John Gray’s essay on post-liberalism in the New Statesman plums new depths of meaninglessness. It reaches the apogee of terminal thought, caught in the multicultural, post-political milieu that defines politics and culture as an array of choices circumscribed by a variety of faceless authorities. Extending beyond the state into an institutional oligarchy of overlapping bureaucracies and NGOs. Product standards, non-tariff trade barriers, certifications, licensure, etc. All conditioned and defined by multinational authorities that sit between compulsory and voluntary (quasi-compulsory to fit the governing modality of quasi-governmentality).
“The way forward is to constrain communities rather than to entrench them. Everyone should be subject to a rule of law enforced equally on all. Nobody should be denied freedom to exit their community or subjected to coercion by other communities. The tyranny of minorities in stifling free expression should be firmly resisted. Individual liberty must be reasserted against the invasive claims of collective identity”[1].
Return to the same but ignoring how we got here in the first place. Gray warns against nostalgia, refounding a forgotten past that never really existed. Yet the essay simply restates the official legal definitions of our modern political condition. Does any politician truly believe in communitarian tribalism or the assertion of identity politics? Does any want to allow particular groups to exist beyond the rule of law? Or is this a consequence of the multicultural project, of an internationalised world that moves beyond borders?
Britain has a political elite obsessed with the international community, with equalising the Other. Not at the expense (in their view) of native Britons but in the pursuit of a global community not unnecessarily burdened by borders, national regulations or other holdovers of the growth of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries (and postcolonial developments in the 20th). That Britons have been degraded by the diminution of national culture and demographics via immigration or of industrial output by import substitution and globalisation is narrativised as the inevitable consequence of international competition, and that the only way to survive is to gear fiscal planning toward the imperatives of bond markets, investors and finance capital.
Identity politics and its various tendrils are outgrowths of liberalism, of the assertion of subjective choices where the governing parameters are set extra-politically (attempting to move beyond the friend-enemy distinction). “The successor ideology is not in contradiction to liberalism, but an outgrowth of its depoliticising tendencies that turn the banality of personal politics into arenas of contestation. Governance, as a meliorative set of systems, opens avenues to the expression of identity through the mode of a consumer and/or manager which then develop political bite as they change the operating procedures of universities, businesses and bureaucracies. The regimentation of bureaucrats that Weber identified is inverted as it travels from down to up, regimenting the upper management and board into ideological decision-making with limited choices”[2].
There is a certain irony in Gray calling for the return of a muscular liberalism in the face of liberalism’s cultural and economic offspring. His criticisms of mass deportations and Powellite politics only reveals Gray’s thinking being curtailed by the very inertia he recognises as causing the emergence of politics that wants to turn back the clock. What does he expect when political elites constantly reference the present and fail to see long-term (or second-order) consequences? Supposed requirements of fiscal restraint and higher levels of immigration to make up for past fiscal excess are constant reminders that modern politics cannot be transformational. It’s not return of the same but a return to nowhere.
“Trust in democratic politics will be damaged irreparably”[3]. We are already there. Crises (whether fiscal, climatic or cultural) are an outcome of a politics obsessed with nonsensical platitudes and assuming futural inevitabilities. Holding the centre-ground, stopping toxic politics, not ceding to the extremes. All of them platitudinous drivel to conceal a lack of answers. Gray engages in such when talking of individualism and community. Both are semantic placeholders that mask demographic realities – mass immigration begets the formation of conflictual groups that demand representation, irrespective of the pieties of multicultural frameworks. Neither has any relevance in a techno-economic landscape that requires the sourcing of international resources (rare-earth minerals, industrial tooling and energy inputs) and the bordering of technological empires (whether Chinese, American or European).
Futural inevitability sums up Gray’s thinking. Globalisation is here to stay, fiscal compacts must be maintained, we cannot reverse demographic replacement. All represent the distribution of sovereign power to new modalities. There is no curtailment or degrading of sovereignty. Hobbesian liberalism has no answer to this. It is a retreat into the comforting platitudes of an era that is ending. And it will end either by transformation via new political elites, or through the brutal violence and impoverishment of overlapping crises. National-legal frameworks invoked by Gray will do nothing. They are just effects of the landscape that Gray sees is dying, and that requires vast infrastructural securitisation to maintain (arguably our most transformational entities have been intelligence agencies[4]). The abyss is all-encompassing, and one can either seize power to transform or allow for death by inertia.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/10/how-to-save-british-liberalism
[2] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/01/30/troubled-relations-defining-the-successor-ideology/
[3] https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/10/how-to-save-british-liberalism
[4] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/06/17/autonomous-agencies-and-the-spectre-of-disinformation/
Collapse Patchworks 