Once upon a time, The Economist was known for being a non-partisan, elitist, classic English liberal paper. For the most part, it still is. But in the last few years, there has been a distinct shift in flavour, which has taken on an especially partisan character, against any political leader or party seen to be on the right. This has led them to print some rather extreme and bizarre positions, which cannot be explained by their prior reputation for simple pro-business, free-trade market fundamentalism.
In 2018, despite Cyril Ramaphosa’s open racialism and socialism plans (to nationalise the reserve bank, appropriate land on a racial basis without compensation, and issue further bailouts of the wildly corrupt and mismanaged state-owned enterprises, and despite their allegiance to the Communist Party, commitment to a socialist future, and race-based legal discrimination), The Economist chose to support the ANC in the South African elections over the far less corrupt and economically liberal DA. They also published a video essay praising Marx’s “correct” analysis of the workings of markets, promoted the ideas of serial fabricator and anti-capitalist anarchist David Graeber, accused a Jewish conservative of being a white nationalist, and promoted the works of a far-left YouTuber. Most recently, they have joined the chorus of cookie-cutter commentators labelling Boris Johnson (a free-trade, bourgeois-bohemian, old-establishment optimist in charge of the most ethnically diverse cabinet in history) and Donald Trump (a cynical mercantilist political outsider with conservative views on gender and ties to the ethnocentric right) two sides of the same coin. What could explain this change of heart?
In the late 20th century, a fight broke out in the halls of American academic philosophy, between two self-proclaimed liberals. John Rawls supported all the classic liberties, but argued that no inequality ought to be tolerated if that inequality did not benefit the least well-off. Corrective, redistributive social justice policies ought to be extended to all, regardless of any conflicting political rights. Robert Nozick retorted that since the state uses the threat of violence to deprive people of their possessions, the use of state power ought to be used precisely as one would a weapon (you wouldn’t hold someone at gunpoint to force him to provide housing for a homeless person, or pay for somebody’s medical treatment). And while Rawls was comfortable with a poorer society if it reduced injustice, Nozick aimed for the freedom from interference above all things.
Both of these are rather extreme positions, one of which leads to an impossibly large welfare state, the other to a prohibitively small government concerned only with basic security. So what sort of Liberals are The Economist? And how has the paper’s editorial stance changed the paper’s interpretation of that Liberalism? These questions are they key to understanding the leftward drift of the editorial stance, which has been inexorable, and the result of both conscious decisions, and ignorance of the new intellectual landscape.
The Middle of the Road
Over the past 50 years, The Economist has changed position on various issues, but have maintained a consistent approach to the big questions of the day. This approach is exemplified by the 2013 editorial stance, which lays out a rather clear case for what it calls “radical centrism”. The editors felt their position was clear enough not to get too theoretical: they oppose “all undue curtailment of an individual’s economic or personal freedom“, and throws its weight behind high-visibility previous political endorsements – Thatcher and Obama; “We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy.” So far, so legible. It could even describe Nigel Farage, seen today as a “populist” bogeyman.
These main points have featured in their “about” pages for years. The philosophy of The Economist has not always been a doctrinaire Liberalism, but rather a tendency to status quo relativism in a world where Liberal ideas were consensus. Fairly confident that they were well-understood, and that the values for which they stood were under little threat, writers and editors for The Economist never needed more of a manifesto than a general statement of support for liberal values. The “radical” position they drew inspiration from, was an adherence to the English liberal movement of the 19th century, of which John Stuart Mill is the most famous example, and Walter Bagehot, a former editor, their favorite luminary. Rather than promoting ideologically rigid attachment to specific institutions or dogmas, the old editorial pattern cleaves, out of a different principle, to avoiding any form of “extremism”.
However, this can often manifest as a willowy supplication to the winds of change. Take Europe, for example; thoroughly laid out by Juan Díez Medrano (from p129). Before attempting entry to the EEC, The Economist considered Britain better out than in, and pushed for closer bond with America. Afterwards, they called for integration on British terms, and not a blink of an eye after de Gaulle’s rejection, it crowed support for a federal state of Europe. In their assault on the Eurosceptics, they threw not only the use of persuasive argument into question, but even the use of professional statistics:
“Why is this sort of clamour set up whenever any new hope of entering the EEC dawns? The truth is that there are some people in Britain who are bitterly opposed to union with Europe on emotional grounds, or on the grounds of what they call the “bureaucratic monster” at Brussels and in that it interferes with Britons’ independence to run their own affairs. Such people are to be found in the economics profession, politics and the civil service; and this quite clearly does affect their sense of statistical balance.” – The Economist, 14 November 1967
Much of the same counted for the treaty of Maastricht, which The Economist stood against on the grounds of popular sentiment and political subsidiarity, but then warmly embraced once it was signed, conditionally criticised again under Blair, and took to in warm fondness under Cameron. They backed the Iraq war when it was popular with politicians, and turned from it once the fever died down. Despite there being significant evidence that it was not working, and despite the violation of both American constitutional principles and Liberal ones too, The Economist consistently backed Obama’s targeted bombing campaign in Pakistan. But they have since advocated an ill-defined desire to retreat from Middle-Eastern involvement, again, following the emotion of exhaustion among elites. [Since writing this, The Economist has performed another u-turn, lambasting Trump for attempting to extricate himself from the Middle East]
This comes from a thorough acquaintance with their target audience. As Helen Alexander, chief executive of the magazine puts it: “you know who they are. They are people who travel a lot, have intellectual curiosity, have a certain disposable income, have a certain decision-making power – and those are the people we know how to reach … and the people that our clients value.” This means that the views have to be adapted to the views of this class, who have become rapidly less liberal in recent years. While gentle in tone, it resembles rather closely the projected notion of “populism”, only this is populism for a much smugger class of people, rationalising the emotions of their target constituency. This cautious conformity, carefully following the consensus positions of the upper classes, could only last so long as the establishment remained united on the big questions of the day. But that is no longer the case, and just at the moment the tide went out, The Economist got a new captain.
New Hands on the Steering Column
2015 was a year of big change. The Economist saw a large change in ownership, Pearson passing its controlling shares on to the Angelli family. Only two months before, they appointed a new editor-in-chief, Susan Minton Beddoes, who has worked for The Economist since 1994. Following her ascension to the chief editorial position in 2015, Beddoes made several sweeping changes. She changed the page layout, introduced several new regular contributors, introduced a special data-driven section in the rear, changed the paper the magazine was made of, introduced a youth talent development program, increased the online social media presence, and started a video production section. Beddoes also chose to prominently make herself the face of the paper, breaking with nearly two centuries of tradition of low-profile, even anonymous editing. She began presenting a series of talks which she hosted and broadcasted, and even presented a video promoting their new manifesto.
Perhaps most bizarrely, the new management moved the company out of the building in which it had worked for fifty years. This move may have more impact than it at first seems. The geometry of the old building was ugly and illogical inside and out, and forced journalists into awkward, two-member offices. But this meant a sharing of insight and interest between colleagues across fields, leading often to collaborative pieces. These two-man offices also inhibited frequent, large group meetings, and divided some sectors of writers by floors, leading to compartmentalisation and partisan differences of approach to different problems, creating a pluralist organisation.
The Economist’s profiler of the old buildings, while acknowledging the obstacles the unwieldy, ugly and illogical modern monstrosity imposed, makes the notable observation that it significantly inhibited groupthink. This was not conducive to the new, multimedia, team-based nouveau regime, which was moved to the rather more attractive art-deco hybrid Adelphi, in slick, clean and modern open-plan offices, with their panoptic lack of privacy. Referring to her approach to the reforms, a profile piece in The Guardian quoted her as saying she “didn’t want us to be the Grandpa at the disco“. She clearly succeeded: “The result is a vibrant, progressive and collegiate workplace where people thrive at work.” How fitting then, the progressive refurbishment, not only of offices, but also of minds.
Use Your Turn Signal
In 2018, taking advantage of the 175th anniversary edition, The Economist issued a new manifesto. Like the previous stance, it staked claim to the middle ground, avoiding American “progressivism”, and what she calls a “rightish ultraliberalism”. Ultimately, it is the avoidance of the latter which most defines the paper today. When regular senior columnist Bagehot criticised the left-wing university establishment, the following edition made the unusual and unprecedented decision to fill its letters section entirely with brutal repostes against just his article, a ritual humiliation of a man who dared to scorn sensitive members of its target audience.
While they claim to be pushing away “progressivism”, the manifesto itself pays lip-service to feminist and post-colonial theory, distancing itself from Bagehot and Mill:
Liberalism was not born with the umbilical link to political democracy that it now enjoys. Liberals were white men who considered themselves superior to the run of humanity in both those particulars; though Bagehot, like Mill, supported votes for women, for most of its early years this newspaper did not. And both Mill and Bagehot feared that extending the franchise to all men regardless of property would lead to “the tyranny of the majority”.
In a related video, The Economist repeats that ubiquitous piece of neo-Marxist fluff that early liberalism provided freedom only for white men, despite no racially discriminatory laws ever having been issued in British history, and ignoring the successes of 18th and 19th century Afro-Britons like Olaudah Equiano who, like many former slaves, found refuge on English soil and English religion, and significant success and public recognition in English society.
Two days after the manifesto launch, two men were invited for a special talk on “the future of Liberalism”: Tony Blair and David Miliband. This rather firmly identifies the brand of government The Economist‘s current leadership views as ideal, which explains their strange, mixed praise for the “heir to Blair”. This has all coincided with a renewed, extreme Euro-fundamentalism. The September 12th, 2019 edition leader for example, argued that Europe risked becoming a “business backwater”. They blamed this on national differences in policy, for which the only cure is more Europe. Specifically, more central regulation, more spending, introduction of centralised welfare, and a harmonisation of tax schemes.
They have also pushed for a “soft Brexit” – that is, full subscription to regulation by the EU, and the relinquishment of decisionmaking power in its administrative bodies. If you are a fan of Brexit, this is a horror. If you are a foe, it bears only marginal distinction from the status quo ante, and can be considered a spectator’s victory. It is especially odd when you consider that their manifesto specifically declares that tariffs are of only marginal consequence to international trade today:
In 1995 the GATT became the WTO, and almost every country on Earth now belongs to it. Tariffs are cut by negotiation and agreed rates applied to all trade partners; a dispute-settlement system authorises retaliation against miscreants. There are still high levies on some goods, and many emerging economies, such as Egypt’s or India’s, would benefit a lot if tariffs were cut further. But tariffs on goods are in general no longer a big barrier to global commerce. The best estimate is that getting rid of those which remain would add only about 1% to global GDP
It is not just a matter of Europe. In broader terms, Beddoes’s Economist sees nationalism, even in its mildest form, as an obstacle and anathema to liberal ideals, defending mass immigration against “those nativist nationalists“; and challenging anti-democratic spoilers from Russia and China with a neoconservative foreign policy.
If liberal ideas do not underpin the world, geopolitics risks becoming the balance-of-power, sphere-of-influence struggle that European statesmen grappled with in the 19th century.
That may be right in principle, but to believe that the world has ever been anything but a balance-of-power, sphere-of-influence struggle is deeply naive, and also deeply ignorant. It is also ironic. America secured its hegemony by commanding military supremacy from the China Sea to the borders of the Soviet Empire. It aggressively defended this military supremacy with Henry Kissinger’s uncompromising realpolitik, until the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of idealist liberal-democratic evangelism.
Donald Trump and Brexit loom large over The Economist‘s new coverage. While Trump challenges open borders, his immigration policy is less strict than Obama’s, and his mercantilism is hardly the suffocating isolationism of the Smoot-Hawly Tariff Act. Nevertheless, Trump’s presidency is treated as a sinister, existential threat. Granted, the man is quite crooked, with ties to mobsters and a fantasy admiration of wiseguy strongmen. He also plays fast and loose with the law. But The Economist has been perfectly comfortable disregarding the corruption and occasional authoritarian fantasies of the Obamas, Clintons, Kennedys and Bushes, and treating them with the respect of dignified statesmen. Why should they change now?
Their manifesto paints the picture of an uninterrupted arc of progress, as reason and enlightenment opened the editors’ eyes to an ever-increasing role for the state, and an ever-diminishing role for the nation. What Trump and Brexit do, is resist this trajectory, not by introducing a reactionary turn, but by questioning the elites’ unshakeable faith in the Whig theory of history by considering a halt to the ongoing radical transformation of Western institutions. A brief examination of the policies promoted by both movements shows absolutely nothing that would have been deemed troublesome or reactionary even 5 years ago.
Keep Left, Pass Right
The new manifesto constitutes a radical change in the understanding of liberalism, from one driven by negative rights, to one driven by positive rights. That is to say, they have embraced the French-revolutionary definition of liberalism, liberation rather than liberty – the simultaneous (and paradoxical) reach for both “freedom” and “equality”. Never before has equality in any realm but law been an item of issue to The Economist. Its new centrality explains the proliferation of concerns about wealth distribution and class politics, which have never before been seen as the proper indicator of progress, but which have become rival to freedom and absolute well-being for the first time.
The state is seen to have a role to play in levelling the playing field and creating “equality of opportunity”, though that is by no means an agreed-upon concept. The Economist shows what they understand by it, by pointing to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which hews to a peculiarly expansive redistributive philosophy. The UN document is largely based in the ideas of its founders, none more intellectually prominent than Jan Smuts, who introduced the notion of human rights into the UN Charter preamble, promising “freedom from fear, freedom from want“; a Bregman-esque utopia of obscene proportions. The fingerprints of Rutger Bregman’s fans are all over the Open Future articles, from their endorsement of Graeber’s theory of “bullshit jobs” (which The Economist promotes here) to the celebration of totalitarian environmental solutions, open borders and UBI.
Their most interesting position, and one which this author found refreshingly idiosyncratic, was the targeting of the concentration of private power, particularly in land-ownership. They propose Georgeist land taxes based on area market value to encourage development and productivity; they argue that land value has become far too concentrated in big cities. They also push for antitrust laws to break up powerful tech giants. In its rationale, these sorts of policies resemble the Ordoliberal consensus of post-war Germany, with the state as referee in a game of fair competition.
But this is soured by an endorsement of socialist housing initiatives (using the old Progressive euphemism, “affordable housing”), and the cheap and asinine equation of any and all restrictions on migration with the turning away of Jews during the holocaust. Immigration is inevitable, they claim, and it will increase, so we need to get used to it, and find a way of shutting up the naysayers. They employ the usual three-card monty of quoting economic contributions of wealthy European migrants to justify the mass importation of welfare-dependent young men and extended families from the third world.
On the other hand, they do vaguely endorse the retraction of some, undefined welfare services from migrants (though not not free education or healthcare, to which they are entitled) and caution “principled liberals” against getting too angry with their pragmatism, by begrudgingly admitting that they have to live with those who dislike open borders for now. They are for grand expansions in the welfare systems of the Western world in all areas, because we live in a “changing world”, which is terribly frightening, unfair, and insecure. When that change is described elsewhere, it is usually in Hans Rosling’s rosy terms. These two arguments seem to be at odds.
But these are exactly the terms on which Rutger Bregman and those of like mind defends this philosophy – open borders, universal basic income (The Economist more sensibly opts for Milton Friedman’s “negative income tax“), and artificially limited working hours. As a communist, Bregman has stated that his goal with his popular histories is to appropriate the language of the right (efficient, rational, pragmatic) to defend wildly utopian visions of the future. He simultaneously remarks on the enormous success of capital, technology and markets, while trying to argue that the means by which we got here is wrong and need to be radically changed. Sounds familiar.
Backseat Driving
The recent leftward lurch in the Western universities and the elite has taken many by surprise, and while The Economist rightly criticises the suffocation of speech at universities, they have gone a fair distance to compromising with the political goals of the new orthodoxy. The substantive differences between left-liberalism and the New Left has eluded many analysts, and the outcomes have baffled commentators now for years – how can college liberals be so illiberal? For those of us who have been to university in the current generation, the rhetorical far-left ideologies employed in their profiles of Ben Shapiro and Natalie Wynn are rather transparent. But from afar, they can often resemble Rawlsian liberalism, enough that they can be mistaken for one another in the right circumstances.
The new multimedia section is the most affected. It is professional and well-polished, geared towards “snacking” content, as opposed to the hearty meals of their detailed feature columns. This is also used to promote the Open Future initiative, a young-talent-oriented platform, which also harbours its most blatantly left-wing material. It is an interesting experience to peruse the playlist of videos The Economist compiled to promote their vision of the Open Society. It involves an endorsement for communist agitator Ocasio-Cortez, a video which invites viewers to consider seriously the insights of Karl Marx, and no videos involving white men, with the singular exception of their endorsement of Miliband and Blair, and a special episode of the village pillory with Steve Bannon. There is also an endorsement for the hollow, hypocritical upper-class screech mob that was #MeToo, and the accompanying unresearched radical feminist generalisations. The majority of their clear stances are characterised by the radical, if not extreme approach to mass immigration, drug liberalisation and freedom of expression. But the aforementioned woke-isms weigh down the branches.
This is a symptom of the increasing influence of Marxist metaethics on the college curriculum in the past generation, which has forced most liberals sharing the general bafflement at wokeness into uncomfortable compromises. And what has exposed The Economist to these compromises, is their embrace of left-liberalism and positive rights. Or as Beddoes herself puts it,
Liberalism is about fighting against entrenched interests. It’s about fighting against rigged systems. It’s about dispersing power, dispersing concentrated power, and it’s important now that liberals regain that spirit. […] We were created to take the part of the poor against the corn-cultivating gentry. Today, in that same vision, liberals need to side with a struggling precariat against the patricians.
Fight the power, G.
One Lane Traffic
So even the full-throated liberal idealism of Beddoes has been corrupted by Marxist logic. Her trendy, clichéed argument is that the grievances which drive Western populism are entirely due to a confusion between cultural issues and economic ones. This is the recycled Marxist analysis that ideology is determined by the material base, producing false consciousness in service of the ruling class, or as Beddoes framed it, an alliance between “blue collars and red trousers“. This analysis avoids other factors, like the deliberate erosion and destruction of conservative cultural values through school curriculum reform and mass immigration, succeeded by a globalist elite who scorn any form of parochial belief as racist, sexist, homophobic and backwards (except for Islam).
Beddoes and her colleagues’ new understanding of the political divide is derived from Karl Popper via George Soros: that the real difference is between “open” and “closed”; “left” and “right” are old hat. But to use it in the particular way it is used today is to embrace a pejorative and self-serving left-wing partisanship. It serves as a principled opposition to any traditional form of power, morality or institution, including the nation state, with its exclusivity and parochialism. The consequence is an unwitting embrace of the notion that anyone who does not identify with the left threatens to drag us backward into Nazism, or as Rosa Luxemburg, the originator of this dichotomy put it, “the choice is socialism or barbarism”.
This Sorosian view seems to share rather little in common with the relatively cautious, small-c conservatism that Popper tempered his liberal Open Society with. His famous essay, the Open Society, was a criticism of Marx, Hegel and Plato, for their visions of utopia, and their “historicism” – the notion that history progresses toward a single destiny, which human beings are compelled to fulfil. By giving into left-wing bullying, and embracing the Whig view of history, taking liberation and equality over negative liberty, they have unwittingly conned themselves into accepting the Marxist terms of political competition.
The left-wing consensus that Brexit “has something to do with” the ideas of Steve Bannon, is rather ludicrous, but in the interview with Miliband, where he claims just that, Beddoes offers no challenge. In reality, Bannon is in thrall to a rather superstitious theory of a clockwork cycle of history, is a disciple of the neo-reactionary philosophy of Mencius Moldbug, and insists on proud, aggressive racial nativism. Perhaps Beddoes buys this because, like the rest of her crowd, she believes that racism is sufficient to characterise the motives, and the decline of heavy industry is sufficient to explain the cause, of both Brexit and Trump.
Fareed Zakaria pointed out in a discussion with Beddoes and George Osbourne, that this dialectical-materialist analysis of Brexit and Trump was a bad fit, because the same was happening in Europe, only without any comparable economic precursors. The wall “wasn’t epiphenomenal”. But for Beddoes, the main offender is “economic unfairness”, which Osbourne quickly recognised as a preamble to wealth redistribution. Next to Beddoes, Osbourne managed to seem almost a man of the people when he argued that Brexit was, in fact, a great deal about “real issues” – sovereignty, law and culture. By embracing the notion that they, the smart elites, have identified the real problems and made solidarity with the “real” workers, while the other party are cynical patricians allied with grubby proles pushing self-serving lies, The Economist has produced a strategy so doped with irony it smacks of habitual intoxication.
Please Step out of the Vehicle
Robert Conquest, a historian specialising in Leninist regimes, is famous for his (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) three laws of politics:
- Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
- Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
- The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy
While The Economist maintains its opposition to state seizure of the means of production for now, its recent rejection of anything deemed “rightish” has nudged it into a left-hand lane on the great Western intellectual highway, just as the road is about to head for a split. Their attachment to enlightened partisanship over their previous radical centrism has invited strange ideas into their midst, and has destined them to a potentially divisive and controversial future. By defining themselves in opposition to the right and in favour of “pragmatic” changes, The Economist is ensuring an incremental, leftward ratcheting. As they do, they will not so much convince right wing readers to embrace Popper and George, as they will alienate classic English liberals and attract radical followers of postmodern Progressivism. Perhaps, if circumstances permit, they ought to return to somewhere approximating the centre.
The Eccentric Flock 
Twenty years ago I ended my Economist subscription for precisely these reasons. Thank you for describing my motives so eloquently and well-wrought ;=)
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