Why Are Young People Abandoning the Political Centre? (Your Radical Questions with Adrian Wooldridge)

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1:10Amol Rajan:This is where I put your questions to one of our magnificent radical guests. He's shuffling in his chair. He's so nervous about having to take these questions. It's your chance to engage very directly with the supremely smart and interesting and influential people that we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. And joining me today, and I very much hope you heard the main episode with him last Thursday, is Adrian Woldridge. He's a writer at Bloomberg. He's a, I think they call you, is it a global business columnist? That's the pompous title, is it? But you write about absolutely everything, basically.

1:41Amol Rajan:Writer of many, many, many books, including The Aristocracy of Talent, and most recently, Centrists of the World Unite, The Lost Genius of Liberalism. and basically Adrian is trying to make a pretty trenchant defence of not just liberalism but the idea of centrism not as a form of equivocation but as an active attempt to basically fix some of the big problems in the world while staying true to liberal principles and I strongly recommend the book but I strongly recommend that podcast as a primer I mean the danger of podcasts Adrian is that people listen to the podcast and they don't need to read the book but in your case they should definitely read the book shouldn't they?

2:17Amol Rajan:Absolutely There we go, look we've got the easy questions out to begin with This is our first question. It's from a friend of the podcast, a former guest on this podcast, a political theorist and teacher of critical theory, a young academic called Louisa Munch. Louisa, it's fantastic to hear from you. She has sent us this voice note. Hi, Adrian. Hi, I'm all. Louisa here. I was wondering, Adrian, how do you think of liberalism in an age where people feel so lonely and disconnected from each other? How do we think of individualism when people feel so atomised in society now? And also, Amol already knows how sceptical I am of nostalgia.

2:57So how do we go about returning to old ideas like liberalism without repeating the past? Thanks, guys. Bye.

3:05Amol Rajan:Thank you, Louise, for that very windy voice note. She's probably on campus as a motorbike went past there. Two things, really. One is, how do you reconcile your belief in liberalism, starting off with the individual rather than the collective and the problems that we have today of atomisation, kind of alienation, people feeling very atomised. And then I'll come on to the one about nostalgia. So yes, where does your liberalism leave room for connection and belonging? One of the interesting things about liberalism is that the best critics of liberalism as a philosophy have almost always been other liberals.

3:38And the classic criticism of liberalism as an over-individualistic philosophy comes from Tocqueville. and Tocqueville when he's writing Democracy in America says that liberalism has this dark side and the dark side is to break up society into atomized individuals who are only concerned about themselves who only look after themselves and perhaps themselves and their families and who create a society which doesn't have any collective dimension. He says that that's a risk but then he goes on to try and explore certain liberal solutions to that problem, ways in which we can address the problems of loneliness without abandoning the good side of liberalism, which is that individuals are judged and considered on their individual merits rather than just as subunits in society.

4:28And he says that in order to deal with the problem of loneliness, we have to build from the bottom upwards. We have to have a vital local politics that individuals should try not just to retreat into their lonely hearts, but to involve themselves in political life. I think Tocqueville's solution is certainly one way of dealing with this problem that is building from the bottom up. But there are also, I think, an interesting group of liberals in the late 19th century in Britain who say that when you have a world in which faith is disappearing, when you have a world in which people's sense of place is being loosened because the organic bonds of society are being destroyed by social mobility and industrialization and the rest of it, that the old elite, which used to be the clerisy, which used to be people who, you know, the church, has to reconfigure itself in some way.

5:24People can no longer believe the same sort of things. People can no longer preserve, you know, the position that they were born into and have that sort of organic sense of solidarity. But the society needs to do something to reintegrate people, to give them a broader sense of purpose. And those liberals, you know, people like Benjamin Jowett, Bailey Hall College, Oxford, said that the solution was education, liberal education. So liberal education is something which tries to create a sense of community by teaching people a certain set of traditional texts, a certain set of traditional values, a certain notion of character and belonging.

6:07So the role that was once played by the church, that was once played by the organic society of people inheriting their position at birth, has to be played by something new, which is the educational system. And I think one of the problems with our educational system more recently is it's become a sort of technical system. It's become fixated on teaching people certain sets of skills, giving them a certain market value. And it's ceased to play the role of locating, giving them a home in history, giving them a sense of where they belong culturally, connecting them to the great text. because the great texts are things that focus on our common humanity.

6:46What is it that makes us human? What are the limits and nature of our humanity? So these two solutions, from the bottom up, participating in local politics, local decision-making, Tocqueville's solution, and from the top down, the role of the clerisy in binding people to cultural tradition, to things outside themselves, I think need to be re-emphasized. And education as an invitation to knowledge. Absolutely. Knowledge but also belonging. because education people are now very fixated on technics on acquiring techniques certain grades certain grades but when we read shakespeare we become let's say we become um connected with humanity with broader humanity we see that people in different times in different places

7:31Amol Rajan:shared the same problems that we have and it's not about learning what to think but how to feel exactly the second half of louise's voice note warns us about the danger of nostalgia which she thinks, I know from when she came on this podcast, she thinks he's often mobilised in particular by the right, these kind of radical right people who have an idea of the nation, which they use to practice, in her view, kind of xenophobic policies. Do you, I mean, you're steeped in history. Your book is steeped in history. Do you think there's a danger? Nostalgia is almost a kind of a false god, because actually the problems we've got are so modern.

8:06Amol Rajan:You know, you think about, you know, there's nothing that the 19th century new liberals could really teach us about AI, is there? Do you think that nostalgia is a danger in politics? Well, I think the notion that the nation, the nation state nationalism is about nostalgia is quite interesting in the sense that in the 19th century, nationalism was a forward looking philosophy. You know, the great liberal nationalists in Germany or in Italy were people who were creating a nation out of fragmented communities and who looked to the future. They were trying to create the future. So I think there's a sense of, I think there's a liberal nationalism and a liberal nationalism, which both gives you a sense of collective identity, but also is not saying we've got to go back to the way things used to be.

8:50It's about saying we must create a society which is, you know, involves us in a common endeavor, but makes the world better.

8:57Amol Rajan:I've sort of felt for quite some time that the great vacancy in British politics is what Sarah Palin called the hopey-changey stuff. The future, you know, a feeling that who's going to say this is not just anti-decline, but actually here's a positive vision of the future. See, a lot of what future-oriented politics has been about in the Liberal Centre for a long time has been about putting your foot on the accelerator, breaking social bonds, giving people the freedom to do what they want. And I think we need to reclaim some sort of notion of cultural tradition, some sort of notion of collective action or collective behavior, because I think this notion of missing a home is very important.

9:33And if you have the centre not offering people a home, the centre sort of said, let's offer people a hotel where they can stay. It's a comfortable hotel. It's nice. But nobody wants to live in a hotel. People want to live in a home. And if the liberal centre can't offer a home, then that will be something that's recaptured by the right, by the nationalist right, for reasons not just to do with nostalgia, but to do with excluding other people.

9:58Amol Rajan:Well, it's interesting. Exactly on that point. It's interesting. David Frum, the American intellectual who used to be thought of as a neoconservative. I don't know if he'd still think of himself as that. Certainly a very trenchant critic of Donald Trump has this wonderful line. I think it's from him where he says, if liberals don't enforce borders, fascists will. Absolutely right. I mean, that is from him. I certainly think he's no longer a neoconservative by a long way. Louisa, thank you so much for that. This is the next question. It's from Alice in Wales, who has texted in to say, and thank you for it, Alice.

10:26Amol Rajan:I'm in my 20s and I notice a real decline in support for the centre in my age group. I think I'm in the minority here. What can centrist parties do to better engage young people to discourage them from turning to political extremes on both sides? Thanks. Love the show. Well, thank you, Alice. What do you reckon, Adrian? Be less old. The problem with the centre is that it's been captured by a certain group of people of my age who basically did really quite well out of the 1980s and 1990s, certainly got into the housing market quite well, who had their ideas formed in that era and who are clinging on to power and position.

11:05And if you think of the most articulate advocates of centrist policies, people like Tony Blair, they're pretty damn senior these days. What we need is a new generation of younger radical centrists to come into politics. Do you see any in British politics? No. So I think that we need the younger generation to get involved in politics. And all of the energy, and intellectual energy as well as emotional energy, is on the left, obviously with the Green Party doing extremely well. But quite often with the right, I went to a meeting of something called the Roger Scruton Society. And it was full of young people, passionately interested in ideas, passionately original in the way that they were thinking, who were completely outside the centre.

11:51So the centre needs to become exciting again. It can't just be reheating old philosophy. It needs to be willing to admit that it's made mistakes. It needs to have new ideas and it needs to have new younger spokesmen. I note there is a man now running for governor of Vermont who's 14 years old and who describes himself very proudly as a centrist. So there is something going on, but not here. But how do you make centrism young again?

12:19Amol Rajan:I mean, if centrism has failed so many young people, you know, I don't know if Alice would go so far as to say that, but if centrism has failed on property, on pensions, on pay, how do you make centrism appeal to young people? I mean, do you invite them to the old tradition and say, believe me, this can deliver for you, it did for us? I think, no, I think centrists have to, the only way that they can really re-engage with young people is to admit that they made a lot of mistakes in the past. Unless you admit mistakes have been made and that you made those mistakes, not just passive but actively, that's table stakes.

12:50That's how you're going to get listening. But what I've tried to do in this book is to say that there are certain fundamental liberal ideas about tolerance, about skepticism of power, about the role of the individual as a building block of politics, which are fundamentally true, which are very, very exciting and which need to go back to. And I think to some extent we need history. You know, forget about the 1980s and 1990s. Go back to the long history of liberalism. And when you read these things, when you read my words, you'll find that these are the most incredibly exciting, interesting ideas.

13:28And as I say in this book, liberalism made the modern world and he's repeatedly saved the modern world from disaster. And the disaster that we are facing at the moment, which is, you know, the super empowered tech companies, which is hostile, aggressive Putin, which is populism, collectivism, a way of degrading the role of individuals in decision making. All of those things have liberal solutions and we should be excited about them.

13:54Amol Rajan:It's so interesting what you say about history because the book has a chapter on liberal imperialism. And our next question, thank you very much indeed for that, Alice. Our next question is from Zach who asks the following. To what extent is the apparent success of liberalism simply a product of the wealth generated by Europe's colonial past rather than the inherent strengths of liberal ideology itself? He also says, if a collectivised society had developed under similarly favourable material conditions, i.e. comparable accumulated colonial wealth and global trade networks, do you think we would instead be celebrating the merits of collectivism?

14:28Amol Rajan:In other words, isn't the thing you're celebrating, I don't know if this is what Zach himself believes, not just a set of ideas, but actually the fact that you're kind of, liberals were riding on the coattails of empire? Yeah, liberalism is rent from empire, essentially, is what he's saying. And it's a very interesting argument. One of the things I think liberals have to do is to confront serious criticisms of them and to own their mistakes. So I had a chapter in this book on empire. And a very significant number of liberals were liberal imperialists. They celebrated empire. They thought that empire wasn't just something that we accumulated in a fit of absence of mind.

15:02It was something that was absolutely integral to the liberal project. They also celebrated slavery, a lot of them. Celebrated?

15:09Amol Rajan:I'm not quite sure I'd say they celebrated slavery. They perhaps, I mean, it's very easy to judge 150 years on. But for instance, The Economist during the Civil War backed the South because they felt that private property, and this is not me saying The Economist is a racist publication, I revere it, but they thought that the importance of private property was more important than the abolition of slavery. That's true. I wouldn't say that's celebrating, but it was a moral judgment which was extremely wrong and which they rectified. But I would say I don't agree with Zach that the wealth of the West is something that is simply plunder.

15:46The wealth of the West was created because of a new way of organizing the world, which was freedom of contract, which was corporations organizing collective activity in ways that were more efficient. The wealth of the West was based on productivity increases. Now, there's a certain element in which there was expropriation of external wealth. But throughout history, you've had empires. Throughout history, you've had slavery. But what happened in the middle of the 18th century is we took off into sustained economic growth. And you cannot explain that sustained economic growth with reference just to empire.

16:26You have to explain it in terms of productivity increases. So I think that the essence of liberalism is a notion of freedom of contract, a notion of private property, a notion of helping people to help themselves through incentives, through market incentives. And I think that at the heart of the liberal enterprise created a wealthier society. However, to deal with the issue of liberal imperialism, I think one argument that's often made is that liberalism is just a justification for empire and that liberal imperialism was somehow part of the essence of liberalism. I don't think it was part of the essence of liberalism.

17:07I think the essence of liberalism, I say, is individualism, limitation on power, tolerance of diverse opinions. And what happened in India in the mid-19th century is quite interesting because all these liberals came along. James Mill worked for the East India Company. John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company. Thomas McCauley, one of the great liberals, went out and administered India for a while. Trevelyan introduced open competition in the Indian Civil Service before he introduced it in the British Civil Service. These people came out with very imperialist attitudes. The Indian population, particularly the Brahmin population, the educated Indian population, didn't say to them, go away, this is nonsense.

17:45They said, well, you're liberals. You believe in open competition. You believe in limiting power. You believe in representation of people through parliamentary processes. What about us? Why aren't we included in this formula? and that was extremely embarrassing to the British but it was also something which set off an Indian independence movement which was actually a liberal independence movement.

18:09Amol Rajan:It argued that they wanted to be part of the liberal pale. If you hear, I shouldn't talk about it too much because I'll probably start crying, but if you listen to Nehru's independence speech famously called Tris with Destiny, he said at the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. and I think that and freedom is very very important he talks about how there comes a time which comes but rarely when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance and what he's talking about when he says utterance is the spirit of a people to be free it's a liberal document that great speech and I strongly recommend it um Zach I hope that answers your question we've got so many that I'm going to try and rattle through them thank you very much for that question this one is possibly from another student and it's a voice note from Jacob hello Jacob let's hear it Hi, Emol.

18:53My name's Jacob. I'm from North Yorkshire, but I live in Cambridge at the minute. That's where I'm studying. My question for Adrian is, how can modern Liberals square support for democratic, mass democratic governments in the context of the history of classical liberal thinkers being very critical of these democratic interventions? and more generally how can liberals justify support for a free market in certain areas of life particularly food and clothing which generates you know such masses of unfreedom for so many people

19:25Amol Rajan:thanks i'm all for the show and i wish you all the best jacob thank you what does jacob mean my question for adrian is how can modern liberals square support for democratic mass democratic governments in the context of the history of classical liberal thinkers being very critical these democratic interventions? Well, a lot of classical liberal thinkers were very worried about democracy because they thought that democracy would be used to destroy what they considered to be liberty or freedom. So, because they thought that democracy would mean votes to less educated people, but it would also mean votes to people who are operating on the basis of emotion rather than reason, sometimes on the basis of bigotry rather than reason.

20:07So John Stuart Mill didn't like the idea of democracy and he had various problems with it. He said that it might mean that the sort of people who spend their time drinking in pubs and being very rowdy and being racist would get the vote and it would destroy liberal society. So he said, well, we must do certain things to stop that. One of the things that he thought we should do to stop that was to give more educated people, higher IQ people, more votes. And strangely enough, talking about Cambridge, that in fact we did, you know, people who went to Oxford and Cambridge did have two votes for quite a long time.

20:47They could vote both at home and at their old university, which is a sort of million notion. and Hayek is also somebody who's worried that democracy would destroy freedom of contract, that the masses would use their votes to limit freedom of contract. Peter Thiel again recently has talked about, you know, you can have liberty or you can have democracy, but you can't have both.

21:08Amol Rajan:Peter Thiel being the hugely influential Silicon Valley investor. But what happens at the end of the 19th century is that liberals begin to make their peace with democracy. They begin to realize both that democracy is inevitable and that it's a good thing. That you need to listen to people. If you don't listen to people, you will become a withered and inward looking regime that's ultimately so brittle it's destroyed. But also, if you're going to have democracy, you need to educate your masters in the great phrase, educate your masters. So long as you have an educated population, democracy is a good thing.

21:43Amol Rajan:What about Jacob's idea? He says, how can liberals justify support for a free market in certain areas of life, particularly food and clothing, which generates such masses of unfreedom for so many people. This is a sort of, this is like an economist would hear this as externalities. You can create your wonderful restaurant food, but actually it has a cost elsewhere, perhaps in terms of the climate or clothing. We have fast fashion. That's a liberal indulgence because you get to choose which clothes you get. There's a celebration of commerce and so on. But actually the impact of fast fashion is felt around the world.

22:13Amol Rajan:Have liberals been too unconcerned by those externalities, do you think? Yeah, I believe that they have. That liberals have – in the 1980s, the great cry of liberals was let business do its thing. Let markets do their thing. We've been through the 1970s. We've seen what happens when you have a corporist regime, a government that interferes all over the place in a very undisciplined way. And we need to stop that. And that did generate some focus. It generated a period of growth and it generated a period where government wasn't too overloaded. But there are certain ways in which that can be going too far.