The Banker Trying To Save Liberalism

In 2016, as an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to leave my native Kentucky and serve for two or so months as an intern with the Canadian Parliament. My internship coincided with the early years of Justin Trudeau’s government—when the young, handsome prime minister still charmed the whole world. While in Canada, I developed an immense respect for the many dedicated public servants I encountered, but I became increasingly wary of Trudeau himself. Though he remains the most charming man I have ever met, he also represented the exact sort of vapid, thoughtless, reflexive progressivism that many have come to associate with liberalism writ large. Ultimately, Trudeau’s charisma proved unable to stand against the tide of populism and his government sank under the weight of scandal and a sharply worsening economic situation.

What happened next is not how this story is supposed to go. For the last ten years, carefully poll-tested liberal leaders around the world have fallen prey to right-wing nationalist movements. If Canada followed this trend, Trudeau should have been swept from office and replaced with a politer, more Canadian version of Donald Trump. At first, it seemed that this was precisely what would happen. The Liberal Party tapped Mark Carney—an economist and former banker who had never held elective office before—to face off against a popular young Conservative opponent.

Yet Carney proved a more skilled politician than anyone could have anticipated. More than this, he has displayed a remarkable ability to reframe the liberal project in substantive moral terms that help to rally people behind an ideology that seems at serious risk of extinction among voters in many countries. With his unique mix of competence and moral clarity, Carney has become the most popular prime minister in Canadian history and seems on the cusp of becoming the de facto leader of the free world. Liberals across the globe would do well to study the secret formula that has made Carney such a success—as well as his potential blind spots.

If asked to formulate in a lab the ideal politician to provide a compelling moral argument for liberalism, you would likely end up with a resume quite different from Mark Carney’s. After receiving a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, Carney went on to have a successful career in banking. So successful, in fact, that in 2008 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada—a post from which he led his nation’s chief financial institution through the 2008 economic crisis. In 2013, he was tapped to be the first non-British citizen to lead the Bank of England, ultimately being the one to shepherd the UK economy through Brexit.

But though an undoubted financial wizard, nothing in his previous life portended Carney’s greatest talent as a liberal. In an age where liberals struggle to move beyond wonky policy explanations for their positions, Carney has proven capable of providing a robust defense of liberalism on economic, political, and moral grounds.

In Carney’s home turf of economics he has worked rapidly to slash regulations and taxes to fight inflation. In true liberal fashion, he has mixed these policies with robust support for Canada’s welfare programs. It is precisely this sort of “third way” that liberals find themselves unable to defend in anything other than technocratic language. This has not been an issue for Carney. He repeatedly reminds voters that a strong economy is one of the means to “a just society.” According to Carney, broad material flourishing driven by economic growth improves the lives of all Canadians. And unlike many neoliberals, Carney is clear that while economic prosperity may be important to create a just society, it can never be the heart of a truly just order. As such, he defends with similarly moral language the ability of citizens to define their own lives without government interference—to develop their own moral ways of being.

Carney’s moral seriousness has inoculated him against many of the progressive excesses of the Trudeau government. Some of it is a matter of emphasis. Carney mentions gender far less and is self-evidently far less driven by conforming to respectable liberal group-think than his predecessor. He also substantively breaks with Trudeau and previous liberal orthodoxy on a number of key issues. He has drastically scaled back Canadian immigration, and wound back criminal justice reforms that softened law enforcement.

It is in the international arena that Carney most shines. With a simple pragmatism increasingly rare in politics today, he argues that the “middle powers” such as Canada must be clear-sighted about the place they occupy on the global stage. As he famously put it in a speech at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, the rules of the liberal international order have never really applied to the great powers. Instead, it is simply the case that the strong do what they will. But, Carney contends, the weak need not necessarily suffer what they must. Instead of seeing the liberal international order solely as a way to impose rules that apply to all countries equally, he argues that they can serve another purpose: providing an avenue for the middle powers to stand up against the overweening authority of the great powers. At bottom, the liberal international order creates “a dense web of connections across trade, investment [and] culture” on which the middle powers can draw. This essentially gives the middle powers a way to combine their economic and military strength to match the great powers.

It would be easy to see in this attitude a brand of hard-boiled realism masquerading as principled liberalism. But what Carney calls “value-based realism” moves well beyond the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and its modern incarnations on the nationalist right. Carney’s message has a moralism that gives it a very different flavor because, for Carney, international cooperation transcends mere self-interest. In his recent speech to the European Union he declared: “we do not seek power to dominate others; on the contrary, we are pursuing resilience so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity, or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law.” Accordingly, internationalism is the fundamental building block for a more peaceful world. It brings together people who may otherwise have nothing else in common and allows them to live out their individual destinies as nations. In this respect, the international realm is not all that different from everyday human life.

By placing his politics on a moral foundation, Carney has achieved something that too few liberals are capable of. Unlike his predecessor—who won the heart of the international community through flash with almost no substance—Carney’s thoughtfulness, intelligence, and seriousness have provided a genuinely appealing pitch for liberalism as a political movement.

Yet Carney may still prove a failure in the ultimate scheme of history. On an instinctual level, he understands that liberalism must ground itself in a morality that pushes beyond technocratic materialism if it is to triumph over the forces of populism on both the left and the right. But living up to this is more difficult, as Carney’s relationship with China shows. On a moral level, the Chinese system is clearly a despotism with little in common with the liberal democratic ethos espoused by Canada. Yet Carney has taken steps to cozy up to China in exchange for better trade relations. Judged from the perspective of Carney’s own moral ambitions, there are definite downsides to finding oneself too tightly in the orbit of a superpower which has no respect for democracy—nor, for that matter, for the middle powers.

More than this, though, Carney must prove that he is able to turn moral speech into moral action at home. For far too long liberalism has sustained itself by tinkering with the capitalist economy and expanding civil liberties. While such work is vital, liberalism has no chance of actually inspiring people without some cohesive moral foundation to ground it. What’s more, and as Canada well proves in cases such as assisted dying, liberalism’s quest to expand rights can go too far, overstepping the bounds of human decency.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is well on his way to avoiding both these traps, which have impaled the careers of many other promising liberals before him. How long he can keep it up is another question entirely.

 

For those interested:

https://kritikbakis.com/en/the-wests-last-chance/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/the-return-of-multipolarity/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/canada-being-a-neighbor-to-america/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/where-are-mark-carneys-middle-powers/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/building-the-middle-power-world-order/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/the-hypocrisy-of-a-rules-based-world/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/canadas-time-to-ditch-us-and-go-with-china/

https://kritikbakis.com/en/canadas-china-gambit-strategic-fantasy-meets-geopolitical-reality/

 

*Jeffery Tyler Syck is an Assistant Professor of Politics and founding director of the Center for Public Service at the University of Pikeville.

 

 Source: https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-mark-carney-gets-about-liberalism