There are few adjustments more psychologically painful than the one required when yesterday’s radicals wake up to discover they are today’s establishment. Such is the predicament of the post-’60s left. Even as they conquered every institution, progressives have continued to strike the pose of embattled outsiders, the brave free spirits raging against a patriarchal theocracy that survives only in their imagination. Their greatest trauma is victory itself. Having won, they can’t stop pretending they are still fighting.
Consider the following facts. Just over 40 percent of marriages in Britain now end in divorce; in the United States, the figure is higher. Around 30 percent of pregnancies now end in abortion (the figure stateside is lower, at a “mere” 21 percent), and 71 percent of Britons support abortion being legal in “all” or “most” cases. Around 50 percent of them regularly watch pornography. Only about 1 in 10 people go to church on a weekly basis, and although that figure is higher in America, it has fallen considerably over the last 20 years, even if there are now signs of the decline bottoming out.
Secular, socially liberal opinions and habits have manifestly prevailed. You would think, then, that liberal opinion makers would be ecstatic about having achieved one of the most dramatic social and cultural revolutions in all human history. No group of people has been so successful so quickly as British advocates of the “permissive” society, of the sexual revolution, and of secularization. In America, significant counterweights have retained some power, but in Britain, both major parties follow public opinion in being socially liberal, and there is little market for any openly Christian politics.
It is therefore striking how jittery British social liberals and secularists always seem to be. In the debate over assisted suicide, every few months advocates like Esther Rantzen seem to circulate an accusatory missive to members of parliament darkly insinuating the omnipotence of regressive religious conservatism. On sexual matters, liberal feminists, who surely represent the ruling orthodoxy of the age, are obsessed with the idea that some outpouring of conservative pro-life sentiment, leading inexorably to a Handmaid’s Tale style theocracy, is always just around the corner, probably funded by shadowy American billionaires. The fact that for generations Britain’s abortion laws have only ever gone in one direction (more liberal) and abortion is now decriminalized up to birth doesn’t seem to have a noticeable impact on this belief.
Today in Britain, critics of Mohammed have to go into hiding for fear of their lives, and you can be arrested for burning a Quran. Instead of seeking to change these realities, secularist groups such as Humanists UK turn their fire on the vestiges of official Christianity such as Church of England-run schools and the continuing presence of a handful of bishops in the House of Lords.
Alice Roberts, Humanists UK’s former president, has just written a book that mangles the historical record to attempt to show that Christianity has always been a cynical exercise in power worship and money-grabbing. She is now having to write about events that happened over a thousand years ago to maintain the plausibility of her paranoid hostility. Sounding like an embattled Victorian freethinker, Roberts assails a straitlaced ecclesiastical establishment that exists only in her mind. In reality, the bishops are almost as liberal as she is, and have little meaningful power over their own flock, let alone over wider society.
“In their minds, it’s an eternal 1950s.”
The secularist social liberalism of the wider British public is a lot less neurotic than that of Roberts or her fellow secularist Stephen Fry, who sees a conspiracy against homosexuality everywhere. However, the same basic worldview is commonplace among the Boomer and Gen-X cohorts that run the BBC, the civil service, NGOs, courts, and the newspapers—as is the belief that such opinions are still meaningfully rebellious and counter-cultural. In their minds, it’s an eternal 1950s, and they are the brave radicals of the 1960s, hitting back against “the man” and all of the oppressive religious and conservative norms that make everyone sad and miserable and buttoned up. The last 50-odd years basically haven’t happened—or at the very least are in constant danger of being reversed overnight.
The endless invocation of non-existent oppressors isn’t just a useful way for our faux radicals to cope with the trauma that they have become the establishment they claim to despise. It also distracts from the reality that secularization and liberalization have not been as liberatory as hoped. Instead of ushering in an egalitarian society, the new spirit of openness and flexibility proved compatible with ever more ruthless modes of capitalist exploitation.
By and large, those who hold this view of things have done very nicely out of globalization and a less regulated economic settlement. They are the inhabitants of the tiny islands of urban prosperity that have benefited from the economic revolution that began in earnest in the 1980s: free trade, free movement of capital and people, free markets. Any enthusiasm they might have had for what used to be the bread and butter of left-wing politics—defending the interests of the British working class—dimmed some time ago.
But the gnawing desire to appear not only as a good person but as a kind of rebel means they need to find some outlet for their faux radical energies. They do this by conjuring up the ghosts of the bad, old days of patriarchal oppression. This also makes it possible to file away skepticism towards any new proposed social or cultural innovation—commercial surrogacy or the legalization of hard drugs, say—in the “bigotry” file. Even the fact that such an approach hasn’t had the desired result in the trans debate hasn’t provoked a reconsideration. Anything that annoys the imaginary Christian conservative storm-trooper who lives rent-free in their head is to be endorsed, no matter how dystopian or how obviously a function of the economic interests of big business it is.
In fact, ceaseless rebellion and the questioning of all authorities is consonant with capitalism’s disruption of social relations. I am far from convinced that liberal progressives were ever entirely unaware of this, or all that bothered by it. I only wish they could be honest about it, drop the smug moralizing that pretends their self-interested politics of liberal hedonism and greed is some noble world-historical moral crusade, and accept their mantle as defenders of an establishment now as entrenched and hidebound as anything they ever railed against. I’m not holding my breath.