I had an epiphany after speaking at a conference in the summer of 2018. The panel on which I appeared was titled 'Beyond Black and White' and addressed whether a post-racial society had already been achieved or if it is an impossible goal. As a black woman serving in the British parliament, and a first-generation immigrant, the answer seemed so obvious to me: of course, the UK is a post-racial society. With ethnic minorities represented at all levels of public life, the colour of one's skin does not determine success.
Yet, I was met with hostility by a group of young people in the audience. All white, mostly female, they tut-tutted, hissed and shook their heads vigorously at almost everything I said. I was intrigued by the manner in which they dismissed my 'lived experience'. After the panel ended, I went over to them and we had a lengthy conversation. It was eye-opening. It was the first time I had encountered the young people in the front line of contemporary identity politics. What I found was that the adherents to this modern creed do not think in terms of individuality and personal responsibility, freedom of association or expression and shared experiences, but separated, segregated identities of victims and oppressors. They were baffled that I, an oppressed black woman, was not angrier about racism and couldn't see that they had 'white privilege'. It was clear that they had never spoken at length to anyone who disagreed with them. They were bemused by me but by the end of the conversation, I knew I'd had an impact as I watched them begin to question some of their own assumptions and argue among themselves. It was refreshing for me to see that if you make an argument, you can challenge - and even change-assumptions that at first seem quite unalterable.
In the course of the conversation, I asked them why they held such strong views when they clearly hadn't spent much time thinking about what they really believed. One of the girls looked at me and said, 'because I need to feel like I'm a part of something important'. And that gets to the heart of it. They didn't see themselves as simply holding views about which reasonable people can disagree, but as warriors for their understanding of social justice, crusaders in a movement that provided meaning and security for them. That is why this phenomenon, which I call authoritarian progressivism, is both so powerful and why the 'new authoritarians' who practise it are so dangerous. It is powerful because it gives these new authoritarians a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. And it is dangerous because it creates a justification for coercion and undermines values that we have, until now, taken for granted and which form the foundations of British society.
I dislike the term 'woke'. It mocks this sentiment. It may sound pithy, but it fails to capture the deep logic that drives this movement. Calling things woke masks the destructiveness of an ideology that presents itself simply as an interpretative tool which highlights social justice issues but, in fact, aims to polarise society along fractured lines. As the equalities minister, I saw first-hand how these new authoritarian views are destabilising the positive norms we use to govern society. We see it in the increased politicisation of the workplace and a proliferation of workplace political activism masquerading as ethical campaigning. Unlike traditional trade union activism, it has a coercive element to it. The ideology is more concerned with controlling the thoughts and behaviour of co-workers and customers than improving the economic lot of the workers as a collective. It is also based on subjective morality rather than economic improvement. So instead of workers asking for better pay and conditions, they take part in days, weeks and months of awareness raising and reflection on various identity issues in a manner redolent of a religious calendar. The focus is on issues that are frequently disconnected from the fundamental corporate purpose of an organisation, such as producing goods or making profits. Every year a new cohort of young people begin their working lives with no memory of the traditional workplace typical to those of us born in the 1980s, 1970s and earlier. They believe the workplace is there not to provide a livelihood, but affirmation and self-actualisation. This turns the office into an arena of competitive virtue signalling and leads to the dampening of free thought. In The Coddling of the American Mind, author and academic Jonathan Haidt explains what is making younger generations more susceptible to authoritarian progressivism. His essay 'Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid' explains the pernicious influence of social media. We may not be able to tame the worst excesses of social media, but we can stop making elementary mistakes that hamper our ability to tackle this new problem. Centre-right political thought has been on a downward trajectory since the mid-1990s, winning elections but not the broader argument at stake. It has failed both to understand the new territory of contemporary politics and the changed character of its opponents. Centre-right values were not an abstract concept in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s. They could clearly be contrasted with a dirigiste ideology and, most vividly, you could see the economic damage caused in places in which the principles of free thought, tolerating difference, equality before the law, and even limited government had been suppressed.
Unfortunately, too many of my contemporaries across the political spectrum do not understand that we are living in the post-modern era - in an age of entitlement and of identity politics. It is not 1995 or even 2005 anymore. Managerialism and more technocrats, however competent, are not going to be enough to solve today's problems. A conscious effort to understand the intellectual and ideological preferences of the opponents of a free society is crucial to defeating their ideas. In a world where people can get their own alternative facts online, reject the authority of experts they believe are manipulative, politically motivated or frauds, it is not enough to simply do better with the same failed bromides. People must see visible improvements in the quality of debate and real outcomes. They will not settle for just being told by politicians they no longer respect that all is well and their fears are unfounded.
To make itself heard to the public at large, the centre-right needs to rediscover the lost art of political argument. Today, centre-right politicians tend to assert, rather than explain. When the centre-right addresses deregulation in supportive terms, people don't interpret it as a call for freedom from bureaucracy, but as the loss of the regulatory safety net that protects them from exploitation. When taxes are cut for business, it is interpreted as a favouritism to wealthy business owners. When the argument is made for strong family structures, they feel that their lives, lifestyles and past mistakes are being judged. We don't require forcefully enough that our opponents use precise language. We must force new authoritarians to say what they really mean. Appearing at a select committee in the Houses of Parliament recently, I was asked a contentious question by the committee chairman. Her aim was not to shed light on government policy but to force me into making a statement that would look like I was against transgender people. Rather than trying to argue my case, I simply asked her, 'What do you mean by trans?'. She claimed that I was asking an unfair question. Like the young people I met at the conference four years ago, she could not define or explain a concept despite lobbying and arguing for particular policy positions based upon it. By providing a definition before responding, her posturing options were immediately limited and we could begin to have a real discussion rooted in the truth of the issue at large. In this way, I avoided the trap and highlighted the absurdity of her stance.
A new activist class has arisen, buttressed by legal and economic power in many of our societies. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not the elected government but this activist class that uses the power of the state to impose its views. It is at the forefront of identity politics and the culture wars. The growth of this class presents a huge challenge to conservatives and liberals. The activist class is not afraid to use its power to impose an agenda that says identity group X is good and identity group Y is bad. This, in turn, makes a mockery of the rule of law, because everything is politicised, including our traditional mechanisms for procuring justice for individuals and society. Liberals and conservatives are expending a lot of energy looking for areas of compromise with activists who refuse to acknowledge progress where it really has taken hold. They sincerely want a revolution and will continue to shift the threshold for political action as soon as their demands are met. For instance, after frequent campaigns to improve ethnic diversity in government over several decades,the current Conservative government is notable in having the most ethnically diverse cabinet in UK history. Three of the four great offices of state,the Treasury, the Home Office and the Foreign Office, are held by ethnic minorities. Yet, rather than being seen as a cause for celebration, new authoritarians attack ethnic minorities in government. They accuse them of being tools of white supremacy, dismiss their achievements and move the goalposts in claiming that representation has no bearing on the government's position on racial issues.
Another common mistake is to accept the presentation of certain problems as issues of injustice requiring the state to get involved. This reinforces the belief that state action can solve everything when, realistically, it cannot do so. More troubling is that new authoritarians have no fundamental concept of the meaning of liberty. They see it as the freedom to do bad things, whether they are offensive or exploitative. This is where reasserting the meaning and importance of liberty into discourse becomes relevant. Liberty is a practical necessity for a flourishing society, not just a philosophical 'nice to have'. The more state power grows, the more we curtail what people can and should do for themselves. Worse, we reduce people's ability to think for themselves. We begin to forget what the state's purpose is in national life, no longer asking, what should the state do, and what should it not do. If we fail to answer those fundamental questions and instead use state power to continue tinkering with every aspect of life in order to achieve social justice, we sleepwalk into a planned economy far more oppressive and stagnant than liberal thinkers of the twentieth century could have envisaged. The state should be used judiciously to avoid both authoritarianism and arbitrariness in its exercise of power. Time and again, those who seek to control others, and to take away liberty, always find a good cause to justify the state's encroachment on fundamental liberties. In seeking to use the law to force others to be nice, rather than to respect the liberty of the individual, we are asked by the new authoritarians to affirm their lifestyle and choices.
Much of what is referred to as 'woke' thinking seeks to replace the old view of an oppressed working class with a series of oppressed groups who are defined by gender, sexuality and race. The assumption being that these groups are constantly being oppressed by others - by men, heterosexuals, white people, and so on. To defeat new authoritarian thinking, it is essential to acknowledge that there are problems which need addressing. But we must also emphasise that so-called woke solutions based on discredited theories are not the answer. Indeed, they rob the individual of agency and dignity and treat people as groups to be manipulated and set against each other. In the reality of a new authoritarian, everyday life is treated as an oppressive structure which must be met with aggression in turn. To tolerate existing structures is to endorse this oppression. The slogan 'white silence is violence' is a perfect summary of this view, in which the idea that the liberty of others should be tolerated is represented as intolerant. A vicious circle of increasing hostility and polarisation is created as a result. New authoritarians see liberty as a sham which allows the oppression of marginalised groups by dominant groups. Individual freedom is portrayed as an illusion. We must refute this view. Liberty is the right of all individuals to choose their life and to make their own way in this world. It is the most fundamental right of all, without which almost no other rights are worth having.
Part of the problem is that, for the centre-right, liberty has come to mean a laissez-faire attitude - that we should sit back and do nothing. Those of us on the centre-right are told we must not take sides or fight culture wars. That this shift underway is the operation of a free society in action, that this is progress, or even liberty in action. This 'do nothing' attitude is deeply misguided. In reality, liberty must be protected and nurtured with reference to important broader principles. People should always be treated as individuals. Due process must always be ensured. A limited state should operate in a neutral fashion to all who live in our society. The rule of law must be protected, under which all are equal. All of these principles are anathema to the growth of this activist class which is dominating so many of our institutions. Whatever you choose to call it, this new ideology is successfully masking itself as liberalism. It proclaims itself as a liberation movement and that is why classical liberals struggle to attack the premise of many of its arguments. At every opportunity,we must expose how the ideology seeks to deny autonomy, corral choice, remove responsibility and impose the conformity of external rules decided by cadres of new authoritarians, instead of allowing individuals to draw on their own sense of conscience.
We cannot reverse time, but we can build a new future. This requires a more muscular liberalism that is strong, confident in itself and not overly fixated on the past. We must not bash or ban things without making a case for a better way. All this attitude does is create new opponents, but few, if any, new allies. A positive alternative is needed, not just harking back to an earlier picture of the good society. This project also requires the case to be made for small government. The unnecessary growth of the state beyond providing essential public services has created multiple opportunities for activists to spread their ideology. We need to make the case for leaner government. And yet, too much rhetoric speaks of a smaller state as an end in itself. A smaller state is a means to secure a better way of doing things, allowing bureaucracy to focus and prioritise its resources. The best governments do a few things well, not many things badly. We need to start from first principles and investigate what liberal frameworks already provide, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. And we can apply it in new ways. For example, as a minister, having to deliver a racial equality strategy from scratch would have been impossible if I did not have a framework to draw on. I did not just go back to basics but repurposed classic liberal values for the work I was doing,and the strategy relied on three principles: disparities are not always due to discrimination; institutions should not be damaged by making the perfect the enemy of the good; and universalism rather than specific targeting of identity groups should be promoted.
Even when problems are discovered within them, we must be creative in finding ways to strengthen institutions rather than to tear them down. And this means not inviting people who do not care about our institutions to advise us on how to please them. That leads to activists marking our homework - we will never pass their tests. There will always be new hoops to jump through. Activists must also be distinguished from genuine victims. Too often there is a conflation between vulnerable or disadvantaged groups and those who claim to speak on their behalf. Recognising the difference between activists and those in genuine need is critical, and also sidelines those who are interested in bringing down the system. Deference in Western society is dead. The most difficult thing we will need to do is restore trust in authority and in the knowledge and information which society relies on. There are no easy answers to how we do this. People no longer assume that what the government or officialdom say is true, let alone what they hear in church or at university. This requires reform of authority itself and how it communicates. In an age when scrutiny is high and tolerance of mistakes and personal failure is low, those who provide a comforting narrative are able to exploit cynicism and create more polarisation.
The logical conclusion of coercive post-modernism is the unravelling of liberal democracy itself. The narrative of the culture wars obscures what is really at stake. Arguments over pronouns and gender-neutral toilets or statues and white privilege seem trivial when compared to solving climate change and the demographic time-bomb of an ageing population. But they are inextricably linked. You can't encourage the rest of the world to make sacrifices to achieve net zero if you've told them Western civilisation prospered only by exploiting them. Why on earth would they trust our intentions on everything from technology to public health? And what do we expect will happen to social cohesion if younger immigrants, on whom our migration policy relies, are immediately told that the majority population has privilege over them based on their skin colour? What else can you expect except an inbuilt hostility, to the elderly in particular?
We will pay a heavy price if we fail to defend our beliefs merely to avoid difficult conversations. If the West, supposedly, is only prosperous due to slavery and colonialism, if all its success is down to the patriarchy, white supremacy and hetero-normative oppression, there is a price to be paid. That price is that our beliefs, democracy, equality before the law, meritocracy,free markets and so many other liberal values are mere fiction. Fairy tales we tell ourselves to cover up a dark and murky past. There can be no resolution of the big problems of our age if we lose confidence in our history and the story of Western liberalism. Should we fail to defend it, there are many competitor states who will happily allow the new authoritarians and their post-modernism to do the heavy lifting in undermining all we hold dear, and will then replace whatever noble intent drove their progressivism with something far more sinister.
This essay was published as part of a collection in Liberty: The Evolution of an Idea, published by Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2024
