“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,” may feel like apt words for today’s politics. We have Zack Polanski of the Green Party unable to identify basic economic figures, whereas on the right, we have Reform pinching old Conservative MPs in lieu of talent and ideas.
It is not just in the UK that we witness this. The social democratic form of politics that was all-powerful between 1992-2010 has broken down. Across Continental Europe and America, the politics of the old is making way for something new. Brief sparks of revival, such as within Macron’s administration in France, are fading on the ground. Even good old Francis Fukuyama, in Liberalism and its discontent, argues that the old order is struggling under the dual combination of a lack of ideas and radicalism emerging to both the left and the right of it.
Centrism is often defined as the bulwark against political forces seeking to uproot both the old and the new in a desperate bid to change the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Yet, increasingly, centrism has been accused of siding with the reactionary tides that plague our current politics. Writers such as Jan-Werner Müller believe that this specific type of centrism has not just opened the door for fascism but have set out the welcome wagons. Unable to stand on its own terms, centrism has been labelled a weather vane forever trying to find what direction to point in. Centrism has not merely failed because of its lack of ideas but because those who hold its standard have failed themselves and the societies they were supposed to govern.
In Centrists of the World Unite, Adrian Wooldridge carefully locates a crisis both within and without liberalism. In its grandest home, the United States of America, liberalism has come under attack from within. Although China has become increasingly illiberal, it is the USA which receives the most attention. The author does not merely look to the populist authoritarianism which is increasingly challenging the institutions of democracy and law, but also the liberal elite. From ideological rigidity to lazy nepotism, which has shut the door on vast swathes of the populace, modern representatives of liberalism get short shrift in this book.
We may also have sympathy with the idea that unfettered liberty has come at the expense of true freedom. The liberalism which was once promoted by Mill, which differentiated between freedom of thought and action, has mutated into a bastardised variant which avoids passing judgement on anything from gambling, to drug addiction, to social media.
Centrists of the World Unite! is a demand for restoring what we have lost. Despite the word centrism, rarely, if ever, featuring in the book, the spirit of this argument is threaded throughout. Rather than supporting any particular individual or claim on its own, Wooldridge’s focus on the centrist disposition makes us question who in the world is really following such a path today. In a world filled with certainty, Wooldridge’s approach is refreshing for its ability to doubt all around us. It advocates for what David Cameron once termed a “muscular liberalism” — a liberalism which advocates not unlimited choice, lest those choices destroy the foundations upon which that liberalism rests, but a liberal spirit.
In America, Donald Trump led the backlash to the worship of financial markets, and laissez-faire individualism on crime, drugs, and identity. Partly because of the weakness of liberals in succumbing to the lure of the neo-liberal market, and partly because of the zealotry of the new identitarian laissez-faire consensus, liberalism according to Wooldridge has reached a stasis which requires substantial realignment.
The case is founded upon classical authors such as Erasmus, Locke, Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill who emphasised societal risk, a demand of the attempt for personal improvement as well as the freedom which came with it. This is not a deep scholarly text, but neither is it designed to be so. Instead, the work provides a functional and interesting stroll through questions of the modern day which have yet to be answered. None of these authors suggested liberty for its own sake — an invention of later liberals at the further end of the ideological scale. Instead, many such authors, such as Tocqueville, were nervous of individualism unless it was tied to a wider good, lest societal bonds fray at the edges.
Whereas previous radicals, such as John Stuart Mill, rejected established consensus and accepted being outsiders, today’s liberals are creatures of the establishment — addicted to their creature comforts such as preferential treatment at academic institutions and cushy nepotism, and are more than happy to use non-democratic institutions to force through their managerial ways if they lose at the ballot box. Perhaps the strongest indictment of the liberalism of today is that of the nepo baby. Wooldridge paints an unflattering picture of an elite grown fat from their forefathers’ success. A new philosophy of liberalism needs to be found if it is to be sustained.
Just one example used in the book is the utility of social media. According to one common formulation, social media should be perfect for free speech liberals. Platforms which transmit our thoughts around the world to create the perfect breeding ground for the best ideas to emerge at the surface. Instead, we have seen the rise of charlatans, the promotion of thugs, and an era of virality which distracts from the nuanced and the complex. Social media, for Wooldridge, has trapped us in a doom loop.
More liberals, for Wooldridge, need to wake up to the possibility of negative side effects of their grand ideas. The modern liberal refusal to judge higher and lower pleasures, as Mill would put it, has left liberalism in the lurch — unable to fashion a coherent and strong argument against the behaviours which have a detrimental effect on wider society.
The misguided belief that Iraq would become a cradle of democracy and free trade, meanwhile, was the product of elite minds imbued with an excess of optimism. For Wooldridge, we need to rediscover our pessimistic and cautious side as well. Perhaps these efforts were a side effect of what Wooldridge also describes as the abolition of the local in favour of the global. Forget raising your own country’s GDP, surely a rising tide raises all boats. Yet, this form of thinking, for Wooldridge, has simply been shown by history to have failed. Iraq, although today in a much better state than it was under Saddam, did not just pick up democracy, as any democratic country understands it is a painful and difficult process, not only to come to democracy but to retain it. The world of free trade may have created more net wealth than at any time in human history but it has also produced ever more losers and a financial crash from which the Western world has still not yet recovered from.
For Wooldridge, centrism entails foundationally liberal principles which challenge the pathologies that liberalism has entertained — pathologies that threaten electoral disaster and undermine the stability and confidence that classical liberalism once insisted on. Liberalism, according to Wooldridge, is not a series of policy statements or blind commitments, but a temperament and a culture that needs to be nurtured. The reader is taken through how this applies to problems such as education, foreign policy, the economy, and defending liberal values against emerging trends which threaten their existence.
Wooldridge stresses the need to take the complaints of populists seriously while rejecting their failed solutions and nefarious politics
For Wooldridge, if liberals understand the philosophy as a disposition, which contains the seeds of its own regeneration, then liberalism can re-emerge from its decline. Using the example of Theodore Roosevelt, a President hated by the elites, Wooldridge stresses the need to take the complaints of populists seriously while rejecting their failed solutions and nefarious politics. It is promoting expertise within the context of good judgement and not simply for its own sake.
This is not a work bogged down in the intellectual debates of academics over what liberalism constitutes. Do you believe in Fukuyama’s fear of boredom or Rawl’s original position? For some, this will be a disappointment but perhaps more importantly, this work delivers a genuine reflection on the state that liberalism has found itself in once it has interacted with the world around it. It is entertaining, eerie, and a piercing look at where societies and economies find themselves — which is, ultimately, quite a mess.
There are issues with the book. Liberal giants, such as Francis Fukuyama and John Rawls, are barely referenced, with Rawls entirely omitted, with the author preferring to focus on the 18th and 19th century traditions. By largely ignoring more modern and popular works such as The End of History, A Theory of Justice, and The Better Angels of our Nature, the work presents an incomplete discussion of liberalism in the modern world.
The book also focuses on the danger of post-liberalism, but only features Patrick Deneen, the most well-known post-liberal philosopher, in the conclusion — and there is no sign of Adrian Vermeule. More thoughtful critics of the current hyper-liberal form of society and economy which we have curated, such as Michael Sandel and Adrian Pabst also remain absent.
Still, I found the book interesting and relevant. There is no doubt that liberalism has found itself at a crossroads and crisis point. Books like this enable us to think about how it can recover.
