Towards a new 'road to serfdom'?

The classical liberal order is under threat from 'woke' progressives

After the Second World War, Fredrich Hayek, a young professor at the London School of Economics wrote a book, The Road to Serfdom, which pilloried the growing acceptance of socialism in the UK, and made the case for a return to classical liberalism. He also set up an academy of classical liberal scholars —the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) — in 1947 to discuss the ideals and ideas of economic and political liberty as a counter to the existing collectivist socialist dogmas, which he described as the “Road to Serfdom”. The MPS held its latest meeting this month at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A major theme was the threats to the classical liberal order, which had seemingly triumphed worldwide since the end of the “evil empire”.
 
One major worry expressed was the growing number of the young in both the UK and the US who proclaimed themselves as socialists, advocating the dirigiste panaceas that had failed worldwide in the past. Thus, in the UK, a 2017 survey found 70 per cent of university students planning to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s far left Labour party. In the US, young Americans aged 18-29 surveyed in 2018 said they were more positive about socialism (51 per cent) than capitalism (45 per cent).
 
Various explanations have been provided for this turn of the young to socialism: The domination by left wing professors of the academy, the laziness of the “snowflake” generation, and the capture by the left of the cultural narrative as advocated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. But none of these are persuasive. The academy has been left wing in both the UK and the US since I joined it in the mid-1960s. The young have always been dismissed as lazy by the old, and I doubt if the US and UK millennials have even heard of, leave alone been influenced by Gramsci. A more cogent explanation is provided by their experience during the Great Recession.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

This is best exemplified by the leading charismatic tribune of the US left, the 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). (See Prachi Gupta: AOC, Workman, NY 2019). She was born in Puerto Rico but her parents moved to the Bronx in New York soon afterwards, where her father had a small business. As the Bronx had the highest school dropout rate of any county in the state, her father pooled money from relatives to buy a modest house in Yorktown Heights in affluent Westchester county, where his two young children could have access to better public schools. AOC did well in school, and by age 17 was set to pursue a science-based career at Boston University. Then tragedy struck, when in 2008 her 48-year-old father died of lung cancer. This destabilised the family.Her mother barely staved off foreclosure and eviction. AOC realising that her chosen medical career would take over 10 years to fructify switched to economics and international relations, in which she graduated cum laude in 2011 but with “thousands of dollars in student debt, adding to her financial burden”. Throughout college, AOC “had witnessed the corporate greed that fuelled the financial crisis and watched taxpayers bail out Wall Street executives who faced virtually no consequences. This recession deepened wealth inequality and it was the middle and lower classes, disproportionately communities of colour like hers, that suffered most” (p.17). This and the public activism she had shown since high school radicalised her.
 
Professor Edward Glaeser in Boomer Socialism led to Bernie Sanders (WSJ, Jan 18, 2020) also argues that young people have been radicalised because the economy isn’t working that well for them. “Many public policies make it harder to get a job, save money or find an affordable home, leaving young idealists thinking, “Why not try socialism?” But Boris Johnson’s victory in the recent UK election faced with similar youth support for Jeremy Corbyn shows the victory of socialism is not inevitable.
 
The second fear is of the undermining of the constitutional order of the US. The late Oxford political scientist Sam Finer in his magisterial 3 volume, The History of Government, summed up the legacy of the American revolution as embodied in the US constitution as “having shown how political power may be bridled; and it has stood for two centuries as the ultimate exercise in law-boundedness. This is a formidable achievement”. As the Hon. Douglas Ginsberg, Chief Judge, US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, explained in his paper for the MPS meeting, the major reason for this achievement is that the US has a written Constitution. “To be faithful to the written constitution a jurist must make it his goal to illuminate the meaning of the text as the Framers understood it”. Despite some exceptions this was the norm till the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s determination to pass his New Deal “put the Supreme Court’s commitment to the Constitution as written under severe stress, and it was then that the wheels began to come off” with FDR’s threat to pack the court (though voted down by the Senate) hanging like the sword of Damocles over the Court’s “adherence to their announced understanding of the Constitution.”
 
Since then there has been an ongoing battle between progressive jurists who believe in a “living” (hence changeable) constitution and traditionalists who believe in fidelity to the written constitution.
 
This debate has been overtaken, argues Christopher Caldwell in an important book (The Age of Entitlement, Simon and Schuster, 2020), by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which rightly banned racial discrimination but created a vast enforcement mechanism to monitor nearly every aspect of American life for the proper racial balance, acting against racism “even if there was no evidence of racist intent.”  Ordinary citizens were afraid to speak for fear of being called racist. “America had something it never had at the federal level. Something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved, an explicit system of racial preference”.
 
This change in constitutional culture, argues Caldwell, was then extended to women’s rights, sexual preference and recently to gender identity. “The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life.” The civil rights revolution was not just a major new element in the Constitution. It was“a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible”. The disagreement over the two constitutions “the de jure constitution of 1788 with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it, or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation” will continue to polarise the polity. Who wins in these disputes —the traditional constitutionalist or the “woke” progressives will determine whether the West is now on another road to serfdom.