The Republican Party looks poised to win back control of one or both houses of Congress in the United States’ upcoming midterm elections. Yet the party stands for nothing except fear of a “radical left” bent on installing socialism. The strands of paleo- and neoconservatism that once defined the party’s identity have given way to the Christian-national populism embodied by US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and promoted nightly by the popular Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
This seemingly new fixation on the specter of socialism looks almost farcical, but it is based on a constant, default setting or through line for the Republicans: the intellectual legacy of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian Nobel laureate might as well be on the ballot come November 8.
Hayek was always engaged in what he understood as rear-guard actions against the genuine threat of socialism, which he understood to include both communism and fascism. All were dedicated to erasing the modern liberal distinction between the state and civil society, the public sphere and the private sector, government and free markets.
The best-known of Hayek’s writings, the 1944 manifesto The Road to Serfdom, is a kind of retreat from the intellectual battleground to the meditative heights of weary retrospect. “It is doubtful whether at this stage a detailed blueprint of a desirable internal order of society would be of much use,” he tells readers. “The important thing now is that we shall come to agree on certain principles.”
The two principles Hayek insisted on have since hardened into the unstated premises of conservative thought, whether paleo, neo, or the virulent new Christian-national variant. First, market forces are the source of individual freedom because they are unknowable: as long as everyone is subject to the same anonymous laws of supply and demand, liberty and equality are possible.
From this it follows that only capitalist societies can be free, and, more significantly, that their citizens cannot – indeed, must not – try to create a more just social order. To do so would modify outcomes generated by market forces, and thus staunch the economic wellspring of individual freedom.
Second, if the state encroaches upon civil society by replacing market forces with central planning, or by manipulating the market through indicative planning (such as industrial policies), the public sphere will supplant the private sector. In view of modern mass democracy, liberty will be sacrificed on the altar of “absolute equality.”
Here Hayek conjures a slippery slope. “Once government has embarked upon planning for the sake of justice,” he says, “it cannot refuse responsibility for anybody’s fate or position … That a government which undertakes to direct economic activity will have to use its power to realize somebody’s ideal of distributive justice is certain.”
The key word here is “somebody.” Hayek obviously assumes that competing ideals of distributive justice already exist and will be contested in political venues once the state becomes the central agent of redistribution. The question for Hayek, then, is not whether an ideal of distributive justice should or will prevail, but whose?
His answer, and that of conservatives ever since, was plain – that “somebody” has been and must remain capital, because any other ideal of distributive justice would presumably entail equality of outcomes rather than opportunity. Capital’s ideal of distributive justice has prevailed because conservative opinion, whether paleo, neo, or Christian-national, has always followed Hayek in equating liberty and private enterprise.
The result has been what the vernacular calls “socialism for the rich” – a system that redistributes resources to the wealthy by relentless tax cuts; outright subsidies to pharmaceutical, energy, and agricultural companies; monetary policies that penalise labour in times of inflation; and fiscal policies that bail out capital in times of crisis. By these devices (and others), Hayek’s ideal of distributive justice has been, shall we say, normalised.
But the times they are a-changing, and this has all manner of conservatives in a panic, striking back when they can (and by judicial fiat if they must). Christian-national conservatism, which sees socialism in every corner of American culture and in most Democratic Party policies, is the seemingly hysterical result.
It’s been more than a decade in the making. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street popularised a new way of thinking about increasing inequality and the reckless yet cosseted financiers who destroyed the world economy in 2008. Then came Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – an avowed socialist! – as a viable presidential candidate.
By 2020, most Democratic and independent voters, as well as pluralities of Republicans, were for taxing the rich, single-payer health care (“Medicare for All”), strong measures to address climate change, and more government spending for infrastructure and job creation. Even before Sanders’ second run, socialism was as popular as capitalism among young Americans.
Then came COVID-19 and the massive government spending ($3 trillion) that buoyed locked-down economies by flooding households and firms with cash. And now, miraculously, comes another blow for Big Government in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act, with more than $700 billion in public investment.
The result is what The Economist calls a “new era” of “Bailouts for everyone!” I would call it something else, perhaps a down payment on “socialism for all,” because the “somebody” who speaks through these movements, attitude shifts, and legislative accomplishments is not capital.
It’s not labour, either, despite a notable uptick in union organising. But its demands are certainly more promising than the Republicans’ combination of tax cuts, deregulation, and new Christian-nationalist experiments with authoritarian governance. The ideal of distributive justice this “somebody” embodies is more pluralistic, egalitarian, and realistic than Hayek’s. At the very least, it opens onto social-democratic remedies for inequality, climate change, migration, population aging, and working conditions.
The Christian nationalists may not be so far off the mark, then. At any rate, they aren’t hysterical in seeing the specter of socialism for all wherever they look. Whatever the outcome November 8, its time seems to have come.
The writer is Professor of History at Rutgers University. ©Project Syndicate