The decline of liberty

Never was there more high-minded talk about republican ideals in ancient Rome than in the age of Augustus, the first de facto emperor who definitively buried the Republic. He took particular care to preserve all the SPQR trappings of the old system: There would still be elections every year for the traditional magistracies, including the two consular positions; the Senate would still rule; even the people’s tribunes formally retained their office. The illusion of a perfect conservation and continuity of traditional liberties eased the transition to complete imperial authoritarianism. The ones who noticed couldn’t do anything about it anymore, and the ones who could, preferred not to notice. The long period of civil wars following Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon had exhausted the reserves of resistance, both physical and moral. Thus died the old Roman liberties, and citizens became subjects.

Something not fundamentally different is happening to us today. At issue is not simply the progressive loss of freedom through government abuses and overreach – despite an apparent expansion of “rights”, measured by the size of the statute books. This loss is clear and obvious enough, as censorship and other forms of authoritarianism spread through Western societies. The real problem is the decline of the idea of liberty itself, as a governing principle, and of its advocates and defenders. This has deep consequences for the relationship between the citizen and the state, which is, in turn, foundational to civilised society.

Liberty, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill – whose thought is central to the modern idea of free speech which the New Right otherwise eagerly defends – embodies individual freedoms, minimal state interference, privacy, the aforementioned principle of free expression, and mechanisms for accountability. It was this classical liberal ethos, rooted in Enlightenment principles of reason, autonomy, and limited government, that once underpinned Western democracies, mostly operating through Rightwing conservative political platforms.

But, as we are being insistently told these days – and with special relish, particularly by certain factions on the Right – we have crossed into the post-liberal age. This overcoming of Liberalism – and of course of its Libertarian economic derivation – is held to be a victory by the anti-establishment, anti-globalist national-populist movements that have risen to prominence over the past decade or so. Far from a triumph, though, it is a tragic and regrettable mistake with untold consequences.

Through what has quite possibly been the greatest and most devastating intellectual fraud and perversion in the history of political ideas, in recent decades the word “liberal” was appropriated and became associated with Leftwing progressivism. The fatal blow to the Old Liberal tradition has come from the postmodern reinterpretation and recruitment of Liberalism in the service of cultural Marxism and the woke agenda – the culture wars – via Liberation Movement ideology which is a product of left-wing political theory. Only Libertarianism survived on the Right as a direct heir to the original appeal to liberty as the defining attribute of the citizen-individual under law.

This inversion of terms and values is what accounts, in large measure, for the odd situation where now the Right positively celebrates (what it thinks is) the demise of a political philosophy which used to be central to its own identity until not very long ago, and in the name of which the principle of individual freedom triumphed over collectivist totalitarianism in the Cold War.

The result is that no major political movement speaks for Liberty as such, anymore. Even minority rights movements, easily mistaken for political freedom-fighters, are anything but: Their entire ideology is predicated on imposing constraints on and policing the behaviour of others. Libertarianism itself has waned over the past 10 to 15 years as a political current from the high-point of Pirate Party wins in several countries around 2010 to 2011, high-profile digital-rights activism and before the onset of “equality” legislation that paved the way to hate-speech laws and other liberticide atrocities.

Three forces have combined to break the spirit of liberty in our time. The first has been the digitalisation of everything, especially the rise of social media. As our lives have moved increasingly online, we have effectively given up on any hope to real privacy in exchange for a frictionless user experience. Online privacy, once a fiery cause, is now all pretence: They pretend to protect our data, and we pretend to believe them and click “Yes” automatically through all of the innumerable privacy notices that tell us, effectively, that we cannot expect any of it. 

After all, we all accept that Big Tech as well as the Big State know pretty much everything about us. Almost everyone has by now understood that the likes of Facebook know more about our psychological profile than we do ourselves. Not too long ago this would’ve been considered an outrage; today we hardly think of it, and the Zoomer generation probably doesn’t even know what actual privacy used to mean. 

The second liberty spirit-crusher has been the “safety” argument. This is liberty’s oldest of foes, deployed by every authoritarian in history to justify various restrictions. A quarter century ago, with 9/11, it was the spectre of terrorism that began to be used as an argument for extended surveillance of the wider population, for various expansions of state power and so on. A great many individual-rights battles were lost on this front, but the cause of liberty still limped on – until the cataclysmic event of Covid-19 which well and truly devastated the Libertarian movement. 

The crackdown on dissent from official “truth” narratives – many of which were subsequently proven wrong – and particularly the strong public support for all this and for the lockdowns themselves (up to 78 per cent in the UK, at the time) showed just how far Western publics and their political representatives had strayed from the far more assertive and independently-minded examples of previous generations. It is true that Covid dissent also fuelled populism, and in some cases that was a virtuous translation of anti-establishment libertarian feeling into genuine political activism. But in many other cases this was mere opportunism, as often proven by subsequent pairing of such “principled” stances on Covid with entirely contradictory statist economic policies.

Finally, the third and most damaging force devastating the idea of Liberty today is the new consensus metastasising across the Right in favour of the Big State. Much of the Right has turned against what it has diagnosed to have been the “neoliberal” excesses begun in the 1980s and continuing through the high-point of globalisation. Free trade has become a dirty word as is outsourcing and cost-reduction. Reshoring supply chains, industrial policy and restoring national manufacturing with strong state support – i.e. classic left-wing causes – are all now almost Gospel on the Right. The New Right criticises the “uniparty” as the Left/Right liberal-globalist-woke establishment, but on core economic principles such as the role of the State (i.e. wanting more of it) it is undergoing its own merger with the Old Left. 

Even the idea of lowering taxes – the most basic expression of the idea of freedom in economics and an article of faith for conservative political movements even half a generation ago – receives little more than lip service. The result is that in the current statist climate the Right – Britain’s Conservatives included – is wary of pursuing tax cuts through any significant reductions in spending, preferring instead to promise vague welfare reforms and “cutting waste”.

Of course, all these big reasons and justifications for looking away from the cause of Liberty writ large sound reasonable today, don’t they? After all, who can stand up to Big Tech on privacy, and isn’t our future digital and data and AI anyway? Privacy concerns are anti-growth dross, or a primitive twitch left over in the reptilian societal brain from that ancient time before the smartphone. And then there are all these scary dangers out there: Possible infections, terrorists, the Russians ready to invade us, the “extremist” ideas about to turn us into racists, the “disinformation” set to brain-wash us, and so on. Why, we need someone to protect us from “the-threat” because as adult citizens we cannot make our own decisions about all this. Not to mention “the good that the State can do”, in the words of former (Conservative) UK prime minister, Theresa May. Who could possibly question the blatantly obvious need to give ever more powers to the state to direct the economy, “select champions”, spend more, decide more etc – after all, we live in dark, dark times, don’t we?

The trouble with deeply-ingrained things in our culture like liberty – although nothing is “like” it, as a principle – is that you don’t really notice it until it’s gone, together with the entire ecosystem of ideas, people and resources that sustain it. So when the ever more powerful State moves to ban the use of cash, for example, or – eventually – to impose some form of Chinese-style Social Credit system, there will be little and few to resist it. Similarly, when transparency standards weaken and dissolve, when investigative journalism effectively ceases to be a threat to anyone in power, who will care – or even notice? 

The way our societies “resolve” the question of Liberty is one of the keys to the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. We are on a trajectory – or we may have even already arrived – where the state is seen as a service provider, with the increasingly isolated, regulated, policed and indeed caged citizen as customer. This is detrimental not only to the human spirit on a philosophical level, but to the nation itself on a practical level, as it undermines collective self-confidence and meaning, and takes us further away from the civic patriotism required to take society through times of great change. We can, and should, do much better than that.