I must admit that I too made the mistake. In my book last year on the Panama Papers scandal, I devoted a chapter to an analysis of the philosophy of Joseph Muscat’s government. My analysis was mostly inspired by the thoughts of Slavoj Žižek, Diego Fusaro, and Jonah Goldberg. In that chapter, I argued that the natural habitat of the middle and working classes is pro-labour conservatism.

But I should have been more careful. What I had in mind is better referred to as ‘communitarianism’ than ‘conservatism’. There are many reasons for this, but here I shall mention only a few.

First of all, because after the flurry of neoliberal innovations – new types of marriage, drug use liberalisation, dying with dignity, State-regulated prostitution, and, eventually, termination of pregnancy – the neoliberals will have no choice but to become conservatives themselves. They will want to conserve the neoliberal ‘revolution’.

Secondly, conservatism emits this musty odour of traditionalism, or even worse, passatism. Passatism is the belief that things were done better in the past, whereas traditionalism believes that we should keep our traditions alive. Both are clearly myths. There is no assurance that things were done better in the past; what we know for sure is that they were done ‘differently’.

Thirdly, conservatism somehow implies the continuation of power structures which benefitted some people at the expense of others. One can almost experience the aftertaste of injustice. Lastly, conservatism seems to smack of prohibitionism, with its spirit-numbing associations.

On the other hand, ‘communitarian’ evokes other connotations and nuances. It is the natural counterbalance to neoliberalism, as Marcello Veneziani explains in his insightful booklet, Comunitari o liberal: la prossima alternativa? Veneziani uses the English term liberal to differentiate the contemporary phenomenon from the liberalismo of the 19th century. We can use neoliberal and liberal to achieve the same effect.

From day one, Joseph Muscat declared he would be leading a liberal party. He used ‘liberal’ in the same sense as Veneziani, but we shall refer to it as neoliberal. He labelled his ideological antagonists ‘conservative’, and the label seems to have stuck.

Everybody is expected to conform to the dominant ideology and be happy about it, and if you dare even to utter half a word in disagreement, the know-it-all brigade will browbeat you

But, I claim, that label is wrong. The opposition to Muscat’s neoliberal politics is not conservatism, but communitarianism. The most important difference between neoliberalism and communitarianism is this. Neoliberalism advocates that the ‘is’ should absorb the ‘ought’. For communitarianism, on the other hand, the ‘ought’ should inspire the ‘is’.

In other words, the neoliberal looks at the world, takes note of what happens, and states that things should be as they are. The ‘is’ absorbs the ‘ought’. There is no lofty ideal to aspire to, but harsh reality to adapt to, almost passively.

You can easily apply this formula to the five behaviours mentioned above: new types of marriage, drug use liberalisation, State-regulated prostitution, euthanasia, and abortion.

Let’s take drug use and prostitution as examples. According to neoliberal logic, since people use drugs and prostitutes, then these activities/financial transactions should be regulated by the State. (The move is presented to the electorate couched in other, more romantic, terms.)

The implication goes further than that. Neoliberal logic permits the individual to enjoy all the possibilities offered by the laissez-faire culture. G. K. Chesterton called it the carpe diem culture – make hay while the sun shines and enjoy yourself as much as you can, safely and with as little consequence as possible.

But I think that using the term laissez-faire culture is better, because it necessarily means that you pay for the enjoyment: there is always a financial transaction understood in laissez-faire. Žižek goes even one step further and claims that the present system is not only permissive, but society actually bombards the individual with the injunction to enjoy and to feel guilty if s/he does not manage. It is like that parent who floods the child with toys and is then angry at the child because he fails to enjoy those toys.

What the child really wants (or needs) are personal ties not toys.

Unlike the neoliberal, for whom the relationship between the economy and the individual should not be meddled with but left alone to achieve its natural aims, the communitarian believes that the community should mediate between the economy and the atomised, infantilised individual, so that, eventually, the individual restores the broken ties with the community and grows out of the infantile state.

There are different types of community – the first community to receive and host the individual is the family. Then there is the State, and other communities the individual might choose to join as s/he goes through the different phases of life.

But in every phase of life according to the communitarian view, the individual should seek the path suggested by reason, rather than by reality.

Reality is the backdrop to the individual’s life, not the script. The script would be reason in its most practical form. Clearly, there is tension between the real and the practical.

Again, applying this formula to the five behaviours mentioned above, and, let’s say, drug use in particular, one finds that whereas in reality many people use drugs, practical reasonableness advocates against drug-use legalisation.

Browbeating practical reasonableness is obviously to be expected. But browbeating – calling those you disagree with ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘ayatollahs’, or even bullying them on Facebook, say – is not an alternative for those who have democracy at heart.

Browbeating was used by the Fascists, who shouted their opponents into submission. They also used truncheons and castor oil, but these are no longer fashionable these days. Instead, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, since the contemporary mode of Fascism is feminine, browbeating is done verbally and symbolically. Still browbeating it is. And still Fascist it is.

The natural tendency of neoliberalism is to drive communitarians into extinction. This it achieves through its most powerful tool: the system of pensée unique, whereby everybody is expected to conform to the dominant ideology and be happy about it, and if you dare even to utter half a word in disagreement, the know-it-all brigade will browbeat you, telling you that your arguments are ‘deepities’, that you’re a relic of the Middle Ages, and other similar Fascist strategies of intimidation.

What the neoliberal bullies seem to forget is that at the end of the day, Mussolini ended up hanging head down outside the forecourt of a garage in Milan, and the other one, the loony one who thought that the Jews, the homosexuals, and the disabled should be gassed into oblivion, shot himself in the temple when his totalitarian project was clearly over.

Society should not let go of democracy. Neoliberals should respect those who disagree with them, without attempting to debase or delegitimise the stances of their opponents. It is illiberal to intimidate the non-liberals.

Mark Sammut has published books on law and politics, in Malta and abroad.

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