Ill Fares the Land (9 page)

But the greatest gulf was now the one separating generations. For anyone born after 1945, the welfare state and its institutions were not a solution to earlier dilemmas: they were simply the normal conditions of life—and more than a little dull. The baby boomers, entering university in the mid-’60s, had only ever known a world of improving life chances, generous medical and educational services, optimistic prospects of upward social mobility and—perhaps above all—an indefinable but ubiquitous sense of
security
. The goals of an earlier generation of reformers were no longer of interest to their successors. On the contrary, they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.

—CAMILLE PAGLIA

 

 

 

 

I
t was a curiosity of the age that the generational split transcended class as well as national experience. The
rhetorical
expression of youthful revolt was, of course, confined to a tiny minority: even in the US in those days, most young people did not attend university and college protests did not necessarily represent youth at large. But the broader symptoms of generational dissidence—music, clothing, language—were unusually widespread thanks to television, transistor radios and the internationalization of popular culture. By the late ’60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

This breach in continuity echoed another tectonic shift. For an older generation of left-leaning politicians and voters, the relationship between ‘workers’ and socialism—between ‘the poor’ and the welfare state—had been self-evident. The ‘Left’ had long been associated with—and largely dependent upon— the urban industrial proletariat. Whatever their pragmatic attraction to the middle classes, the reforms of the New Deal, the Scandinavian social democracies and Britain’s welfare state had rested upon the presumptive support of a mass of blue collar workers and their rural allies.

But in the course of the 1950s, this blue collar proletariat was fragmenting and shrinking. Hard graft in traditional factories, mines and transport industries was giving way to automation, the rise of service industries and an increasingly feminized labor force. Even in Sweden, the social democrats could no longer hope to win elections simply by securing a majority of the traditional labor vote. The old Left, with its roots in working class communities and union organizations, could count on the instinctive collectivism and communal discipline (and subservience) of a corralled industrial work force. But that was a shrinking percentage of the population.

The
new
Left, as it began to call itself in those years, was something very different. To a younger generation, ‘change’ was not to be brought about by disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen. Change itself appeared to have moved on from the industrial West into the developing or ‘third’ world. Communism and capitalism alike were charged with stagnation and ‘repression’. The initiative for radical innovation and action now lay either with distant peasants or else with a new set of revolutionary constituents. In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals.

Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely those benevolent overseers responsible for liberalizing old constraints or providing for the betterment of all.

Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that ‘justice’, ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘economic security’ were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. Whatever the shortcomings of over-intrusive top-down regulation and control, these were the price of social justice—and a price well worth paying.

A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. ‘Individualism’—the assertion of every person’s claim to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large—became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing ‘your own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’, ‘making love, not war’: these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that ‘the personal is political’.

The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. Curiously, the new Left remained exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands, where they could be gathered up into anonymous social categories like ‘peasant’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘subaltern’ and the like. But back home, the individual reigned supreme.

However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to
religious
language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.

But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both
new
and
left
. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private—and privately-measured—interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else—much less to impose it upon them (“do your own thing”).

True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little. Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

In distant retrospect it may appear odd that so many young people in the ’60s identified with ‘Marxism’ and radical projects of all sorts, while simultaneously disassociating themselves from conformist norms and authoritarian purposes. But Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

On the contrary, ‘Left’ took on a rather selfish air. To be on the Left, to be a radical in those years, was to be self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial in one’s concerns. Left-wing student movements were more preoccupied with college gate hours than with factory working practices; the university-attending sons of the Italian upper-middle-class beat up underpaid policemen in the name of revolutionary justice; light-hearted ironic slogans demanding sexual freedom displaced angry proletarian objections to capitalist exploiters. This is not to say that a new generation of radicals was insensitive to injustice or political malfeasance: the Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s were not insignificant. But they were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.

These paradoxes of meritocracy—the ’60s generation was above all the successful byproduct of the very welfare states on which it poured such youthful scorn—reflected a failure of nerve. The old patrician classes had given way to a generation of well-intentioned social engineers, but neither was prepared for the radical disaffection of their children. The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest. The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well.

—FRIEDRICH HAYEK

 

 

 

 

C
onservatism—not to mention the ideological Right—was a minority preference in the decades following World War II. The old, pre-war Right had discredited itself twice over. In the English-speaking world, the conservatives had failed to anticipate, understand or repair the scale of the damage wrought by the Great Depression. By the outbreak of war, only the hard core of the old English Conservative Party and rock-ribbed know-nothing Republicans still opposed the efforts of New Dealers in Washington and semi-Keynesian administrators in London to respond imaginatively to the crisis.

In continental Europe, conservative elites paid the price for their accommodation (and worse) with the occupying powers. With the defeat of the Axis they were swept from office and power. In eastern Europe, the old parties of the center and right were brutally destroyed by their communist successors, but even in western Europe there was no place for traditional reactionaries. A new generation of moderates took their place.

Intellectual conservatism fared little better. For every Michael Oakeshott, embattled in his rigorous contempt for
bien pensant
modern thought, there were a hundred progressive intellectuals making the case for the postwar consensus. No one had much time for free marketeers or ‘minimal statists’; and even though most older liberals were still instinctively suspicious of social engineering, they were committed if only on prudential grounds to a very high level of governmental activism. Indeed, the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather
within
the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-social-democratic consensus.

The nearest thing to a serious theoretical conservatism in those consensus years came from men like Raymond Aron in France, Isaiah Berlin in the UK and—albeit in a rather different key—Sidney Hook in the USA. All three would have blenched at the label ‘conservative’: they were classic liberals, anti-communist on ethical as well as political grounds and marinated in 19th century suspicion of the over-mighty state. In their different ways, such men were realists: they accepted the need for welfare and social intervention, not to speak of progressive taxation and the collective pursuit of public goods. But by instinct and experience they were opposed to all forms of authoritarian power.

Aron was best known in these years for his unwavering hostility to dogmatic Marxist ideologues and his clear-eyed support for a United States whose shortcomings he never denied. Berlin became famous for his 1958 lecture on “Two Concepts of Liberty”, where he distinguished between positive liberty—the pursuit of rights which only a state can guarantee—and negative liberty: the right to be left alone to do as one sees fit. Although he saw himself to the end as a traditional liberal, sympathetic to all of the reformist aspirations of the British liberal tradition with which he identified, Berlin thus emerged as a founding reference for a later generation of neo-libertarians.

Hook, like so many of his American contemporaries, was preoccupied with the anti-Communist struggle. His liberalism thus devolved in practice into an argument for the traditional freedoms of an open society. By conventional US criteria, men like Hook were social democrats in all but name: they shared with other American ‘liberals’ like Daniel Bell an elective affinity for European political ideas and practices. But the strength of his antipathy to communism opened a bridge between Hook and more conventional conservatives, across which both sides would stride with growing ease in the years to come.

The task of a renascent Right was made easier not just by the passage of time—as people forgot the traumas of the 1930s and ’40s, so they were more open to the appeal of traditional conservative voices—but also by their opponents. The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the ’60s generation invited a conservative backlash. We, the Right could now assert, stand for ‘values’, ‘the nation’, ‘respect’, ‘authority’ and the heritage and civilization of a country—or continent or even ‘the West’—for which ‘they’ (the Left, students, youth, radical minorities) have no understanding or empathy.

We have lived so long with this rhetoric that it seems self-evident the Right would resort to it. But until the mid-’60s or so, it would have been absurd to claim that ‘the Left’ was insensitive to the nation or traditional culture, much less ‘authority’. On the contrary, the old Left was incorrigibly old-fashioned in just these ways. The cultural values of a Keynes or a Reith, a Malraux or a De Gaulle were uncritically shared by many of their leftist opponents: except for a brief moment in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the mainstream political Left was as reliably conventional in aesthetics as it was in so much else. If the Right had been constrained to deal exclusively with social democrats and welfare liberals of the older sort, it could never have secured a monopoly of cultural conservatism and ‘values’.