Market versus State: Why AOC, Clinton and the Koch family are on the same team
An essay from 2019
This essay is from November 2019. I was thinking aloud on Facebook. This in answer to a squabble about Venezuala
It’s not either /or. Conservatism has always included two traditions that came together in the 19th century: classic (market) liberalism and social conservatism.
In the former, the individual is everything. The Enlightenment image of the rational, transacting individual ...making free choices, bartering for personal advantage, overlays the epoch defining image of the franchise:the individual citizen, voting, sitting on juries, exercising individual rights etc.
In the latter, the individual is important, but embedded in other equally salient units – the household, family, marriage, community, nation.
In the mid-19th century, with the gradual extension of the franchise, the case against laissez faire economics was pressed from below by trade unions, from without by socialist agitators and from within by religiously and ethically-driven reformers. Many free market liberals began to realise that, left to their own devices, price-setting markets are liable to destroy both nature and society/social cohesion, with devastating political results. And as a result, they moved towards a greater role for the state. This is the origin of the welfare state in the UK, with pioneering roles for Lloyd George, Asquith (and even Churchill), Butler, Beveridge, Keynes and Atlee. The developing common sense, that eventually underpinned the post-war consensus politics, was that there was a pragmatic need to compensate for the market, by expanding the state. And ever since, left/right politics has been dominated by this yo-yo between market and state.
And conservatives got pulled along with this tide of left versus right, market versus state politics: at first by accepting and even embracing the welfare state; but later by demanding that society tack in the opposite direction. By the time Thatcher came along, she was able to declare that there was ‘no such thing as society’ – and the individual was everything. Such a sentiment is a million miles from Edmund Burke and this was always a one-sided reading of conservatism. She didn’t really mean it, but it did inadvertently express the societal parameters that had emerged on the back of capitalist modernization.
But ironically, having abandoned the nation-state and the prospect of social democracy, after the Berlin wall came down, and in the face of rampant neo-liberal globalisation, the left adopted a worldview remarkably resonant with that same neo-liberal vision of a society of individuals. The intersectional left, gender equity feminists, critical race theorists – all construct their identity group politics, completely incoherently, in terms of an architecture of ontotological individualism. Yes, we carry the sins of fathers (heteronormative, cis-gendered, white man etc). But these group sins are carried individually, and must be paid for individually (‘check your privilege bro’); and members of groups are individually victimised as women, trans, blacks (even if they are not). And, of course, the apotheosis of this vision is that men can decide individually to be victims and to become women or anything else (a six year old girl, in one case), by a simple act of self-designation
‘So what’ you say?
This kind of politics, rooted in that vision/reality of deracinated, free floating individuals, socially, spatially and now biologically disembedded from any pre-existing, traditional or natural societal structures, is completely antithetical to ANY first person plural ‘we identity’ that can structure a consensual, cohesive civil society.
Conservatives might not like ‘class’ as a category – but a Bruce Springsteen, class politics provides a good rationale for a kind of mixed economy, welfare state, rooted in a national ‘we’.
Black Lives Matter, aggressive Trans politics or separatist feminism – all negate any such transcendent ‘we’ in favour of a myriad of ever more fragmented and granular contesting groups, who construe every interaction between individuals, and between such groups, as a transactional, zero-sum exercise in power.
And the real irony is that this kind of politics most closely aligns with economic globalising neo-liberalism. This is why Clinton, Blair – and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and now Bernie Sanders – are on the same team as the Koch family. The Kochs jive with gay rights; Twitter celebrates and endorses every erratic tremor of Trans activism; Google demands equality of outcome (rather than opportunity) in hiring practices; they all want all women in the labour market as an article of faith rather than choice. They all want (more or less) open borders for refugees and economic migrants i.e. the free movement of labour (even as those on the official left, if not the corporations, rail against free movement of capital). They are all ideologically opposed to the (extended) family as the favoured and privileged locus of child socialisation and the primary survival group – a role it has played for 2 million years. They are all opposed to all forms of civic nationalism. Homo-economicus is most certainly the flip side of the gender-bending, hysterical SJW trans rights activist.
So what is missing from this picture? In part, the deracination of the family/community has been the default setting of capitalist modernisation for over 200 years. Since nineteenth century, those same activists, left/liberals and ordinary working people, have always depended for their ‘survival unit of last resort’, on either the Market (access to a job, employment, private pension, private insurance) or, since the war, on the State (welfare safety net, public pensions, National Health Service). By the same token, as a matter of pragmatic reality and often deliberate policy, they decreasingly, and often NOT AT ALL, on family, community, church i.e. on the domain of Livelihood. In the post-war period, for instance, single unmarried mothers became de facto wards of state as a matter of policy, bailed out and saved from absolute poverty by welfare safety-nets and housing policies. And just as the state served as provider and protector, state institutions took over paternal role modelling for young children and boys . State institutions embraced this role with some alacrity, but as voluminous evidence now shows, very little success. So for instance, the destruction of the black family in America is almost certainly the single most important factor in the impoverishment and exclusion of black America.
But as globalisation pushes back the capacities of the nation state, increases competition, increases capital mobility and undermines the welfare state – those same constituencies are becoming MORE and not less dependent on the market. And generally speaking, they are not happy about it. But although the identitarian left protests, because those activists and ideologues have become viscerally antagonistic to the civic-national basis of the welfare state, intellectually and politically, they have nowhere to go. And hence, their politics focuses less and less on political economy, taxation and welfare, and more on micro- aggressions, phantom colonialism (everywhere), rape culture, words as violence, Transphobia everywhere and the strange assertion that ‘TERFs’ are fascists. Antifa thugs attack conservatives and neo-liberals without any recognition that their tactics are fascistic and that their politics is an expression of and (viz open borders) an endorsement of neo-liberalism. And at the same time, American Democrats are unable to publicly acknowledge what some must realise in private, that tighter enforcement of border controls under Trump has lead to a tighter labour market and rising levels of employment for blacks and poor whites.
Implications ?
Bernie Sanders (Mark I) understood this, which is why he was closer to Trump and Bannon on civic nationalism, protecting a national economy and the genuinely (as opposed to rhetorically) inclusive Bruce Springsteen politics rooted in a national ‘we’.
Bernie (Mark II) now has ditched this idea. The Scandinavian/Springsteen model requires a strong attachment to place, to nation, to a cohesive and shared we-identity. This was always a difficult sell in America – so big and so diverse. In the current context, Bernie obviously realised that it was probably impossible. Perhaps it was his brush with Black Lives Matters- unceremoniously silenced at the hustings by activists intent on pushing a sectarian agenda of competing privilege and group interests. By going in with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and the squad he has embraced, at least tacitly, the agenda of open borders, a whole sale attack on civic nationalism and the indiscriminate discursive rejection of western culture /civilization which must (in European societies) undergird any collective cultural ‘we.’ This is as far from Scandinavian social democracy as it is possible to go whilst remaining under that seemingly infinitely expandable umbrella designation, ‘the left’.
And what about the other side of the Anglosphere? What about Brexit? Left-liberals in the UK, who are fervent REMAINERS, in exactly the same way, embracing a fetishized, individual, cosmopolitan diversity, at the expensive of civic national ‘we identity’. Remainers signal their cosmopolitan credentials as ‘Europeans’ and ‘world citizens’ by construing LEAVERS as Little Englanders i.e petty nationalists. All nationalism is either petty or dangerous – and most certainly anachronistic.
So where to go?
There is, however, an alternative path, which none of the 20th century capitalist or socialist traditions embraced. This is to re-assert the importance of the domain of Livelihood i.e. marriage, community, church, voluntary association, along with civic obligations at the level of state (conscription, civic service) – as a third leg, balancing both State and Market.
This would lead, perhaps, in the direction of Chesterton’s distributism, the Pope’s Laudato Si, aspects of the guild socialism of William Morris, and the cultural conservatism of Matthew Arnold and Ruskin. There is an interesting intellectual counter culture to draw upon, which melds social conservatism with Romantic socialism and green politics (for instance, of the Wendell Berry variety).
But the first step is to see that on this score, Blair, Corbyn, Clinton, AOC, the Koch brothers, are all on the same team. Team STATE-MARKET. Whether you start off blue or red, in the emerging political conjuncture, there are people across the political divide who might be your friends. Thus far, it is only the Donald Trumps, Steve Bannons and Marine Le Pens of this world who have recognised the emerging political-cultural landscape for what it is: a completely new political paradigm, in which as Goodhart has observed, the somewheres are pitted against the nowhere, where attachment or not to place and community, has become the most salient political fault line.