Will a new era of nationalism and conservatism soon dawn?

After four decades of neoliberalism, are political elites about to embrace National Conservatism?

Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash

The Americans by the 1850s to 1880s, depending [on] how you want to cut it, have actually figured out industrial technology and boosted the demand for labour more than the Europeans ever imagined. Then the Americans are in the lead, and we had a very good 20th century combining private capital, private innovation with some (I would say) selective public interventions where a private initiative didn't work. And this actually carried a lot of countries, including countries in that European tradition, through to around 1980. Since 1980, it's become much more bumpy. We've had a widening of income inequality and much more questioning of the economic and political model.
Simon Johnson, Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, co-author of Power and Progress

It is certainly true that economic liberalism tends to lead to more social liberalism – one reason that young people on the continent are less woke than their British or American contemporaries – but that is in part related to trust. Economic freedom tends to breed a more trusting population, in certain conditions, and high trust leads to liberalism – and then liberal policies tend to erode that trust. The circle of life.

Ed West

, Substack superstar

You start to sweat and fret; it gets hot
How’d you get into this spot?
You played yourself
Ice-T, Rapper

Armchair sociologists, including me, spend a lot of time contrasting the widespread upward mobility and social cohesiveness of the post-WWII decades with the rather less egalitarian and cohesive societies now found throughout the Anglosphere and Western Europe. This comparing of eras is now so widespread that a name has been coined for it – nostalgia economics.

But as the quote above from Professor Johnson underlines, the material living standards of people in the US and similar countries improved from around the middle of the 19^th century. It was presumably during this long stretch of time, rather than just the post-war decades, that people came to believe that their children would inevitably live more comfortable and prosperous lives than they did.  

Neoliberal economists would argue that even low-income and middle-income people’s material living conditions have been improving since 1980. (Albeit not as rapidly as those of high-net-worth and especially ultra-high-net-worth individuals but, hey, a rising tide etc etc.) Rather than get bogged down in that interminable debate, let me just observe that while the top quintile of the income distribution is delighted with how things have turned out over the last four decades, the bottom four quintiles are somewhat less sanguine. There’s a generational as well as a class aspect to this given the boomers – who are at this point looking like the luckiest generation in human history – are disproportionately overrepresented in the winners’ circle.

What life is like for the non-winners
At the risk of trying the patience of regular readers, let me contrast the very different life experiences of the boomer and post-boomer generations.

The boomers: Around 10 per cent of them complete a university degree. Many don’t even finish high school. While they don’t exist in a classless utopia, the boomers do benefit from their elders’ determination to build stable, relatively egalitarian societies after experiencing the horrors of two world wars and a savage, long-lasting economic downturn.

Younger readers should also be aware that during the Cold War Western business and political elites believed Communism was a serious threat. They were therefore willing to tolerate a strong union movement and plenty of income redistribution. Among other things, this led to the growth of an unprecedentedly large middle class and widespread homeownership.

The post-boomers: The post-boomer generations are the best-educated generations in history, with each succeeding generation more likely to complete undergraduate and post-graduate qualifications. Unfortunately, while the supply of university-educated, would-be professionals has exploded, the number of secure, well-paid, professional jobs either hasn’t increased much or has declined due to technological advances and the accompanying industry disruption.

I don’t think anybody needs to be educated about the housing unaffordability crisis, so let’s just run through the basics. Boomers (and some Gen Xers) have won the housing lottery, purchasing homes that have massively appreciated. When the boomers were buying houses or, more rarely in those days, apartments, the standard asking price was 4X annual household income, at a time when a household income was often only whatever the man was earning. (In that era, women typically dropped out of the labour force when they had kids and sometimes as soon as they got married.) Nowadays, in many cities, the standard cost is at least 10X household income. And this in an era when the female half of the household usually works at least part-time and often full-time.

The impact of unaffordable housing on Generations X, Y and Z has been well-ventilated, but it’s worth pointing out it ultimately doesn’t even serve the boomers’ interests that well. They now have the choice of either handing their offspring a large sum of money or having their kids (and grandkids) living in a far-distant suburb or region. Increasingly, they get the worst of both worlds and must hand their kids a large sum of money just so those kids can put together the deposit on a grim 1.5-bedroom apartment 50km away from the CBD.

It's not something many economic and political commentators feel comfortable drawing attention to, but the social and economic changes of the last half-century have also thrown relations between the sexes into disarray.

For all of the monomaniacal obsession with female disadvantage in progressive circles, women have been outperforming men educationally for decades. Feminists are correct in noting that this educational outperformance doesn’t consistently translate into occupational outperformance, especially after women have children. But I see a lot more concern about the dearth of ‘good men’ in media created and consumed by women than I do complaints about being unfairly underpaid or denied well-earned promotions. Most women have an exhaustive list of the characteristics a man must possess to be worthy of their affections, but at the top of those lists is that he must earn as much or more than they do.

Long story short, here’s what life is like for many post-boomers in the bottom four quartiles of the income distribution.

You spend a long time in the education system, but still likely end up with a low-income or middle-income job. Even if you end up with a middle-income job, you probably won’t be able to get into the property market until your fifties or sixties, when your parents die and leave you part or all of the house they purchased in their mid-twenties.

If you’re a middle-income man, you’ll get much less interest from the fairer sex than your (middle-income) father and grandfather did. If you’re a low-income man, you will struggle to get any at all. If you are destined to lead a propertyless, sexless and loveless existence anyway, you might start to wonder if it’s worth dealing with the indignities of minimum-wage pink-collar employment when you can live almost as well on welfare then commit slow-motion suicide with alcohol and drugs while keeping yourself distracted with porn and video games.

If you’re female, you’ll probably get plenty of attention from all different kinds of men, as has been the case since time immemorial. But you will find it ever harder to meet a man you consider marriage material the further up the career ladder you progress. The best-case scenario is that you will merely marry and give birth far later than your mother and grandmother did. (Given that you probably won’t start trying for a child until your fertility is beginning to fall off a cliff, you’ll usually have no more than two children and consider yourself lucky to have one.) The worst-case scenario is that you won’t marry or give birth, despite yearning to. The increasingly common middling scenario is that you will find some way to give birth but either never get married in the first place or divorce your husband before your children reach adulthood.

Whatever the reasons, if the women of a society aren’t giving birth at above replacement rate that society is heading for a world of economic and political pain. (Likewise, if many of the world’s wealthiest societies aren’t reproducing themselves, that world is in for a, um, world of economic, political and geopolitical pain). While it would be reductionist to assert greater economic and social liberalism are the sole causes of collapsing birth rates, you’d have to be obtuse to argue they haven’t played a significant role.  

Given all of the above, many people, especially people under the age of 40, are concluding the untrammelled economic and social liberalism of the neoliberal era (1979 – 2016) hasn’t been all upside.

Can we unplay ourselves?  
While those on the mainstream Left have been concerning themselves with the important issues of the day, such as whether oxygen measurement technology is racist, a new generation of thinkers who self-identify as being on the Right, or at least on the dissident Left, have been investigating whether Anglosphere societies made a terrible wrong turn at some point in recent decades.

These thinkers don’t hesitate to decry the social liberalism advocated by the Left since the late 1960s. But they are also willing to admit that economic liberalism championed by the Right since the late 1970s has white-anted many of the institutions that conservatives value. Indeed, there’s a growing recognition that social and economic liberalism are two sides of the same coin.

This was meant to be an article about national conservatism. This is a type of anti-globalist Social Conservatism 2.0 that departs in significant ways from the (increasingly exhausted) neoliberalism that parties of the Left and Right have been serving up to (increasingly disenchanted) voters since the 1980s.

To my eye, national conservatism looks like the Red Toryism/Blue Labourism that made a bit of a splash a decade ago before quickly fading away. (As luck would have it, I wrote a thinkpiece for the ABC a decade ago suggesting Tony Abbott govern as a Red Tory. He didn’t heed my advice and look how that turned out.)

But I’ve run out of space and time, so a deep dive into one of the more interesting political movements to emerge recently will have to wait until my next missive.