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Thursday 6 September 2018

Hayek, astroturf and centrism


In my efforts to understand astroturfed political campaigns, I decided to read Hayek’s polemical essay ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’.

The essay is the source of Hayek's reference to “second hand dealers in ideas” often assumed to mean think tanks. I’m not sure this is what he meant in 1949, regardless of how apt it feels today.

Hayek’s "intellectuals" are journalists, school teachers and other purveyors of knowledge. They are the second-hand dealers in ideas whose role is to act as an intermediary between social, political and cultural ideas and the public at large who, he assumes, are inescapably under their influence.*

In the essay he rails against a media and cultural world dominated by socialist intellectuals , putting this dominance down to the awe-inspiring utopianism of socialist ideas in contrast to the workaday “practical”  “sensible” “realistic” (dare I say) centrism of liberalism.

Hayek complains that: “what [liberals] lack is a liberal Utopia… a program which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty… which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today to be politically possible.”

This quote could literally have been uttered by David Cameron or Tony Blair. It is precisely the kind of “what works is what’s best” managerialism that guided first term New Labour. It feels entirely apt for a society chugging along with 3% growth, decent wage growth and a public sector borrowing requirement of 37-40% of GDP.

Hayek didn’t believe he was living in an actually existing capitalist society.

And I think it is precisely this that's is at the root of the failure to adequately respond to the crisis of 2008. It is the reason why liberalism offered, at most, an apologia to 2008 according to this week’s Financial Times. It is possible Hayek would have campaigned for Brexit, though our current no-deal trajectory sits ill with the centrism in his 1949 essay.

All of which is to say that Hayek and today’s “intellectual neoliberals” in the media continue to spectacularly miss the point.  

In a society marked by social distress, it is insanity to think a media ‘huddle’ with Michael Gove a masterstroke of social action.

When millions of children cannot get a decent diet; if you don't know where next week's wages are coming from; if one of the great markers of human progress has gone into unprecedented reverse, then no amount of editorializing, lobby briefings or press releases is likely to shift public opinion.

Because Hayek was wrong, fatally wrong, if he believed that public opinion turned solely on whatever vision or anti-vision is on offer from media intellectuals.

Surely this is what the 2017 general election result, and all opinion polls since, conclusively demonstrated? Public opinion does not turn on whatever latest smear is concocted in the Westminster lobby, it turns on the deep and long-standing churnings in people’s everyday material conditions.

Unless and until liberals are able to understand that a politics that addresses 2008 and its fallout is the new centrism, they will stay irrelevant.

*Note - I find the essay useful in getting my head around the funding decisions of charities like the Political and Economic Research Trust (PERT). Not just the money it gave to the TaxPayers Alliance, but the money doled out to early culture war outfits like the New Culture Forum. I’m researching a longer piece on this, including how PERT ended up funding a campaign to have traffic lights abolished).   


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