How freedom can win elections in the dark 21st century

The West used to understand that liberty is the best route to security. It has forgotten this basic wisdom, to catastrophic effect.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

The story goes that libertarianism is spent as a political force. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel captured the received wisdom of our time when he declared in a viral 2009 essay penned for Cato Unbound: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".

Thiel went on to lament:

“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.” 

According to the Paypal founder, with libertarians facing certain doom in the electoral realm, their great task in the 21st century is to “find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guide so-called “social democracy.” He has called on freedom lovers to strike out to new frontiers beyond state control, whether that may be in cyberspace (cryptocurrency) or the oceanic wilderness (seasteading). 

There is overlap between Thiel’s position and the deriding attitude of Brexit campaigner Dominic Cummings. The latter of course is not a libertarian but rather a Cold War-style statist who has advocated the application of Schumpeterian shock therapy to the Western system, forcing it to revert to the golden ‘Manhattan Project’ age. Though he played an instrumental role in the Brexit campaign and Boris Johnson’s landslide majority in 2019, both phenomena that were in part spurred by a residual if vague British commitment to the freedom cause, Cummings maintains:

“[Libertarians] cannot win elections in a democracy. The most they can ever hope for is small marginal improvements in odd niches. Cowen/Tabarrok influencing half-doses and rapid tests is about as good as it gets. It’s impossible to do what libertarians want and make a democratic culture libertarian.”

I do not share their pessimism, which seems oddly ahistorical. The reality is that freedom and democracy have proved perfectly compatible and complementary ideals throughout the West’s history. 

In fact, across the centuries, freedom has often served as a powerful ideological basis for winning elections. This includes the recent past, following the dawn of universal franchise and the rollout of the minimal welfare state.

What is even more striking is that throughout modern history the very conditions that we assume preclude freedom’s relevance today — volatility, uncertainty, division, and mass yearning for certainty — only poured fuel on the flames of liberty. 

It is hardly a coincidence that the cause for individual freedom has burned brightest in the West, a volatile region that from the Middle Ages was defined by internal military strife and political division on a scale that invites comparison with sub-Saharan Africa and Japan.

Of course, something peculiar happened in the West from the 16th century that did not happen in either Africa or Japan: namely, people started to invoke mass progressive freedom as an antidote to internal chaos. 

This trend first emerged most clearly in 17th-century England, a world of conspiracy, rebellion, conspiracy, riot, treason and plot where political violence was considered a gentleman’s “birthright”. Neither monarchy nor Parliament had proved able to create a system of organisation that could lend society coherence and order. In that objective, James I, Charles I, Cromwell, Charles II and James II had all dismally failed. 

Out of the entropy emerged an ideal of freedom that cast itself in severe contrast to the chaotic status quo. This English ideal of liberty rested fundamentally on the notion of men being ruled by ‘good law’ rather than the arbitrary tyranny of men. ‘Good law’ was to be rationally and democratically crafted by elected MPs engaging in discussion and logical reasoning. A code of law which guaranteed each maximal freedom was hailed as the one thing that a divided realm could possibly unite on.

It is intriguing that this definition of ‘liberty’ evolves in opposition to an earlier, pluralistic understanding of ‘liberties’ that emerged in the Middle Ages. These were basically narrow, restrictive privileges bestowed by the monarchy on various power groups, from barons and the City of London to the Church. Their prevalence in Early Modern England goes a long way in explaining why the country was so unstable.

Liberty in its origins then was an unabashedly aristocratic concept. It was also, in truth, profoundly destabilising. But, in an interesting twist, liberty has evolved over the centuries as the answer to itself as a problem. 

It is important to understand this aspect to freedom; until recently, the overarching thrust of modern Western history has been that freedom begets disruption which, paradoxically begets more freedom, as periods of instability and division only intensify support for the cause of liberty.

(Only very recently has this story arc faltered. As progressive liberalism has congealed into radical centrism, Western history seems to have tipped into a different self-reinforcing pattern, whereby technocratic managerialism leads to destabilisation which paradoxically only increases the calls for neat expert solutions to the world’s problems.)

Freedom has also functioned as a crucial stabilising ideal in America since the country’s founding. A nationalism of ‘rugged liberty’  — based on a rejection of the crown and hereditary aristocracy, but also the dream of self-sufficiency and a revelling in abundance, epitomised by the agrarian freeholder vision — helped meld together a new country of immigrants that lacked a hostile neighbour against which to define itself. 

Through the 19th century, the Republican ideal of freedom — based on low taxes, free labour, social mobility, self-help and an approach to politics that tolerated diverse views — evolved as a unifying, stabilising antidote to the bitter division and political anarchism of the Civil War. Republican Presidents consecutively won elections by championing black civil rights not merely on moral grounds but because northern voters genuinely believed that the liberation of slaves could bring ‘national quiet’. It has always struck me that the slogan of the commercially minded Georgian state capital, Atlanta, is ‘a city too busy to hate’.

What is striking is that the extension of the franchise and clamor for a welfare state did not dampen the cause for freedom, but merely altered it. 

Nowadays, economic socialism is preoccupied with ‘redistribution’ and ‘tackling ‘inequality’ as if these were ends in themselves. But at least at first, economic freedom was the rallying cry of socialism. The overarching mission of the 1942 Beveridge Report, which formed the foundation for the British welfare state, was to deliver ‘freedom from want’. Formulated in the midst of the most destructive war in history, welfarism worshiped the twin gods of fair play and liberty as the ideals “for which century after century our forefathers were prepared to die”.

Meanwhile, American socialists viewed it as their heroic task to “gather the shards of liberty” scattered by capitalist millionaires. Under Franklin D Roosevelt, the Democrats transformed from a clientelist organisation narrowly dedicated to localism and state rights to a broad coalition of farmers, factory workers, liberal intellectuals and white supremacist southerners, devoted to the securing of mass liberty through social security and state intervention. 

Until very recently the stated aim of American socialism was not equality but liberty. It sought Jeffersonian ends through Hamiltonian means. And it won big victories by pushing this ideal. 

JFK’s captivated America with his challenge to fellow countrymen that only by  channelling the rugged American spirit into a new ethos collective effort and common fraternity could the country conquer the New Frontier. 

When Lyndon Johnson rolled out a series of anti-poverty programs that would form the basis of the modern American welfare state, he did so with the explicit aim of spreading freedom. Rejecting the idea of direct cash assistance, claiming it would fuel dependency, he instead focused on building up basic services in housing, health, and education that he hoped would breed vigorous, resilient, self-dependent Americans. 

At some point Western socialism got so bogged down in the egalitarian means of its mission that it mistook it for its ends. But there was nothing inevitable about this drift. And it certainly was not a reflection of some kind of intrinsic incompatibility between freedom and the dawn of universal suffrage or working-class aims.

This is all aside from the Right’s thumping victories on a liberty ticket under Reagan and Thatcher. On both sides of the Atlantic, the advent of the Cold War, and the failure of Keynesian economic interventionism created an opening for fledgling conservative parties to build powerful new voting coalitions by preaching a vision of freedom based on a holy trinity of self-reliance, low taxes and minimal governance. 

Their framing of Western freedom as an unleashing of the infinite capabilities of rugged individuals by scaling back of the inert and artificial forces of the state had mass appeal. In Britain, such an ideal offered  not just traditional shire conservatives but also struggling entrepreneurs and the aspiring southern working class an exhilarating refuge from the claustrophobic hopelessness of British collectivism, and the queasy, slow-burning sense that the country had spiralled into decline. 

In the United States, Reaganite rugged optimism tapped into mass revulsion at bureaucratic-corporate American modernity, which was bland, mechanical and uniform. Reaganism’s emphasis on economic rather than social liberty also made it possible for the Right to build a powerful coalition uniting enterprising metropolitans with conservative evangelicals who, while broadly anti-liberal, were receptive to capitalism, interpreting the amassment of riches as a sign of divine benediction. 

Turning against freedom

But of course in the last generation, things have changed drastically.  

We have lost our innate sense that freedom is a stabilising force. It is, instead, widely held that liberty is a threat to sustainable order, and therefore needs to be reined in. We live in the era of ‘securonomics, ‘managed capitalism’ and ‘de-growth movements’, which start from the premise that capitalism is not a self-regulating system that melds people of varying backgrounds and beliefs in mutually beneficial endeavour but a ‘destructive’ and ‘pillaging’ force needs to be controlled — or in the context of the climate threat even reversed.

Human liberty is not seen as the answer to questions of super-catastrophic risk but part of the problem. Whether in the context of pandemics or eco-degradation, many have started to wonder whether the West’s culture of egoistic individualism might now be proving its Achilles’ heel, rendering it incapable of the kind of collective precautionary action that is necessary to survive in the age of super-catastrophic complex society. 

Western political leaders typically take the view that our uncertain, stagnating age requires not greater freedom but tighter managerialism: more neat, authoritative legal fixes to messy and charged political problems, more intensive and mathematically advanced deployment of predictive modelling in order to understand and anticipate a volatile world, more measures to ‘nudge’ or compel the populace into harmonising behaviour.

Some are attracted to the notion that the encroachment of the irrational democratic process on decision-making process needs to be minimised now that governmental and international decision-making carries such high existential stakes, 

Populism does not offer a straightforward challenge to this illiberal turn by the ruling class. The current rivalry between populists and ‘technocratic elites’ is not turning out to be straightforward rivalry between the causes of freedom and technocratic control. In fact, populist parties are typically galvanising voters not with impassioned calls to freedom but by offering an alternative vision of security to their technocratic counterparts. 

Populism starts from the premise that the Western liberal mission has overreached itself. It amounts to an almost total repudiation not only of the Reaganite/Thatcherite vision of liberty, based on free market globalisation. 

Trumpism not only favours tariffs over free trade and border control over open borders, but rejects the Reaganite tendency to minimal governance, insisting that the state must actively intervene in the capitalist system in order to engineer jobs in the rust belt. 

The basic conditions that sustained steady support for freedom at the ballot box appear to be disintegrating. Collapsing entrepreneurship and the shrinking of the middle class has eroded the voting base for the freedom cause.

What is freedom anyway?

All this does not mean that freedom is condemned to electoral irrelevance. Liberty is longer a vote winner for the simple reason that we cannot clearly say what it is to be free in the 21st century, or why freedom is important. More specifically libertarians no longer have an argument for why freedom serves as an antidote to the chaos of lived experience, and the entropy and uncertainty of our times.

The view that the Western tradition of liberty boils down to ‘non-interference’ is clearly outdated. While the age of the surveillance technology, emergency lockdowns, cramped cities and professional lives punctuated by pointless meetings might produce in some a longing to be left alone, this is not the liberty that most people overwhelmingly crave.

Instead it is the freedom of ‘taking back control’. The 21st century is producing a deep psychic yearning for agency. We desire above all other things to move purposefully through the universe rather than drifting along ghoulishly like interstellar dust, powerless to outside forces. 

This craving is the driver of so much politics. The cult of Trump is driven by a fascination with his mobster prowess — like the gangster anti-hero archetype, he knows concretely what he wants and goes out and gets, irrespective of the consequences. 

The image of the nation state, powerless to control its own borders, is a mere metaphor for modern man who is struggling to operate on the most basic level as an autonomous entity, through the selective absorption and response to external stimuli. In the age of mass information, hyper consumerism and chronic stagnation, he feels himself disappearing into environmental flux.

One of the most important and least discussed sentiments of our age is that the system of internal cause and external effect has broken down. Visiting deprived council estates in the rust belt, people have repeatedly told me that they do not subscribe to an input-output view of reality. They genuinely believe the prevailing force that characterises the universe is luck. That what matters is not how hard you work or whether you can put your mind to something, but rather who you know, and whether you are in or out of favour with whatever gang rules the roost. Among the middle class this attitude is not quite as severe, but it is getting there. 

Political leaders do not intuitively grasp this sense of collapse of basic human agency in the way that their predecessors grasped the Early Modern Englishman’s exasperation with disorder or the 19th century American’s fixation with self-ownership. More often they get things completely the wrong way round, assuming that people want the government to solve its problems.

In fact, when the people who I talk to in Red Wall towns complain about the failure of the state, it is usually with respect to some or other broken part of the system preventing them from getting on.

For example. In Hartlepool people are endlessly frustrated with the fact that local transport is such a joke that it is simply not possible to get out of the city before 9am on a Sunday without a car. Unless you have means, it is impossible to take up shift work job in the surrounding areas that have more opportunities like Middlesborough.

Some pseudo-libertarian politicians like Kemi Badenoch have started to talk in a woolly fashion about the need for “the state to do fewer things better”. But what people want is for the state to operate a bare bones infrastructure that will help them to get on with their lives. Deprived of a basic ecosystem that will enable them to get on, they are giving up on the notion of individual human autonomy.

In a nutshell, populist rage is being driven by a profound collective desire for the kind of personal stability that can only be attained through the exercising of basic human autonomy. But this is way over the heads of most politicians. This includes libertarians; blindsided by the view that freedom is about non-interference, they have failed to see this potential political ‘opening’.

Freedom, understood as agency, is the only means by which human beings can attain a genuine sense of personal stability in the post-modern age. Liberty can also make society materially safer in the super-catastrophic age. And yet libertarians are failing to grasp this latter argument too.

This is in part because their pro-capitalist polemics have grown tedious and uncompelling. Clearly, the challenges and uncertainties of the 21st century are considerably aggravated by stagnation — and to address stagnation requires an increase in economic freedom. Of course, libertarian arguments in favour of economic freedom are immediately met with deriding snorts about “trickle down junk economics” and “tax cuts for the rich”. Nor is rhetoric about people being “crushed” by taxes or “held back” by red tape really cutting through.

I suspect that this is because such complaints do not capture the profound spiritual damage that is being wrought by the entrapment of the vast majority of people in uninteresting, poorly paid — and amid the explosion of professional, legal, managerial and administrative employment, often even seemingly pointless— jobs. As the late David Graeber pointed out in his storming article on Bullshit Jobs the prevalence of unrewarding work ”is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

Libertarians urgently need to get to grips with this phenomenon and incorporate it into an economic plan to unleash the potential of the knowledge economy. The reason that a plethora of new high-skilled, well-paid jobs have failed to materialise in the technology and services industries on a scale to replace the old manufacturing jobs is that the fruits of the knowledge economy are currently being hoarded by a minority of elite global forms, undergirded by a protectionist IP regime enforced through the mechanism of the WTO.

The great blind spot of Thatcher-Reaganism was that while it advocated the liberation of the flow of capital and trade in goods, it completely overlooked the flow of ideas. Until libertarians start to understand this oversight and its catastrophic implications for Western economies, the notion that they can somehow ride the waves of populism to deliver their Right-wing economic agendas is for the birds. 

I will leave a more extensive rant about the dismal state of libertarian economic policy for another day. Safe to say that champions of freedom would probably have more immediate success by pointing out more often and at a louder decibel that solving the hyper-crises of our time — from pandemics to climate change — requires a social atmosphere conducive to free thinking.

The blindingly obvious fact that society will need more clever people than ever to solve super-wicked problems, and clever people thrive best in an ecosystem of freedom that permits them to say and think wacky and unorthodox things, is rarely articulated. And yet there are obvious examples one can point to. Lockdowns did not see off Covid. This was catalysed by the rollout of experimental vaccines, in an atmosphere that for a brief moment increased the threshold for acceptable risk. 

A return to the freedom of ‘good law’

Libertarian Brexiteers have, in recent years, been steadily groping towards the traditional understanding of freedom as ‘good law’.

However, while the Right delights in lambasting the EU as undemocratic/protectionist etc, it has not yet developed clarity on the potential for a return to ‘good law’ to bring stability to a chaotic world. This is in spite of the destruction being wrought not only by sledgehammer regulation but the cataclysmic Procrustean drive to make life fit the rules of the models rather than the other way. 

Let me put this less polemically. Decision making in management and regulation is typically informed by statistical calculation and modelling based on probability theory. The problem is that many of the complex risks thrown up by everything from pandemics to new areas of innovation like nanotechnology and biotechnology, are not amenable to statistical calculation based on probability theory. Their qualitative impacts are not easily reduced to data, and they throw up uncertainties that probability theory cannot allow for. Captured in a sentence: the technocratic toolkit for world management is redundant. 

The only answer to this is anchor systems of management and regulation in principles of freedom. This, I would argue, requires a new movement for freedom understood in the traditional English sense as ‘good law’. When it comes to regulating areas like biotechnology and nanotechnology, we need a shift in emphasis from the precautionary principle, which aims to liquidate risk to the innovating principle, which is willing to take reasonable risk, weighing up the value of the opportunity.

Some legal minds have starting talking about the need for “uncertainty tolerant law”. The thinking is that law should lend people maximal reasonable freedom to operate in new frontier realms that nobody fully understands, such as AI. That is should adapt constantly to new information rather than rigidly fixed and informed by precedent. That studying the dynamics and impact of rule implementation should constitute another layer of the “concrétisation” of law, rather than legislators slapping blunt regulations onto emerging industries and hoping for the best.

Both the failure of Brexit and the triumph of Trump suggest that a populist drive for freedom through ‘good law’ rather than security through ‘big men’ is far from guaranteed. 

All this is to say that libertarians should not give up on politics. But they do need to go back to the drawing board and ask themselves two simple questions: what does freedom really mean, and why is it important? One wonders whether they are willing to swallow their pride and take up the intellectual task — or whether they would prefer to retreat into puritanical niches. Are libertarians really content to retire to their esoteric online crypto forums and seasteading plots off the coast of Polynesia while the world burns? Or do they still hunger to effect change in political area? Only time will tell.