The worry is, I think, both in the UK and the USA, that voting for some vague or inchoate form of liberalism SAVED one from swinging further left. Corbyn’s career was all but ended by this kind neo-lib buffer zone between conservatism writ large and the ‘loony’ left. But the neo-lib line was pred-
cated along the lines of ‘more of the same’. My tutor-to-be, the late Peter Lipton, dubbed this position ‘cautionary’ inductivism, though in another context (as opposed to revolutionary inductivism = time for a change given the same data). And this resulted in an attack on a sitting duck, as far as
the comfortable electorate was concerned. Suddenly this small ‘c’ conservatism was blasted from the water by cries of ‘elitism’, feeding straight into populist anxieties. In many ways, some or other sort of liberalism triggered an inarticulate populist backlash. We paying for that today.
Of course what the liberals hated about Corbyn wasn’t his social-democratic economic policies but his rigorous liberalism. If someone was a centrist ‘liberal’ he simply showed them up.
Hence the irony. I’m not a card-carrying socialist. But I’ve come to see over the last 20 years or so that there’s been absolutely no increase in the social goods; health, education, housing. Nobody has dared to improve them for fear of …. for fear of what exactly? A label?
The electorate hasn’t had the option of voting for anti-neoliberal party since perhaps 1992, maybe 1987 (until 2017).
What an indictment, and a hangover from Thatcherism. Why weren’t lessons learned?
There’s a lot at stake in making sure they’re not.