What of Liberal Fascism in practice?

 

The picture as seen from Europe is depressing, and getting worse.

 

In the USA the range of ideas, choices and voices heard is far wider than here. When some new policy is proposed in the USA it is likely to meet a truculent argument that “that is none of the government’s goddam business”. Whether that claim is valid or not, the fact that Administrations constantly have to explain in simple terms why More Government is a good idea brings some vital discipline to public life. A weakness in Goldberg’s book is that he does not do enough justice to how the USA and its institutions fended off all the totalitarian temptations he enumerates.

 

Here in Europe any sense of a judicious balance between citizens and state is lacking. Positions known to be highly unpopular with voters are slipped past us furtively. Take for example the new EU Lisbon Treaty which says in Article 1 that “…decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen” but on which, naturally, the British people may not have a referendum.

 

After a stirring Preamble drafted by Stalin ("DETERMINED to promote economic and social progress for their peoples, taking into account the principle of sustainable development and within the context of the accomplishment of the internal market and of reinforced cohesion and environmental protection, and to implement policies ensuring that advances in economic integration are accompanied by parallel progress in other fields") we come to Article 3.

 

Article 3 includes a stunning proposition. That the UK and all other EU member states in their Union ‘work for’ a ‘highly competitive social market economy’.

 

What does that mean in legal terms? Nothing? Or Everything?

 

What is the difference between a ‘market economy’ and a ‘social market economy’? There must be a far-reaching difference, otherwise the phrase ‘social market’ would not have been included – and qualified with the words "highly competitive", suggesting (no doubt accurately) that a run-of-the-mill ‘social market economy’ is by nature highly not competitive.

 

The proper place for the ever-changing balance between ‘market’ and ‘social’ to be hammered out is in legislation passed by national Parliaments, not set in stone in international treaties. Thus today’s European Creeping Collectivism.

 

Or take BBC morning radio in the UK. For many years typical fare has varied wildly between some or other activist clamouring querulously that the government ‘do something’, and some or other politician earnestly agreeing that maybe something should be done, but by his/her party. Such a trite consensus is given a turbo-boost by the Precautionary Principle, which empowers the country’s shrillest, risk-averse, collectivist busybodies. And helps achieve this staggering result. This neurotic ‘better safe than sorry’, grannyism/nannyism is a one-way ratchet which forces up (down?) public expectations of government to quite unrealistic levels.

 

Having helped establish the stupid sentiment that there are no sensible limits on the state’s role in almost anything one chooses to talk about, politicians have a context for agreeing that ever more money be taken away from private initiative into state coffers in an ill-formed hope that somehow successful policies will emerge. Anyone who says that this is not a good idea is quickly dismissed as ‘uncaring’, ‘selfish’, ‘insensitive’. In short, Right-Wing. A fascist!

 

Add to all this the European Union’s demands for more and more funds to emit more and more ‘social directives’ with no hard-edge accountability, as well as the EU’s uneasy response to the relegitimization in Russia of authoritarian language and policy, and we have the makings of deep quasi-collectivist pan-European decline.

 

The public (of course) sense that something is deeply amiss. Public dissatisfaction with government as such not only in the UK but also as shown in the 2005 French and Dutch EU Treaty referenda must stem in part from growing frustration at the lack of any coherence in what government means these days.

 

David Cameron is wisely trying to tune into this. But without promising a strong, clear, philosophical commitment not just to make the state run better, but rather deliberately to scale back the state’s role in our lives (and therefore strategically to cut taxes and bureaucracy) can he get anywhere different which counts?

 

A final vital UK civilisational point. British freedoms are not written down in a single accessible place. They emerged over centuries in a higgledy-piggledy way, scattered in common law norms, statute law, precedents, interpretations, ‘traditions’, prerogatives, ‘conventions’ and other devices. They combine to require unusual levels of personal integrity and responsibility from our leaders and civil servants.

 

The main objection to this situation is that it is hard to fathom. That also can be a strength – if something needs fixing in the light of experience, it is not too difficult to work out an ad hoc sensible outcome which may or may not turn into a new convention or norm.

 

However, one serious weakness in the unique British model is that having grown bit by bit, our liberties and principles can erode bit by bit. We may never notice the process happening. Even if we do, how to stop it?

 

In the deep way our system works (namely relationships based ultimately not on legal requirements but rather on trust, decency and honour) there are few robust legal ways to attempt to do so. The more so as publicly funded PoMo liberal fascists in academies, NGOs and think-tanks sneeringly ‘deconstruct’ such basic values as intrinsically meaningless, which in turn allows politicians and civil servants to begin to ‘deconstruct’ their responsibilities too.

 

This for me is the main danger in the UK’s current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.

 

Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having – and worth fighting for.

 

Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned – not part of the ‘contemporary narrative’.

 

Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?

 

Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached – and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?

 

How would we tell?

 

Would we care?