Our Post-Liberal Future
In a powerful series of articles in UnHerd this autumn (‘Why Farage is a Burkean: Prepare for the counter-revolution’, 18 September, and ‘The extinction of British liberalism: Our American masters have moved on’, 4 October), Aris Roussinos argues that both Labour and the Conservatives are now engaged in little more than ‘a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government’. The global ‘late-stage liberalism’ (the term is Danny Kruger’s) of the ancien régime is dead, buried for good by our American imperial patrons, to be replaced by a new politics of national identity ushered in by Reform. The central task of a Reform government will be to institute a ‘Burkean counter-revolution’, a ‘restoration’ of parliamentary and popular sovereignty that will overturn the ‘constitutional architecture’ of the Blair regime, which saw our age-old liberties and national independence sacrificed on the altar of universal human rights, and genuine democratic governance usurped by unelected committees, a progressive liberal ‘woke’ technocracy. The idea of a restoration – a return to the principles enshrined in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – is most associated with David Starkey, the ‘court historian’ of Reform. But it is America that will most likely be our model and deliverer ‘returning to the motherland in her hour of need’, for it is America, by virtue of that ‘very English revolution’ of 1776, that is now the repository of our ancient liberties.
There is much that is attractive in this vision. Trump, Vance and Musk have already come to our rescue by holding Starmer to account over free speech. And if anyone can forge a dynamic new relationship with Trump’s America, it is Farage. But will a return to the classical liberal values of our past be enough? Will it even be conservative in the true sense?
Prior to the Thatcher revolution, the belief that society was more than a market, more than an aggregate of selfish individuals motivated by profit and intent on maximising their utility, was central to the English conservative or Tory tradition. Society was an organic unity, a hierarchical community held together by bonds of mutual obligation, and a host of evolved institutions, customs, traditions, rituals, loyalties and affections – familial, local, cultural, religious, and national. We are social beings, born into a society, and formed in a social and cultural inheritance – and it is only within this frame that our individuality can have meaning and significance. There is undoubtedly a strong strain of individualism in English society (most notably documented by Alan Macfarlane in his The Origins of English Individualism) that pre-dates the advent of classical liberalism. Allied with the Common Law, which guaranteed our rights to private property and our individual liberties, including the right to enjoy the fruits of our labour, this individualism lends itself naturally to a free market – and so there has always been a strain of classical liberalism within conservatism. But it is the institution of private property, not the accumulation of capital or profit, that is of crucial importance to conservatives; for as Roger Scruton argues, it ministers on the one hand to our profound human need to be at home, and to offer hospitality to our neighbours, and on the other to protect our liberties. Which is why an Englishman’s home has always been his castle, not a property investment.
The problem, as numerous political thinkers have observed – Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Alain de Benoist, Michael Sandel and Patrick Deneen are among the most prominent – is that the seeds of the infinite expansion of human rights, of the woke agenda, and consequent social and cultural disintegration, are contained within classical liberalism itself. The foundational premise of liberalism, from John Locke to John Rawls, is that the individual is endowed with an authentic inner self that he has the inalienable human right to express, and that society is merely a contractual arrangement (a ‘social contract’) that enables him to do this without infringing the rights of others to do the same. There is therefore a built-in disintegrating dynamic, a centrifugal force, to liberal society.
In classical liberalism, the atomising tendencies of the market were held in check by pre-liberal social norms, customs, attachments and loyalties – by the bonds of family, community, religion and patriotism. Edmund Burke recognised this instinctively. But it was inevitable that these bonds would be undermined in time by market forces, which catered solely to the appetitive desires of the individual, and that the rights of the sovereign individual would multiply. Now, with the advent of globalism, the transformation of the world into a giant market of interchangeable consumers, with labour and capital flowing freely across borders, local and national identities are being erased, and democracy rendered a sham. In place of the will of the people, we have universal human rights.
Modern-day ‘liberal conservatism’, which is strong on global markets, private equity buyouts, the sale of strategic national assets to hostile states (euphemistically termed ‘foreign investment’) and imported cheap labour, but has little to say about families and communities, or the national interest, was always destined to provoke a popular reaction. But if classical liberalism is not the answer, what is the ‘post-liberal’ alternative?
The restoration of our constitution – our individual liberties, our freedom of speech, and democratic accountability – is an essential pre-condition. But unless this is accompanied by a restoration of the social bonds that the cult of liberal individualism has so weakened – that is, by a restoration of a cohesive national community – there will be no nation, no demos, to give substance to the democratic will of the people. Global liberalism will continue its onward march, atomising communities, reducing us to mindless consumers trapped in a virtual world, a process managed by a global technocratic elite reinforced by the resources of AI and digital surveillance.
The challenge, then, is to restore the bonds of family and local community, responsible citizenship, our religious and spiritual life, and our nation. A new elite will also be needed to articulate the common good and give voice to the people – an elite rooted in our national culture, not dedicated to its destruction. Is a Christian revival possible? A renewal of our national spirit? This might all seem a tall order in the ‘multicultural’ Britain bequeathed us by our current political class. But it is the task that any post-liberal conservative movement must set itself. Whether Reform can fulfil this role remains to be see.
