millions lost their savings and their homes — sought to content itself with symbolic victories for “inclusion.” After Trump’s victory in 2016, and his near-victory four years later, liberals made openness to immigration and concern for “kids in cages” centerpieces of their crusade to save democracy alongside their performative alignment with Black Lives Matter. The British version of this, and its subsequent abandonment, has looked basically identical.

The question of Gaza, needless to say, has only brought things into sharper relief. Most liberal politicians have at best been fair-weather friends of the Palestinians. But in their support for Israel’s genocidal onslaught we have seen many abandon even a rhetorical commitment to their once-beloved “rules-based international order.” Whether they upheld them in practice or not (and it was very often the latter) previous cohorts of liberal elites still sought to ground their geopolitical rhetoric in the idioms of human rights and international law. In the dying days of the Biden White House, the administration’s dead-eyed spokespeople instead greeted every airstrike on a school, hospital or refugee camp with a smirk.

What all this harkens for the politics of liberal democracies is incredibly bleak to consider. For decades, a broad consensus has held that the era of neoliberal capitalism — whatever else it might bring — was at least destined to remain liberal in the social and cultural sense. The first half of the 2020s have shown us just how flimsy that premise may ultimately have been.