The Conservative Reads: Centrists of the World Unite!

Can liberalism heal itself and the world?

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Centrists of the World Unite! is the more considered print version of one of the fastest growing forms of elite media, the ‘Centrist Dad’. However, unlike the plethora of podcasts that have infected our feeds, Wooldridge brings the knowledge and insight you’d expect from a well-respected Economist, and now Bloomberg, journalist. Rather than endlessly blaming foreign actors or ‘disinformation’ for recent events, like most of the Centrist Dad Universe, Wooldridge has come to see that there is something fundamentally rotten in the state of the Western world.

The essence of the book’s argument is that the positive qualities of liberalism (meritocracy, pluralism, belief in free exchange) have been shunted aside for identity politics, globalism and market fundamentalism. In many cases, these darker sides to liberalism emerged for understandable reasons (the civil rights movement, the opportunities from global free trade, reaction to trade union militancy) but they have simply gone too far. The ‘good old liberalism’ was replaced with “liberal triumphalism” that simply went too far and tried to spread these values at the point of a gun around the world.

In many ways, it builds on the (in my view stronger) argument made by now Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy, in his excellent book Remaking One Nation which called for a defence of ‘essential liberalism’ rather than the ‘elite liberalism’ of the kind that Wooldridge also attacks. The consequence of this perversion of liberalism, as Wooldridge sees it, is that it has created reactions (Brexit, Trump, Reform - insert your centrist bête noire here) that are pulling society apart. The response is that centrists (and I presume Wooldridge would include many conservatives in this) need to come together and put good old fashioned liberalism back at the heart of our politics.

So much of the book is a Centrist Dad version of the Aristotelian ‘Golden Mean’. Can we have authority and hierarchy, but not too much? Can we have free markets and free choice but also a “liberal paternalism” that stops people making the wrong decisions? Can we have empowered nation states but also keep the global institutions to enforce the rules based international order? Can we be progressive but not have too much progress? Basically, can we go back to that golden period of the 1980s and 1990s where everything seemed to be going quite well?

The obvious answer is no. We cannot. Why not? Simply put, liberalism is not a self-correcting system that allows for this ‘Golden Mean’. The biggest barrier to centrist liberalism is the very philosophy that Wooldridge espouses.

What does liberalism mean to Wooldridge? “Individuality”, “freedom” and “tolerance”. As Wooldridge says:

“Liberals start with the individual and work upwards where previous political systems had started with the collective (the community or the state) and worked downwards. Liberals believe that people should be judged as individuals rather than as members of social and biological groups. They also regard freedom as the signature political virtue…Liberalism broke with the idea that we should pursue collective salvation by worshipping in the same church and living according to the same political code.”

Strangely, Wooldridge says that this political liberalism was born against the ‘extremes’ of the French Revolution. This would no doubt come as a surprise to men such as Robespierre, Danton and Saint-Just who very much saw themselves as embodying these liberal ideals. After all, their so-called Montagnard Constitution of 1793, is a liberal document par excellence. After stating the goal of society is “the common welfare”, it then states that “Government is instituted in order to guarantee to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” These rights are “equality, liberty, security and property…liberty is the power that belongs to man to do whatever is not injurious to the rights of others; it has nature for its principle, justice for its rule, law for its defence; its moral limit is in this maxim: Do not do to another that which you do not wish should be done to you.” The problem has always been, as critics such as Burke and Hegel articulated at the time, that relying on these abstract liberal principles is a recipe for disaster because they create concepts that can never be realised and constantly tear down any positive project to build a better society. This mistake is compounded with political liberalism’s other essential feature, that all decisions must be valid through the logic of Kantian pure practical reason where all traditions, contingencies and faith are removed and only those decisions that the sovereign individual can make into universalising categorial imperatives are valid. It leads to the dead end of Rawlsian liberalism. This is not merely a matter of historical debate, but something that shapes the biggest issues of our time.

The author is a scathing critic of the “politics of identity” on both left and right. He is justly concerned about the rise of Islamism and blasphemy laws but also ethnonationalism on the right. However, as with so many things, the author does not seem to understand that liberalism has created this existential battle for identity because it has stripped national identity of any substantive content. Do not be an Islamist. Do not be an ethnonationalist. But what should one be? A conservative can answer easily. Be British. Loyally support our Crown and our Constitution, participate in those local institutions that give us meaning from the school fete to the local sports club and meet your civic responsibilities through jury service, voting and helping your fellows. What does the liberal offer? Defend ‘liberal values’. In his call for an end to culture wars, Wooldridge draws on similar ideas of ‘civic nationalism’ which Martin Wolf calls for in his recent centrist book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Yet ultimately when you peel away the packaging of this civic nationalism, there is nothing in the box. For the abstract liberal values that they are calling for us to defend are the very values which those on the far-right and Islamists are using to justify their actions (the freedom of their religion, their freedom of speech etc.). This liberal nationalism not rooted in anything real, it is just people shouting at each other.

The only answer to the extremes that threaten to pull us apart is not to quote John Stuart Mill at people or invent some pseudo-legal sounding rights. Our response to these people is simply to say that “we do not do this sort of thing here”, appealing to our traditions, our institutions and the long-held beliefs. It is a reasoned belief, drawn on our experience and our preferences. This conservatism enables us to see things as they are. We do not really believe in freedom of speech. We have a generous tradition that should be able to speak, write and debate what they like providing it does not disturb the public peace. It is a tradition that emerged through centuries of give and take, experimentation and contingency. It does not depend on liberalism (toleration predates liberalism by hundreds of years, as Wooldridge notes) and cannot be defined or implemented in an abstract way, it is simply a matter of judgement. It is a judgement that we have entrusted to our politicians and our courts because we assumed they would operate within our political tradition or put the national interest (balancing the positive benefits of freedom with the equal positive of public order). This limit has been fairly broad in our recent history because we did the hard work of building a strong social fabric where people shared most of their fundamental beliefs (Monarchy, Parliamentary Democracy, The Rule of Law, Christianity) and assumed the patriotic commitment of others. In times of war or crisis, most people have no qualms with restriction because we know that different circumstances require the boundaries to be reset, but we trust that when peace returns, we can return to normal. British liberty is the consequence of delicate balance based on a shared history and a shared culture. It is a system breaking down because we have tried to universalise it and appeal to abstract ideals, rather than making decisions in the national interest.

The same is true for our economic order and the global order. The biggest sustained rise in living standards was not under the ‘liberal’ economic order of the 19th Century, which the author approvingly references, but the system we developed after the Second World War to avoid mass unemployment and poverty. The global order was balanced at those times when we decided not to trust our security to vague notions of universal citizenship, but when we had strong defences and mutual respect.

Ultimately, it is the British (and to some extent American) political tradition that Wooldridge is essentially defending and with good reason. It is the tradition that conservatives defend because it is our tradition, our living tradition, not because it conforms to some dead philosopher or international treaty. The good news is that you can get all the benefits of liberalism that Woolridge states (meritocracy, equality before the law, market capitalism) without having to embrace the round-about way that he chooses to get to these outcomes.

The author makes many good points, but rather than being a centrist or a liberal, he sounds like a lost conservative. A conservative who has ignored a positive disposition - a liberal, tolerant one - and instead embraced a doomed political project. The only political project that matters is not maintaining a desiccated universal liberalism, but defending the British constitutional and cultural settlement that we have inherited through the generations. You cannot achieve this conservative end, however, with liberal thought because it denies you the very tools you need to do the job.

Wooldridge thinks that liberalism is like Holy Spear in Wagner’s Parsifal. Where only the weapon that made the wound can heal it. I’m afraid to tell the author, that unlike in Wagner’s magical opera, picking up the spear of liberalism will not heal the wounds it has created, it will simply create more of them.

You can buy a copy of Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge online or, even better, support your local bookshop.