How a
ruthless network of super-rich ideologues killed choice and destroyed
people’s faith in politics
by George
Monbiot
The events
that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At
a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the
Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was
explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She
snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it
on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A
political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.
The book was
The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in
1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to
an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw
competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The
market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers,
creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through
planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as
significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision,
was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the
wealth that would trickle down to everyone.
This, at any
rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came
to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and
thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by
multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending
themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal
programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close
the gap.
He begins
the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty:
an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom,
universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all
of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful,
intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.
Democracy,
by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In
fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising
choice over the direction that politics and society might take.
He justifies
this position by creating a heroic narrative of extreme wealth. He
conflates the economic elite, spending their money in new ways, with
philosophical and scientific pioneers. Just as the political
philosopher should be free to think the unthinkable, so the very rich
should be free to do the undoable, without constraint by public
interest or public opinion.
The ultra
rich are “scouts”, “experimenting with new styles of
living”, who blaze the trails that the rest of society will
follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these
“independents” to gain as much money as they want and
spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore,
arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit
and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income,
and no limit to the rents they can charge.
Inherited
wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: “the idle
rich”, who don’t have to work for their money, can devote
themselves to influencing “fields of thought and opinion, of
tastes and beliefs”. Even when they seem to be spending money
on nothing but “aimless display”, they are in fact acting
as society’s vanguard.
Hayek
softened his opposition to monopolies and hardened his opposition to
trade unions. He lambasted progressive taxation and attempts by the
state to raise the general welfare of citizens. He insisted that
there is “an overwhelming case against a free health service for
all” and dismissed the conservation of natural resources. It
should come as no surprise to those who follow such matters that he
was awarded the Nobel prize for economics.
By the time
Thatcher slammed his book on the table, a lively network of
thinktanks, lobbyists and academics promoting Hayek’s doctrines had
been established on both sides of the Atlantic, abundantly financed
by some of the world’s richest people and businesses, including
DuPont, General Electric, the Coors brewing company, Charles Koch,
Richard Mellon Scaife, Lawrence Fertig, the William Volker Fund and
the Earhart Foundation. Using psychology and linguistics to brilliant
effect, the thinkers these people sponsored found the words and
arguments required to turn Hayek’s anthem to the elite into a
plausible political programme.
Thatcherism
and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just
two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich,
crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation,
privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were
all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this
network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of
parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.
Bill Clinton
and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than
develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to
triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what
their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what
their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely
combination a “third way”.
It was
inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of
neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than the
dying star of social democracy. Hayek’s triumph could be witnessed
everywhere from Blair’s expansion of the private finance initiative
to Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which had regulated
the financial sector. For all his grace and touch, Barack Obama, who
didn’t possess a narrative either (except “hope”), was slowly
reeled in by those who owned the means of persuasion.
As I warned
in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement.
If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social
outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate.
Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to
the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a
virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by
slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton’s
bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.
The
paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism’s
crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of man that
Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a
classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s
“independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained
by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that
others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round
this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who
know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our
remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global
warming.
Those who
tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of
competing narratives. The key task now is to tell a new story of what
it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to
some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of
Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.
A few of us
have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning
of a story. It’s too early to say much yet, but at its core is the
recognition that – as modern psychology and neuroscience make
abundantly clear – human beings, by comparison with any other
animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish. The
atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run
counter to much of what comprises human nature.
Hayek told
us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our
humanity.
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