The rulers have lost the consent of the ruled even when the insurgents win elections, they have no control over the actually-existing levers of power. This is why we are mired in the culture wars this is why we are trapped in an increasingly heated political interregnum and this is why political crisis has become endemic across the West. Aware of their slipping grasp on power, encircled by enemies, liberals have retreated into fundamentalist fervour, fighting a rearguard battle against democracy while enforcing purity within their own ranks. And yet it hangs on to tenuous political power through its capture of the economic elites. It is increasingly rejected by voters across most of the Western world. In its purest economic form, liberalism, the ideological nursemaid of capitalism, destroys its social and fiscal base in pursuit of an idealist model, with disastrous results. Essentially a northwest European secular heresy derived from the Protestant Reformation, liberalism seeks to remake the world in its own image, projecting its own ideal form onto utterly different societies in a mission as doomed to failure as America’s wars in the Islamic world. By dividing communities, social and economic classes and nations into a constellation of individuals warring among each other in search of self-advantage, liberalism negates any possibility of collective action or solidarity. The argument is this: liberalism contains within its essential nature the seeds of its own destruction. To understand the sense of gloom pervading British post-liberalism, we must return to its diagnosis of the West’s political crisis. Instead of seizing this historic moment, the Labour Party has lost itself in the abstruse theological disputes of a liberalism increasingly unmoored from reality, and become ever more feverish in policing its ideological purity as its voter base vanishes into history. One thinks of the Owl of Minerva taking flight ‘only with the falling of dusk.’” For Rutherford, “Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renaissance and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them”. In a plaintive recent essay, Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford has claimed that “we imagined Blue Labour was about renewal, but, in hindsight, it was already too late. Yet Britain’s most prominent post-liberal theorists are not claiming victory, and are instead mourning their defeat. What was a few short years ago the preserve of marginal discontents is now the hegemonic discourse: it is the liberals who are on the back foot, dreaming up ever-more elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of their ideology. It’s as if post-liberalism has won the political argument: we are all post-liberals now. When the party’s neoliberal faction, whose decades-long hostile takeover of British conservatism had until now reigned unchallenged, is reduced to mourning its new political marginalisation, we can celebrate the end of a disastrous era, and the dawning of another. When even an inveterate social and economic liberal like Boris Johnson can give a speech at the Conservative party conference railing against big business and invoking a paternalist High Tory dirigisme as the governing ideology of the new era, it is a sign of a historic shift in the tectonic plates of politics.
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