That institutions within Western democracies have deteriorated in recent decades is clear. That the march of progressivism through the institutions is at the heart of this deterioration is also clear.1
This has been progressives acting like progressives, with all the perverse relationship with information that is at the heart of progressivism. A perverse relationship that leads directly to their degradation of institutions.
Progressives use the imagined future as their benchmark of judgement, but there is no information from the future, so there is no reality-test in their benchmark of judgement. The imagined future can, however, be as glorious as one likes.
Conversely, anything actually created by humans will have downsides and even sins attached. This gives progressives a great rhetorical advantage over anyone who attempts to defend anything humans have actually built. All of the painful history of human achievement is rendered as naught, as mute, in the face of the splendours in their head.
If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work.
For using the glorious imagined future as the benchmark of judgement creates the basis for denigrating anything that comes from the past: which is all the information we have about what works and does not. This includes denigrating the embedded learning in institutions. Even fundamental questions about what is required to sustain a social order get written out of acceptable discourse as not fitting with their imagined-future benchmark of judgement, with the splendours in their heads.
Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark of judgement also naturally leads to concluding that one owns morality, as any opposition to the glorious imagined future is clearly immoral. This leads to, at best, comprehensive disengagement with, and at worse, systematic denigration and delegitimisation of, those who disagree. A systematic denigration and delegitimisation that often involves systematic misrepresentation of those who disagree. The consequence of all this is to block feedback about one’s political projects.
The most extreme instance of this has been the UK, where the Blair-Brown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could do their thing, insulated from voters. This made the UK a state, a polity, with broken feedbacks.
Modern Western civilisation is a civilisation with broken feedbacks—as I discuss here, here, here, here and here—but the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism extended that pattern of broken feedbacks systematically to the British state. The consequences have become grimly obvious. Massive waves of unwanted migrants as part of a massively dysfunctional British state.
If you systematically kill feedbacks from voters, you systematically kill accountability. Of course dysfunction will spread across the organs of the state, as it has. (See here for a discussion of aspects of that horrifying dysfunction.)
Part of this destruction of feedbacks has been the verbal sleights-of-hand of progressivist language that elevates a performative compassion over and against the tests and constraints of creating and maintaining a robust social order. Words that incorporate embedded—and embodied—learning are replaced with terms that reflect the splendours of the imagined future, safely insulated from any reality-tests. Bums because the homeless, swamps become wetlands, standards become illegitimate exclusions, illegal aliens become the undocumented, and so on. Progressivism seeks to extend its rejection of the embodied, and embedded, learning of the past to the very language we use.
All this leads to a systematic hypocrisy, as the splendours in their head lead to a sense that they own morality. They do not, but it creates a pervasive double-standard, a pervasive hypocrisy, in order to define their politics as inherently moral in a way no other politics are. This hypocrisy acts as both an exercise in discourse dominance and as a loyalty test: those who are willing to engage in necessary rationalisations display their loyalty to the shared status game of “owning” morality. Anyone who raises questions—especially about the hypocrisy—show a lack of loyalty, or even that they are opponents, so immoral.
So, progressives have done what progressives do. The politics of the worship of the future—of using the imagined future as the benchmark of judgement—has a long history of being hostile to human flourishing. This has been grimly obvious in the history of Communism (i.e., Revolutionary Marxism). The new progressivism that has afflicted Western societies has been substantially based on Critical Theory—itself a derivative from Marxism—and various Critical Theory offshoots: Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc—that use focus on matters cultural to sidestep connections to the grotesque failures of economics-focused Communism.
But progressives must be expected to act like, well, progressives. A much bigger problem has the been the feckless irresponsibility and failures of mainstream conservatives—of mainstream centre-right politics—which has done nothing substantive or effective to stop, or even seriously impede, the progressive march through institutions and their various social vandalisms.
The problem has partly been simple ignorance of what progressives and progressivism has been about. Some of it is an inherent presumption that institutions can be relied to operate as expected, that institutions should run themselves. But both these things are part of a larger problem: conservatism conceived as protection of the status quo.
The problem with status quo conservatism was articulated by economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek in his famous essay Why I Am Not A Conservative. The status quo is a moveable feast. If one sees one’s role as conserving the status quo, then one ends up defending whatever changes the Party of Change has wrought to the status quo. This is precisely the failure we see with mainstream centre-right politics going back decades. As Hayek wrote:
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments
This concern has been thoroughly vindicated.
Again, the UK provides the clearest example. Not only did fourteen years of Tory Government (2010-2024) fail to reverse any of the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism, in some ways they doubled-down on it, most obviously through opening the migration floodgates. It is the most grotesque example of status quo conservatism, but it is simply the most extreme (and disastrous) version of a larger pattern across Western societies.
This has led to various dissenters asking, brutally, of mainstream conservatives: what have you conserved? To this is added scathing commentary about Conservatism Inc. playing the game of losing gracefully.
The problem with such commentary and questioning is that it is correct. Mainstream conservatives have been losing gracefully and disastrously. Those who acquiesced in the traducing of our institutions are in a very weak place to whine about the rise of anti-institutional politics among those alienated by those institutions becoming increasingly hostile to the general citizenry.
Even the triumphs of successful waging of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and the economic renewals of the early 1980s, have proved to be, like all victories, wasting assets. In the case of the economic renewals, not only has the neoliberal policy regime—like all policy regimes—decayed over time, as issues that it is not structured to cope with have become more salient. Neoliberalism’s own narrowness has proved to have destructive aspects.
At the heart of the failures of neoliberalism is that it has no useful language to consider the problems of social order and social resilience. It has seen societies as just places where transactions happen and migrants as interchangeable widgets: both claims being false, and destructively false.
Social order conservatism
What is the alternative to status quo conservatism? Social order conservatism: conservatism conceived as preserving a flourishing social order based on a continuing heritage. Economist Arnold Kling’s famous schema of the three languages of politics talks of conservatism as operating on an civilisation versus barbarism moral axis. That may have been the language, but it has not been the politics, otherwise the march through the institutions of a socially and institutionally corrosive progressivism would never have got anywhere near as far as it has.
Hayek continues his critique of conservatism has just slowing down a direction of social travel it provides no corrective to:
But, though there is need for a “brake on the vehicle of progress,” I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake.
That strategy of not being a corrective, that accept-the-changes mode of political operation, has proved to be a comprehensive failure. Such a comprehensive failure that the continuation of the democratic order—and the Western social order more generally—is now in serious doubt.
About liberalism
Hayek, being the classical liberal he is, adds:
What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.
But liberalism has its own limitations. Commentator Carl Benjamin identifies a key limitation in this talk, riffing off political scientist Francis Fukuyama who was himself riffing off Plato’s tripartite division of the psyche into the rational, the appetitive and the spirited (aka thymos). The first two liberalism grapples with: the last, not so much.
Liberalism has a problem with those aspects of social interactions which make a society and a polity resilient. A particularly salient example of this is what a failure economists have serially been on immigration, precisely because of their efficiency-obsessed models based on humans as utility-maximising rational calculators, societies as merely places where transactions happen, and migrants as interchangeable universal-human widgets. None of these claims are accurate: a case of three strikes and you’re out.
The (over-done) rational actor model economists use has been well and truly demolished by evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology—and, for that matter, cross-cultural scholarship. Alas, because none of the social sciences are in fact sciences—as they make no systematic attempt to be consilient with evolutionary biology, i.e., with the more basic structures of the universe from which the phenomena they study emerge—they have continued on their destructive (and very liberal) way.
It is quite clear that the past successes of liberalism have substantially rested on a wider Christian cultural and religious heritage allied to various patriotisms filling in the thymetic—the spirited, the social connection—“hole” in liberalism. This includes various notions of transcendent aspirations, of what constitutes the good life. Any wisdom in liberalism is very shallow precisely because—left to its own devices—it ends up worshipping a socially and cognitively unanchored human autonomy.
While it is clear that there are serious limitations to liberalism, it is still the case that it is much better to live in broadly liberal societies. The problem comes when liberalism is used to overwhelm democracy—and thus accountability to the citizens. The most obvious form of this is human rights jurisprudence.
Natural rights make no sense except in the notion of the universe having an inherent moral order. Such claims then rely on some form of monotheism—or on metaphysical claims that perform the same grounding function, such as the ancient Egyptian maat, the Vedi Rta, or the Chinese Tao. What we see, again and again, in contemporary human rights jurisprudence is increasingly unhinged worship of human autonomy that refuses to grapple with the reality of trade-offs and rights-limiting responsibilities.
This extends to Transactivism’s serial offences against biological reality, seeking to grant people the “right” to declare their own gender identity plus the authority to impose the implications of such declarations on everyone else. Yes, that last part is very illiberal, but the rest is liberal worship of moral autonomy taken to the unhinged level of valorising psychological disorder and/or sexual fetishes.
Human rights jurisprudence as increasingly unhinged worship of human autonomy can also be seen in migration cases, where the most ludicrous grounds are used to frustrate any citizen control over migration. The UK provides a particularly pathological example of a state that refuses to enforce its borders while spending billions on the housing and comfort of those who have deliberately flouted its laws to enter. Yes, this is an elite and state apparatus expressing their utter (self-righteously moralised) contempt for their working-class citizens but, again, the—albeit highly selective—worship of human autonomy is a key element in the serial contemptuous dysfunctions.
So, there is a lot to criticise in the evolution of a thymetically-deficient liberalism unanchored in a continuing heritage and providing no—or only an unhinged—sense of transcendence. On the latter point, Critical Theory and its derivatives (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc) have moved into fill the thymetic hole in liberalism by providing a highly political sense of transcendence. Thymetically-deficient liberalism has proved to be susceptible to colonisation by very illiberal ideas.
Blame status quo conservatism
But liberalism has never been the defining ideology of the mainstream centre-right in Anglosphere—or wider Western—democratic politics. Yes, Anglosphere conservatism has always had a strong liberal element to it. An indicator of this is how Edmund Burke (1729-1797)—a Whig and prudential liberal—has been taken to be a key conservative thinker.
Nevertheless, the real issue has been the failure of mainstream centre-right politics to be an effective barrier to either unanchored—so, increasingly unhinged—worship of human autonomy or to the colonisation of institutions by very illiberal ideas. By accepting almost every policy change by progressives as incorporated in the new status quo, status quo conservatives have just gone along with the direction of progressive travel.
The very liberalism that has pervaded centre-right politics has also tended to lead to a narrow focus in mainstream centre-right politics on economic policy, with no sense that wider cultural issues might matter. An easy, glib, presumption that institutions can be relied upon to run themselves has been used for centre-right politicians and their staffers to not bother to inform themselves about the wider issues; to not have, or prosecute, a full sense of what constitutes a flourishing social order.
Mainstream conservative politicians have not been animated either by any vision of what constitutes a good life—beyond “do your own thing” banalities—nor what constitutes a genuinely resilient and flourishing social order based on a continuing (and socially ordering) heritage. If one possesses such a vision, one can look at various progressive changes and assess them against a standard which can justify over-turning those changes that are corrosive of a flourishing social order.
Overturning as corrosive to a flourishing social order would include more or less everything the Blair-Brown Governments did in the UK. Asking yourself what progressive changes do to feedback mechanisms in your society and polity is always a good start. This is, after all, at the heart of why government production and regulation so often fail: they suppress feedback mechanisms.
A concern for a flourishing social order also forces examining what is happening in institutions, how they are actually performing. This includes whether they have become overblown, whether they need serious pruning. If the UK closed every university outside the Russell Group, it would both save billions in fiscal distress, it would also reduce corrosion of British society by toxic untruth. One has to abandon judging government expenditure by its intentions and start considering its consequences more systematically.
It has become very clear, for example, that training by institutions that do not have to bear the consequences of any failures in such training cannot be relied upon. Universities have proved systematically bad at training teachers and journalists for that very reason. Education Faculties suffer from continual re-packaging of failed ideas, while Education and Media faculties have systematically taught graduates to despise their fellow citizens and their heritage.
Even university training of doctors and lawyers has shown increasing deficiencies. In the case of doctors, ludicrously inadequate training in metabolic health by Medical Faculties has much to do with the falling metabolic health of the population. In the case of lawyers, Law Schools are increasingly unable to find lecturers in key parts of law while the non-law of international law, and the egregiously anti-democratic, anti-accountability arrogance of human rights law, increasingly pervade Law Schools. The university training of nurses and teachers has also become increasingly separated from the practical experience of their occupations.
If there is one thing any strong notion of a flourishing social order needs, it is a deep and abiding concern for what feedback mechanisms are—and are not—operating. Keeping an eye on that would have been enough, on its own, to invalidate the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism. It would also have encouraged applying a critical eye to the massive expansion in higher education, the shift away from training grounded in practical experience, and on what incentive structures are set up by university funding, including via research grants and their associated metrics.
Colonised by pathologies
A persistent concern of social orders down the ages is how to weed out bad characters. One of the reasons that European—particularly English-to-British governance—was so unusually successful for centuries was that it had an embedded mechanism for screening out Dark Triad personalities, the duel of honour which acted as a character test.2
One of the deep problems of our societies is we have not developed any substitute mechanism for systematically weeding out bad characters. Hence our bureaucracies become increasingly pathologically dysfunctional by failing to select against—and in some ways selecting for—highly manipulative Cluster B personalities. This is made worse by activist networks also selecting for bad character—those that Victorians would have called the morally insane. Inserting activists into organisations via DEI compounds both problems.
What has not been a useful substitute for status quo conservatism is Neoconservatism, which, in its descent from Trotskyism, is yet another case of everything that comes from the intellectual and moral tarpit of Marxist is cursed. Neoconservatism came in both a domestic policy and cultural concern form—represented by the now defunct magazine The Public Interest (1965-2005)—and in a foreign policy/geopolitical form, represented by the magazine The National Interest (1985-2023 in print; since February 2023 only online). The geopolitical form married disastrous Marxian vanguard politics—a combination of a vanguard policy elite directing a vanguard state (the US)—with disastrous Marxian (and liberal) illusions about universal humans with universal aspirations and cultural patterns, so universal capacity to sustain liberal-democratic political orders.
Any serious concern for social order must have a sense of the power of particularism; of the power of specific cultural and religious heritages. What is, also needed, however, is a sense of the breadth of such heritages. The reducing of the Western Christian heritage to concerns over sex and sexuality has not been helpful. It has occurred in part precisely because of impoverished notions of the patterns, nature and value of social order.
The way the UK Tories went along with, and in some ways doubled down on, the Blair-Brown traducing of the UK’s Parliamentary heritage was both a sign of the fecklessness of the British political class—who were clearly only too keen to shed awkward responsibilities—but also of the utterly impoverished nature of status quo conservatism.
Technology and social order
It is true that the scale of technological change creates dilemmas for conservatives. The sense of advancing into a future of ever-greater human capacities has certainly given much aid and comfort to progressivism. Technological change of the scale that has been experienced since the application of steam power to transport in the 1820s complicates thinking through what of our existing heritage still has power and what benefits from adjustment. But that dilemma is one every social order has to confront; it is just particularly dramatic in the case of continual, high levels of technological change.
The advent of dwellings created households—foraging bands have families, they do not have households. Factories, and then offices and shopping centres, separated households from production. The social dynamics of separating production from households is why the mass politics of the C19th and C20th were pioneered in the self-governing cities of medieval and early modern Europe. Universal suffrage is a product of mass production systematically separating production from households, throwing working folk together.
Mass societies also have mass media interacting with mass politics. The continual falls in transport and communication costs massively increased global trade—thereby generating mass globalisation, including mass migration—but has also made political organisation-at-scale ever cheaper.
The result was—in societies which already had histories of formalised political bargaining in representative bodies—the Emancipation Sequence. This was the sequence—going back to the early C19th—whereby free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. The entire point of the Emancipation Sequence was to include the previously excluded into various existing social processes and institutions.
It was a process of persuasion and inclusion. Not the bullshit Inclusion of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) whereby modern inquisitors and “Our Democracy” commissars—aka diversity officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc.—enforce opinion conformity, operating on the Inquisitor’s principle that error has no rights, and they can recognise error.
The Emancipation Sequence empowered and included ordinary people. The bullshit Inclusion of DEI empowers and institutionally-embeds inquisitorial activists.
There is always a tension between cohesion and diversity. The success of the Emancipation Sequence seemed to say that inclusion was always moral trumps; that diversity is our strength—a slogan usually parroted by those very hostile to cognitive diversity, as they think error has no rights and they can recognise error. Inferring too much from the advances in civil rights helped to metastasise the Open Society consensus into an attack on boundaries in general and so on the sinews of social cohesion.
To all of these trends, status quo conservatism represented nothing more than a slow-motion surrender. The lack of a social order conservatism willing to wrestle with all these complexities has proved disastrous.
Blaming liberalism is the wrong target. Yes, liberalism is seriously incomplete as a model of social order. It was, however, status quo conservatism that was the real disaster and which urgently needs to be replaced.
References
Douglas W. Allen and Clyde G. Reed, ‘The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital,’ American Law and Economics Review, Vol.8, No.1, 2006, 81–115. https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Dueling.pdf
Joana Araujo, Jianwen Cai and June Stevens, ‘Prevalence of Optimal Metabolic Health in American Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009–2016,’ Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, Volume 17, Number 1, 2019, 46–52. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30484738/
Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2
Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/
Richard E. Mayer, ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction,’ American Psychologist, January 2004, Vol. 59, No. 1, 14–19. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8909497_Should_There_Be_a_Three-Strikes_Rule_Against_Pure_Discovery_Learning
Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869
Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.
Feminisation of institutions has also been a corrosive factor, but that is deeply intertwined with the march of progressivism through the institutions.
Ignore the paper’s horrible econ-speak of “unobservable social capital”: substitute character and the analysis works fine.
Lorenzo, thanks...brilliant, as ever.
A welcome bit of momentary relief from observing disturbing current affairs. In Aus media the wheat keeps getting sorted from the chaff...
RIP Charlie Kirk, a good man killed for wanting to talk about ideas.