Trussonomics, out the window.
Truss’ false start reminds us that we are living at the end of an era.
On June 30th, 2003, a small plane took off at Tuscola Area Airport, near to where Michigan’s thumb-like eastern peninsular protrudes Lake Huron. The pilot, by all accounts a handsome and well-loved man of 43, who had married just weeks before, was the only person aboard the ultra-light aircraft, and its only victim when shortly afterwards it came crashing down. His name was Joseph Paul Overton, and he left behind his new wife, his family and friends, and perhaps the most useful political concept of the late 20th century.
Whilst acting as the Senior Vice President for Michigan’s Mackinac Centre for Public Policy — Joseph had developed the idea, perhaps pondered before but never so clearly articulated, that the scope of acceptability of a given policy was both limited at any given time and yet, crucially, movable in future. Some ideas are too radical to be discussed in polite society one month, and then widespread orthodoxy the next. The Overton Window, as it came to be known, has been a part of political commentary ever since.
Joseph was a free-marketeer, and more than that, an ardent libertarian. In his lifetime he had seen the social democracy of the post-war economic order replaced with the Reaganomics of the 80s, and then the accession of neoliberalism to a state of being that influenced every aspect of both politics and culture in the 1990s. It isn’t hard to imagine why he was so fascinated with the idea that ideas themselves could come in and out of fashion not simply because of changes in the material experience of history, but because of the actions of agitators and iconoclasts who were willing to push the Overton Window in a given direction.
But how fast can these parameters move, realistically? And how much can a rogue actor or a set of think tanks push the Window in a short space of time? The answers to these questions are not readily available, and they get at the heart of some of the oldest questions in democracy about the conflict between a leader who wants one thing and an electorate that wants something else, or indeed, about the differential power of human agency and the forces of history.
Britain is an island where this particular psychodrama has often been mused on, and the story leaders like to tell often fall on the “forces of history” side. Centuries ago, Cnut demonstrated for his loyal subjects that he could not stop the tide. Churchill, in turning down the Order of the Garter after having won the war and losing the 1945 election in a matter of months, reminded the King he had been given the “Order of the Boot”. Callaghan, perhaps presaging Overton most directly, said in the run-up to his defeat in 1979, that “There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do.”
But there is another British school of thought on this — one best exemplified in modern times by the victor in that 1979 election. Thatcher’s sea-change was so powerful that for Conservatives today it is still not seen as a sea-change but rather as a vindication of her singular ability to move the Window herself. Broader cultural patterns of the explosive birth of the new middle class and the exhaustion with the failings of the 70s be damned, she did it herself through her own force of will. She remains venerated so highly that even where the next four Conservative Prime Ministers deviated quite sharply from her particular brand of market fundamentalism, they continued to pay lip service to the mythos that surrounds her in an effort to keep the very useful image of her era-making powers alive for their own benefit — be it for the purposes of party management or defeating progressive opposition.
It is precisely that mythos and repurposed history that Liz Truss wanted to weaponize and mobilise when she took office a month ago. Her unique response to the prolonged death of neoliberalism was to in effect resurrect its first, state-crafting, Window-shifting form. Her theory of the case was clearly that only a self-confident free-marketeer, a true believer, could restore the order to its original greatness. As theories go, for economic liberals, it had a certain ring to it ; unleash the hidden power of the market and drive growth by finally getting back to the original, orthodox form of that ideology, which had been lost in the lustre-sucking years since Blair’s schism divided neoliberalism in 1997.
If she had been right, she might have condemned the left to longer in the wilderness. But it seems she, alongside Kwasi Kwarteng and the other faithful surrounding that wing of the party and the think tanks of Tufton Street, fundamentally misunderstood how far into its death spiral neoliberalism was. The Overton Window has shifted, whether through the efforts of individuals in all parties or by global economic shifts accelerated by the crash of 2008, too far back towards state action and intervention. She might claim to not care about being unpopular, but Thatcher was only able to risk this because she was riding the waves of an emerging order, not trying to revive a dying one.
Yes, the Falklands War helped her through the worst of the first winds, but the direction of travel had been set by broader forces. She didn’t so much blaze a trail as she rode a step behind the rightward path of a public ever more interested in a certain kind of upstart, entrepreneurial expressionism that manifested itself in a politics of home ownership and anger at increasingly out-of-touch Unions.
For ten of the twelve years Thatcher was in Downing Street the archetypal hero of British working-class popular culture articulated his own version of that zeitgeist perhaps better than any politician ever has — and he did it for weeks on end on BBC One. Del Boy believed, truly in his heart, that he could burst out of Peckham and be a millionaire within the year. Now, when the arts hold up a mirror to this same cohort of society to which most of us belong, it shows us BBC3 comedies set in crumbling council estates, or Netflix’s brutal Top Boy. We are everywhere surrounded by reminders of the short-termism and stratifying effects of neoliberalism.
The damning reality for Truss is that the very touchstones of the world Thatcher, and Reagan, and a thousand diffuse centres of that ideology built have themselves evolved and are in the process of reckoning with the paradigm. The markets could not tolerate a plan of tax cuts that displayed such a wilful disregard for servicing the U.K.’s sovereign debt. Larry Summers, once a global symbol of U.S. fiscal neoliberalism, said the U.K. was “behaving a bit like an emerging market turning itself into a submerging market”. The final betrayal came when the IMF, long considered the behemoth that enforced that orthodoxy on the developing world (and then, more recently, the likes of Greece), urged the government to reverse its plans.
Truss has managed to prove in just a month the exact antithesis of her theory of leadership. She has faced the storm and instead of weathering it, has been scattered by it. Whether or not she lasts until 2024 in Downing Street is almost irrelevant. Her actual political agenda has been rejected not just by an already startled electorate but by the very institutions that she should have been able to count on. She summoned the forces of Thatcherism and found that they had long since evaporated. If Kwasi Kwarteng becomes the sacrificial lamb to keep herself in office, then she will only further signal the demise of any political capital she had left. Survival in office is no vindication of your leadership, not when the ideological thrust of your mission has gone. She seems doomed to cling on as Johnson did, with no real agenda left and no power to achieve it; only worse for her, perhaps, because she at least believed in hers in the first place.
