That crazy libertarian rag
Stuart Millson
Keywords: Economics, Politics
During the mid-1980s, the point at which Thatcherism had reached its boiling point, a number of libertarian voices piped up from the free-market firmament to argue that "the economic revolution" born of Hayek had not gone far enough – that in taking up this economic creed, the Tory Party had merely provided it with a blue rinse, but had failed to understand its true and ultimate ramifications. The thinking went like this: if we believe in the freedom of individuals and are prepared to allow them to buy council houses or shares in railways, why not liberate them from all "constraints"? One such "constraint" was the existence of nation-states.
For extreme libertarians, the nation (being a collective entity, enclosed by boundaries and dominated by institutions and social mores) was as morally antagonistic to their creed as the idea of being compelled to join a trade union. If individuals could be liberated in an atomised free market –circulating, trading and acting according to economic self-interest – then,by that same logic, civil society should be speedily replaced, giving way to a world simply made up of individuals, buying, selling and competing with one another.
According to the classical libertarian position, citizenship could be regarded as a property right, to be bought and sold on the market. The whole edifice of human societies should dissolve into an un-policed, interchangeable,global, free-market nirvana – where even money would be denationalised.(Such a policy was even debated at one 1985 Tory student conference!) It suddenly seemed as though the Thatcherite "Right" had achieved what Marxism had failed to do: the withering away of nations and the triumph of man as an economically-determined unit. For the libertarians, free migration became the be-all and end-all. They dreamt of their perfect world:
the big-M sign of McDonalds would line the mountain routes of Tibet;
posters for cigarettes would rise next to Ayers Rock; and
the Amazon rain forest would become a "resource".
But at the beginning, the "revolution" which came to be associated with Thatcherism had very little to do with the intellectual posturing of the"lib"-ist think tanks. Margaret Thatcher originally stood, not for Britain (or the world) as a gigantic supermarket, but as a country where shopkeepers, tradesmen, private entrepreneurs and the enterprising could simply get on. Their way would be relatively free from the burdens of excessive taxation and the stranglehold of the now-outdated and cumbersome state monopolies. It was a vision, not of hard, cold, libertarian purity, but of a return to a settled England of enterprise and freedom – a society which had existed prior to the great tidal wave of nationalisation and stifling control unleashed by the post-war Labour Government. For the libertarians, though, it was a chance to latch on to one word "freedom" and inject a ruthless new agenda into our political and economic life.
A new breed of political activist entered the Tory realm and a peculiar political discourse began to manifest itself. Notions of "authority"were laughed at, or condemned as intellectually disreputable, and national feeling – the kernel of Tory philosophy – was condemned as "Nazi"by the self-confessed "anarchists" now implanted in the Conservative Party. A society in which anything goes became the goal of this generation,although such an idea had traditionally been the preserve of the campus-based Marxist Left rather than the party of Margaret Thatcher. Gradually, the Tories came to be seen, not as a party devoted to reassurance, balance and tradition– but a movement for economic atomisation, jungle economics and the worst form of devil-take-the-hindmost individualism. It was to be the party's undoing. But it was also to leave a legacy, laying the foundations for the dismantling of so much of our society's rules, ways and traditional design of living.
As surely as day turns to night, the economic "rights" of the 1980s'radicals metamorphosed into the moral relativism and moral-less social libertarianism of the age of Blair. For today's "libertarianism" has become the very antithesis of freedom, and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the phenomenon of "gay rights". For instance, a highly collectivist, politicised notion of "gay rights" has replaced the truly conservative and naturally British idea that people should be free to pursue their own private lives in accordance with normal standards of decorum and restraint. How different the aggressive, you-must-defer-to-us-at-all-costs agenda of the modern "gay" movement seems from the quietly accepted and happily-conducted relationship of Benjamin Britten and Sir Peter Pears in the 1950s and 1960s – a time of supposed "homophobia".
Wherever one chooses to look, some aspect of traditional, (truly) rational,common sense life has been overthrown by the extension and application of "libertarianism"and its many derivatives. Whether it be the struggling small farmer, destroyed because it is more "economically rational" to run an e-commerce agri-business; or whether it be the curriculum of a traditional Church of England school – overthrown because it pays insufficient attention to "diversity"and "rights" – libertarianism has exposed an emotional and philosophical link between globalism, boardroom capitalism and the race and gender-obsessed new Marxist Left.
In reality, the unrestrained global free-market – that libertarian totem– provides very little in the way of choice. Universality, or the standardisation of mass-produced items, is as much a cultural consideration for manufacturers as it is economic. For example, the marketing department of a Hollywood studio, or the makers of a packaged consumer item can only afford a certain degree of local variation, but their intention in the long term is not to adapt – to keep providing that variation according to place – but to work for the dilution and disappearance of the organically collective, the personal, the regional and the national.
The Hollywood blockbuster will have little meaning to people who prefer the conviviality of their inn on the Orkney Islands, and the necessity of owning a DVD player will possibly have limited relevance to a rice farmer in South East Asia. However, the corporations on their missions of international liberalisation cannot live and let live. They have to capture these people in the Orkneys and Cambodia, and make them into buyers and credit card numbers, for they are driven by a desire, which goes far beyond the basically rational and simple idea of trading to make a profit, or to make enough money to stay alive.
What we are witnessing today is an economic psychosis: money for the sake of money, libertarianism as an end in itself, not as a means to an end – an addiction to ever larger sums, ever greater spreadsheets, ever more noughts on those figures in the increasingly meaningless annual reports. And so the principle of individual choice – supposedly the "perfect state" of man in the global market-place – is actually abolished. The death of real choice and the standardisation of all humanity: this is the epitaph of libertarianism. Yet the legacy of this creed has saddled us with almost irreparable social and cultural damage.
Lacking the stimulation of real life, the pleasures of belonging to an authentic society, with neighbours and communities, the modern global consumer just buys and buys in order to cheer himself (or herself) up. The momentary,fleeting "lift" that buying something provides is practically all that one can do in a world which has been turned into a giant marketplace, dominated by advertising and requiring total adherence to owning, getting, consuming and conforming. It is a depressing fact, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after centuries of evolution, man's highest ambition is to own that latest mobile phone.
The Conservative politicians of today who might complain about the lack of community spirit and who wonder at the aimlessness and barbarity of urban youth might well remember their 1980s' obsessions with "the market" and the purely economic. Back in those heady, mid-1980s' days of the libertarian revival– a little number entitled "That crazy libertarian rag" was sung– Woodstock-like – in the bars after every successful lib symposium or conference. One of the verses ended with the line: "You've gotta burn that copy of Thomas Hobbes!" That explained a great deal. Hobbes, after all,warned us of the danger of the great, savage "war of all against all"– the lot of man if he abandoned the equilibrium and order which comes from authority.
As our minds are rotted and our culture coarsened by the beastly spectacle of"Reality TV"; as our environment is degraded by cosmopolitan blandness;and as the whole world turns into a sort of ghetto of consumerism, ruled by the mania and obsessions of the "rights" lobby, we would do well to ponder the root cause of it all: the sterilising, dissipating force of libertarianism.
