Reactionary chic

Peter Jenkins

The Collapse of Democracy Robert Moss (Temple Smith £4.95) Death of democracy books are the coming vogue. The spirit of the times is an anxious one and the lead-time of the publishing industry being long, the shock to the western system — Which, for convenience, we can date in the autumn of 1973 — is still in the process of being transmitted between hard covers. The 'thirties were the most prolific period for hard-cover Pamphleteering; forebodings about the dictators were amply justified but the democracies emerged victorious and capitalism, for whom the typewriter bells tolled incessantly, not only survived but went on to flourish as never before. The late 'fifties and early 'sixties brought another spate of vogueish political literature: the what's wrong books boomed; remember The Stagnant Society, a paperback best-seller? The literature which accompanied the election of a Labour government in 1964 after thirteen years of Tory rule was harsh in diagnosis but optimistic in prognosis; the spirit of the times was the contagious one of Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society. Now comes the literary backlash against the failure to build Harold Wilson's New Britain while, not only in this country, the depressed spirit of the times is reflected in a new literature a the apocalypse.

Robert Moss's book is not a particularly good one but it has many of the ingredients of a successful vogue book. It has a shrilly arresting

title democracy's "collapse", is not suffixed With a question mark. The author warns us in an introduction of how "highly controversial" he is going to be as he sets off, somewhat breathlessly and bossily, to rouse us from our complacent slumbers. One of the tricks of the vogue book trade is to promote some commonplace to the rank of revelation — in this case democracy's tending towards equality at the expense of liberty. Vogue books are usually also eclectic as is this one; from the index, the acknowledgements and references you can see at a glance who's in and who's out and the text is studded with gobbits from more-often-quoted-than-read authors. They do service for argument — as Sir Henry Maine observed ... as Pointed out by von Mises . . Those two enemies, topicality and profundity, lie down together between the covers of the vogue book and the proofs of this one were updated tO take

account — as at the middle of this year — of the latest developments in Portugal and in the

A.E.U.W. elections. A voguebook, above all, Must be contemporary — that is to say concerned with the immediate future — while at the same time seeming to be rooted in older, Preferably recently rediscovered, truths.

Given the shortcomings of the genre Mr Moss's book is readable and stimulating and not excessively irritating. It is also interesting

since it may be an early instance of an unfamiliar phenomenon, a vogue literature of the Right. Mr. Patrick Hutber of the Sunday Telegraph already has seized joyfully on

somebody's reference to the "trendy right" on the grounds that the Left's best tunes are no longer automatically top of the pops and I suspect that Mr Moss is the harbinger of what we shall soon be sneering at as "reactionary chic." The reactionary chic buy their politics at Hayek, shop for economics at the Institute for Economic Affairs and attend holy worship at the True Church of Milton Friedman. They are for indexing and vouchering, can talk with technical expertise on the subject of counterinsurgency and invest in the fall of the Weimar Republic the same sort of historical and ideological significance which the Left attaches to the Paris Commune.

Mr Moss deserves some welcome — even from his opponents — as an articulate exponent of right-wing nostrums wkich, I suspect, are on the way to becoming intellectually fashionable at a popular level. What's wrong with the book is exactly what is wrong with most left wing books of the same ilk: that is that it pounds away at its theme with a hammer steamed by first principles enriched with secondary authorities. The reader should skip Chapter One which is a fictitious 'Letter from London, 1985' derivative of — though not as good as — the setting for Jack London's 'The Iron Heel.' By 1985 Socialism has extinguished liberty and by extrapolation from the imagined future into the real present the "now" is presented by the author — surely with ludicrous extravagance — as a "stage of proto-communism". He refers — as if the point has been demonstrated — to "what remains of the free society in Britain".

Starting with what (though he does not attribute it) is Schumpeter's definition of democracy — a mechanism for selecting teams of leaders — Mr Moss asserts (arguing chiefly by quotation from the classics) the classical doctrine that a free market is quintessential to a free society. Who are therefore its enemies? Number One is "the extraordinary power that is concentrated in the hands of a single social pressure group, the industrial trade unions." Number Two — although this is not made fully explicit until a later stage in a muddled argument — is "the absence of constitutional curbs on the power vested in the House of Commons." In Parliament we see (or so he says) the Party of Equality triumphing over the Party of Liberty: the extinction of liberty and, when it comes to it, equality as well, is "the alluring horizon towards which Britain is steaming at full speed...."

This is all nonsense and Mr Moss, who has used his eyes and his ears and his common sense as a journalist in Portugal and the Argentine and some other places, clearly hasn't stirred far from his offices in the Economist for the purposes of observing his own country. What he has done instead is to bring to bear upon newspaper reports about trade unions and other contemporary domestic problems texts concerned with the age-old tension between democracy and equality. By this means he achieves one of the essential requirement of a vogue book — the perennial made new and urgent.

For a hundred years or more critics of democracy (ie. representative government elected by universal suffrage) have predicted that liberty will be the inevitable victim of the masses' lust for equality. Because this has so far not proved the case you might think it more worth exploring why than repeating unfulfilled prophecies just as it is more worth explaining the failure of socialism to replace capitalism — except with the aid of arms — than to go on inventing new scenarios for capitalism's inevitable collapse — which is of course another example of how Mr Moss has written an inverted New Left Book.

Mr Moss invests in the unions a mysterious power born of his own ignorance. Trade unions do have too much power but most of it is negative: they constitute one of the most formidable barriers against the advance of equality in what is still a pluralistic system although its structure may be neither to Mr Moss's taste nor mine. Similarly he gets himself into difficulty with his economics — of which he admits knowing little. Having demonstrated by assertion and quotation that a market economy is the precondition of political freedom he is obliged, by circularity of argument, to come down in favour of a market economy. Its performance then becomes a matter of faith. How free a market in order to produce how free a society? He does not discuss.

Indeed the economic section of the book — which is really integral to his whole political and moral argument — is a lamentable example of amateur monetarism and entirely begs the proper subject of his concern, which is the basis of authority in society. For example he makes a point of the difficulty of freezing wages without aid of the army but doesn't see that the same difficulty applies to freezing the money supply. All through the book he talks about "unions" as if they were simply an unbalancing item in a philosopher's constitution. He doesn't go into "workers" and work. By what means does he propose to make them work if they won't? At bayonet point? And why if property (Sir Henry Maine passim) is synonymous with liberty cannot a job or a work ("restrictive") practice be considered as a form of property and also synonymous with liberty? Democracy has resulted not so much in the expected thrust towards egalitarianism as in a translation of democratic rights into new property rights — jobs, demarcations, tenancies, etc — on a scale inimical not so much to hierarchy but to efficient control — which is another facet of authority.

However a book which raises these and many other questions is worth reading, and Mr Moss should be deplored not for writing it but for his contribution to a growing intellectual fashion which is reactionary in the literal sense of turning to the past in revulsion from the present. If there is a threat to democracy — and, of course, there is if only because there always is, because democracies are ambitious societies prone to dissatisfaction — it stems from the failure of the system to yield the results expected of it, a combination of excessive expectation and under-gratification. The unions — which Mr Moss unthinkingly belabours — are a good example: paradoxically too demanding (powerful?) and too undemanding (feeble?), at the same time a force of radical intent and conservative effect, positive in their tendency at the centre and largely negative at the workplace. British democracy is at risk because of persistent failure but the failure is structural, economic and social. Perhaps the

failure is in some way systemic — endemic in our attitudes, habits or institutions — but after reading Mr Moss's book 1 am not in the least convinced that British democracy is peculiarly vulnerable to self-destruction or that he is entitled, on the evidence he cites, to announce its demise in so vogueish and sensational a manner,