Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge
Authors are often most revealing about themselves in their acknowledgements, which they dash off last, in an exhausted and emotional state, with no time for second thoughts.
In Adrian Wooldridge’s acknowledgements, buried on page 352, we find this book came out of the “general despair” he feels at the state of contemporary liberalism.
Wooldridge also acknowledges his debt to his former employer, The Economist, “for providing me with a thirty-two-year long trans-Atlantic education in liberalism”.
The Economist has no time for Alexander Herzen’s observation in 1855 that “on the whole modern man has no solutions”. It is inclined to imply that if only political leaders were as principled and intelligent as the staff of The Economist, the world’s problems could before long be substantially alleviated, if not removed altogether.
Towards the end of his book Wooldridge goes through the motions of offering some solutions in whose practicality even he does not sound as if he believes.
He urges liberals to become more pessimistic: “The most pressing liberal task is not to create a utopia. It is to prevent terrible things from happening.”
By this point Wooldridge has offered ample grounds for pessimism. He opens with a glimpse of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a festival of decadence where delegates subscribe to quack solutions such as “liquid democracy” while cut off from the outside world.
Liberals, he points out, used to be radicals, who challenged the status quo. Now they have become the Establishment, handing down moral injunctions to the rest of us from on high while paying themselves disgusting sums of money and ensuring their sons and daughters follow them into positions which are not open to free and fair competition.
There used to be liberal giants on the earth: Wooldridge traces a line running from Erasmus and Hobbes to Montesquieu, the American founding fathers, Constant, de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lincoln, Gladstone, Acton and Matthew Arnold.
In The Federalist Papers, “surely the finest newspaper columns ever penned”, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay explained how in the American Constitution they would “set ambition to check ambition” by separating powers and balancing them against each other.
In the 19th century, according to Wooldridge, “the direction of history was clear”: it was towards greater and greater freedom. Mill issued, in On Liberty, his great warning against the tyranny of public opinion, and the danger of growing uniformity of view, with dissidents not thrown into prison but simply dismissed as mad.
Towards the end of the 19th century this first liberal wave was exhausted, and Disraeli’s jibe in 1872 that the Liberal front bench reminded him of “a range of exhausted volcanoes” became true.
How were the ruling classes to come to terms with the arrival of democracy? Would not the widening of the franchise lead to the tyranny of the majority, mob rule, with the high civilisation so dear to high-minded liberals trampled underfoot?
According to Wooldridge, Lord Salisbury, one of the great Tory Prime Ministers (he lived from 1830-1903 and served three terms as PM, from 1885-86, 1886-92 and 1895-1902), said that governing in an age of mass public opinion was like having “a huge lunatic asylum at your back”.
Turning to Andrew Roberts’ biography of Salisbury, one finds the great man said this of Jingoism, extravagant outbursts of popular enthusiasm for the British Empire.
Many at the end of the 19th century believed liberalism was already over. In the years before the First World War the Liberal Government led by Asquith tried to remain relevant by inventing New Liberalism, an early version of the Welfare State.
Asquith, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, spoke in a light-hearted speech delivered there soon after becoming PM (he served from 1908-16) of the “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority which is the mark of a Balliol man”, a phrase I had always assumed was uttered in jest, though Wooldridge, another Balliol man, is not amused, and calls it “nauseating”.
“The dream of liberal harmony,” Wooldridge writes, “was shot to pieces in 1914.” Nor has it ever been restored. Woodrow Wilson, who with reluctance brought the United States into the First World War, was brilliant at proclaiming liberal ideals, and useless at putting them into practice.
John Maynard Keynes is one of Wooldridge’s heroes, the subject of a sustained panegyric, but between the wars the dictators triumphed, and were often worshipped by intellectuals.
The peace of 1945 was, as Wooldridge says, less defective than Versailles. He admires the founders of the European Union, but sees trouble stored up by making it an elite rather than a popular project.
Donald Trump appals him, and so does San Francisco:
“It has been impossible to visit the city in recent years without a pang in the heart. There are several thousand people living on the streets, either in makeshift tents or in the wild. The smell of urine and excrement is pervasive… America is suffering from the worst drug epidemic in its history with more than 100,000 Americans dying in the year between August 2021 and August 2022 alone…a well-organised group of left-liberals have been changing the culture for the worse…”
He is disgusted too by American universities and the way they have bent over backwards to appease the liberal left while being run by a new caste of liberal careerists:
“They run institutions, chair foundations and live in grace-and-favour mansions. They ooze from one job to another – one moment they are leaning to the left as heads of Ivy League universities and the next they are sitting on the board of rapacious banks…The liberal establishment is reproducing the most egregious institutional deformities that liberalism originally arose to destroy.”
Wooldridge thinks “policymakers need to devote more energy to remoralising the ruling classes”, but offers no hints about how this might be done, and is driven to ask “what conservatism can teach liberalism”, and to quote a magnificent passage by Edmund Burke, in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, written in 1791:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.”
Herzen, unmentioned by Wooldridge – one cannot mention everyone – wrote in From the Other Shore of the failed revolutions of 1848 that the liberals did not know the people, who “lived, laboured, suffered nearby, round the corner”.
That remains the problem. The liberals do not know the people, and into this void step the populists.