The strange return of authoritarian individualism

Posted on 18/10/2022

Image: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Luke Cooper on the rise and fall of ‘Trussism’.

The Truss government recalls a bygone era of hardline economic libertarianism. This is the root of its present crisis.

The crisis besetting the UK’s new prime minister provides an insight into why in recent years the political right has tended to move away from the economic individualism associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Instead of appealing to the alleged rationality of the free market, celebrating individual competition and seeing economic inequality as an incentive to work hard, the twenty-first century new right have for the most part advanced what we might call a ‘selective paternalism’.

In this new orientation, the right claims to protect ‘the people’ from a series of threats and insecurities ranged against them. This has involved pledges made at the level of economic distribution (such as the promise to ‘level up’ poorer regions through state intervention and investment) that sit uneasily with the idea of ‘free’ markets as an efficient and merit-based distributor of resources. But this approach is selective, insofar as a narrow ethnic or political identity (usually involving some form of political nationalism) is seen – implicitly or explicitly – as defining who the people are and how their interests are understood. The global authoritarian turn has emerged through this dynamic. For if the favoured in-group believe that their critical interests are at risk, they may be willing to support attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law in order to secure their rightful position and interests over ‘the others’.

In my 2021 book, Authoritarian Contagion, I called this ‘authoritarian protectionism’ and contrasted it to the ideological claims of the Reagan and Thatcher era, which I referred to as ‘authoritarian individualism’. It might seem curious to draw this distinction because of the tremendous and enduring influence these two figures have had on the world in which we live. But the difference has been starkly highlighted by the strange return of authoritarian individualism under prime minister Liz Truss. The rapidity of her government’s crisis confirms just how out of step it is with political reality in the twenty-first century.

Authoritarian individualism: the paradigm of Thatcher and Reagan

Thatcher and Reagan shared an obsession with individualism, low taxes, and the notion that state intervention in the economy represented a fundamental threat to liberty and private property. In 1989, Reagan’s ‘Farewell Address to the Nation’ spoke of how his move into politics had been motivated by the belief that ‘government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom’. Reagan’s election had been a turning point in Republican Party politics, signalling a major shift of gear in the long process of dismantling the New Deal consensus, the US equivalent of the postwar social-democratic consensus in western Europe.

Thatcher had similar aims in the UK. For both Thatcher and Reagan, politics was, in effect, a battle between the forces of ‘light and dark’, and ‘good and evil’, in which compromise or consensus-building amounted to appeasement.

As Stuart Hall would famously argue, this was a populist ideology that sought to weld together a politics of the elite and the mass. It declared all-out-war against the social liberal consensus, corporatism, the trade unions and the ‘undeserving poor’, mobilising state power as necessary to defeat these foes. But this authoritarianism was combined with a fervently ‘moral’ set of core convictions. Larger and more affluent than ever before, the rising middle class on both sides of the Atlantic responded viscerally to the logics of neoliberalism.

These leaders would both express surprise at the scale of their success. ‘We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world’, as Reagan put it. The ‘Washington Consensus’ of the 1990s consolidated their victory – one shaped by the shift, including within social democracy, towards acceptance of financial liberalisation and globalisation. Much of the economic architecture they created lives on in today’s world. But its relationship to state power and dominant ideology has transformed in the last fifteen years.

The decline and strange resurgence of authoritarian individualism

Against a backdrop of accelerating economic inequality, falling real wages and near-stagnant growth, the core ideological claims of classical Thatcherism and Reaganism have lost much of their lustre. In the 1980s the argument that government ‘won’t protect you’ had won a, perhaps surprisingly high, level of popular support. But for this to work enough voters had to feel that the system supported their interests. Markets had to generate an affluent, large middle class attracted to the ideal of self-reliance.

This basic condition no longer exists – and right-wing politics has for the most part implicitly acknowledged this reality in its turn away from libertarian narratives. Whereas Thatcher rejected the ‘the doctrine that the state should be active on many fronts’, Boris Johnson’s government was assertively interventionist. Neoliberal traditionalists lamented this departure from Thatcherite thinking.

The Truss government represents those yearning for a return to Thatcher. It has resuscitated classical neoliberal zealotry for ‘free’ markets. But this language now appears strikingly archaic, and as a departure from the norms of political debate we have grown used to. It marks a shift even from the Cameron-Osborne years, which had seen austerity justified by a faux political inclusivity (‘we’re all in this together’). As she attempted to pursue huge tax cuts that overwhelmingly favoured the already wealthy, Truss rejected any focus on economic redistribution. Parroting Thatcher’s comment that ‘life’ in the Britain she envisioned ‘won’t be easy’, she argued that ‘we have the attitude and spirit to get through’, attaching an idealised ‘Britishness’ to graft and the rejection of ‘handouts’.

To this individualism was added the old Thatcherite authoritarianism – a point of continuity with the policies of the previous government, but shorn of the most modest vestiges of socially orientated policy.

Whither ‘I won’t protect you’? From hubris to crisis

The public have immediately given their verdict on the Truss programme. A series of opinion polls have shown the largest Labour leads since the late 1990s. Ideas that resonated with enough people in the 1980s to achieve thumping Conservative majorities now have a Kryptonite effect on their support.

As the forward march of the middle class has halted and economic and ecological shocks intensify, there is little public appetite for Truss’s turn to the ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology of Thatcherism.

The astute and opportunistic right have adapted to this new political context. Careful not to question the idea of protection in these times of crisis, they have instead focused on the object of the protective appeal. The turn to ‘culture wars’ can be read, in this sense, as a series of claims about who are the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ in the face of the demand of citizens for protection from crises. Brexit was similarly an attempt to aggressively prosecute British interests – albeit one flawed in its design.

Somewhat paradoxically, then, the neoliberal structures that Thatcher and Reagan cultivated and which endure to this day – above all, their cornerstone legacy of a highly integrated and unstable global financial system – cannot be politically sustained using the arguments that they were so committed to. And this is, in fact, a material and not simply ideational matter. These markets have themselves grown more dependent on state and central bank intervention since the 2008 financial crisis. They thus make their own demands, so to speak, for protection by the state, eroding the very idea of ‘free’ markets.

It is in this broader context that the markets which had once responded gleefully to Thatcher’s agenda immediately delivered an entirely negative verdict on ‘Trussism’. Markets, in effect, roundly rejected the government’s view that handouts for the rich financed by debt could deliver rapid economic growth.

Facing a ‘double crisis’ of negative financial market reaction and catastrophic Conservative polling, Truss pledged to move ahead with corporation tax increases, after all, and sacked her chancellor and close ally, Kwasi Kwarteng. His successor Jeremy Hunt immediately signalled a return to Treasury orthodoxy, effectively dumping the programme that Truss had presented to the Conservative membership. Promising tax rises and austerity, Hunt turned to the political framing of protection. ‘My priority, our values as a government’, he said, ‘will be to protect families, businesses, who are going through a very challenging time’. The short-lived return of an idealised ‘trickle down’ economics is now displaced by this paternalistic discourse.

So, in just a few weeks, the ‘I won’t protect you’ ideology of the Truss government has been shipwrecked. If Truss makes it to Christmas, let alone the next general election, as Conservative Party leader, I for one will be surprised.

Luke Cooper is Senior Research Fellow at LSE IDEAS, the in-house foreign policy think tank of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy, Bristol University Press 2021.