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{"id":18612,"date":"2017-01-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=335"},"modified":"2017-01-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T00:00:00","slug":"may-and-postliberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/01\/may-and-postliberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"May and Postliberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

T<\/span>he Guardian devoted a long recent editorial<\/a> to an analysis of the political outlook of British Prime Minister Theresa May. Whatever Mayism might be, it is not an ideology, not Thatcherism, not David-Cameronian modernizing. For May, Toryism is not \u201ca doctrine but as cultural inclination and a social milieu\u2014the parochial heart of Middle England.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the editors think they can discern the outlines of a \u201cpostliberal\u201d outlook in May\u2019s politics: \u201cShe is evangelical about global free trade but ready to compromise on economic openness for tighter immigration control. She supports gay marriage and women\u2019s right to choose abortion, although she has voted in parliament for shorter term limits.\u201d<\/p>\n

She takes Brexit as a renunciation of the trajectory of British politics from Blair to Cameron: \u201cthe referendum as an instruction to reshape the state to address the grievance of voters who felt marginalised through the years of accelerating globalisation. That is a cultural project as well as an economic one. It posits pre-referendum supremacy of an elite that was liberal, cosmopolitan and quick to ignore\u2014even to despise\u2014alternative perspectives. It follows that this elite should now be sidelined and its opinions discarded.\u201d<\/p>\n

In place of this decades-long consensus, May offers something close to \u201cRed Toryism\u201d: \u201cInfluential figures in Mrs May\u2019s close-knit entourage are sympathetic to the \u2018Red Tory\u2019 school of thought that combines a critique of social liberalism and free market libertarianism. This analysis identifies a corrosive interaction between two successive revolutions of the 20th century: the left-leaning, permissive culture of the late 1960s and the rightwing fixation on profit-seeking as the agent of progress that was the kernel of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Red Toryism rejects neither movement outright but says that their combination led to a cult of individual self-gratification, expressed through materialistic consumption, at the expense of community wellbeing.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other side is a \u201cBlue Labor\u201d movement that rejects Blairist New Labor because it \u201cwas insufficiently sceptical of the capacity of the state to effect social change by cash redistribution from the centre, overly squeamish in facing the impact of mass migration and neglectful of the resonance in traditional Labour-voting areas of identity, community and place as drivers of political allegiance \u2013 faith, flag, family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mayism seems to be settling down \u201cin the space where Blue Labour and Red Tory sensibilities intersect.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"