As a Marxist, I was brought up on the idea there were two bourgeois newspapers/magazines, the Financial Times and the Economist, that one needed to read because, unlike most of the mainstream print media, they were the ruling class talking to itself. The rest of the popular print media were either about pandering to right wing prejudice or manipulating the working class with propaganda or both.
The Economist dates back to 1843 and was founded to support abolition of the Corn Laws. Its historic ideological stance, repeated endlessly in articles as a kind of mantra, is classical economic liberalism. The competitive market is pretty much the best way of distributing most resources and preserving “liberty”. It favours bourgeois (parliamentary) democracy and limited, rules-based government. It combines that with some degree of tolerance of welfare and diversity – social rather than economic liberalism.
This week it has taken aim at what it claims is the growing “illiberal” left with its banner front page and not one but two articles attacking this alleged threat to our fundamental freedoms. Its target is not, as it would have been 40 or 50 years ago, the threat to freedom posed by trade unions. Now the threat comes from “wokeness” and “identity politics”.
The least one might have expected from a serious magazine claiming some intellectual credibility, even if it’s in defence of a capitalist system pretty much as most of us don’t know it, is serious analysis and argument. Instead they have produced a litany of selective and selectively described examples of this alleged illiberalism and occasional vapid and vacuous argument. In fact the articles are a travesty of thinly disguised bigotry serving to enable the far right for whom wokeness is the new cold war enemy, representing the forward march of the Marxist left in our universities and increasingly and amazingly, according to the Economist, big business. This is straight out of the Jordan Peterson school of crapulousness.
I confess though I rather took heart at the Economist’s description of how powerful the progressive left has become based apparently on the trendiness amongst Generation Z of a very small number of texts by minor academics. Would that it were so easy to change the world. Anyway, for all of the political limitations of wokeness and identity politics, far better in my view to be woke than an ignorant, bigoted, reactionary bastard, as advocated by this week’s Economist.
Rob Hoverman
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