On Moral Unity and Regime Legitimacy

In the past several years – but especially since 2020, which saw the triply lethal combination of Covid-19, the US Presidential Election and the ‘mostly peaceful’ worldwide BLM protests – there has been an accelerated breakdown in social cohesion, moral unity, and regime legitimacy in Britain, America and across the West. Public approval ratings for current governments, whether led by Biden, Sunak, Trudeau, Macron, or whomever else, are at all-time lows. Public trust in government has never been lower. The social and moral consensus that held sway, in, say, 2012, has by this point now almost totally broken down. On the right, lingering doubts about the legitimacy of Biden, the aftermath of BLM and, the mysterious disappearance of Covid mandates with the advent of the Ukraine war, and the unprecedented obscene levels of immigration since Covid have created an atmosphere in which long-standing taboos no longer matter to anyone but the crustiest of establishmentarians. On the left, the issue of Israel has loomed larger, but many authentic leftists feel betrayed by the regime on a host of issues, not least their perceived abandonment of socialism for neoliberalism. All these issues have coalesced to discredit the established centre which has never looked more tenuous or fragile than it does today. Regime lackeys are now openly despised, and must be aware of the extent to which they are hated. Some seem to engage in an almost nihilistic and sadistic glee in clinging onto petty officialdom, but this is generally unhealthy for a social order. As there is now an almost complete break between the values and moral visions of the rulers and those they rule over, in this short article, I wish to revisit Gaetano Mosca’s comments on the importance of moral unity to regime stability. My view remains that unless the establishment can come to its senses and enact my containment plan (putting the woke away etc) and essentially to co-opt and normalise populist sentiment, there is a very serious risk of widespread civil unrest in the future.

In his classic study, The Ruling Class (1939), Mosca emphasises the importance of moral unity for social cohesion and effective governance (pp.109-10). There are two key factors here, which we may call vertical and horizontal moral unity: the former is the moral unity between the rulers and the ruled and the latter is the moral unity of the ruling class itself. I believe that both are currently under extreme pressure. The vertical moral unity is all but lost, there is reason to believe that as many as 75% of the public no longer buy into official doctrines given the extent to which they report self-censoring their real views (studies vary but it is certainly more than half). The horizontal unity is now showing serious signs of fracturing also; in other words, an increasing number of current elites are becoming counter-elites who actively oppose or resist the ruling class. The current order is becoming more draconian, more desperate, more openly hostile and more authoritarian as its legitimacy slips and its moral authority has drained. The prospect of political persecution and even a ‘hard managerialism’ willing to use violence on its enemies is now more real than it has ever been. But as Mosca points out, this is a precarious situation for the elites:

Now physical force may suffice to prevent the outbreak of a violent catastrophe from day to day, but it cannot restore to the social body the moral unity essential for a stable order. As we have already seen (chap. VII, 10), brute force, taken all by itself, cannot suppress or even restrain a current of ideas and passions unless it is applied without scruple and without consideration, unless, that is, it is applied with a cruelty that does not falter at the number of its victims. Aside from the fact that such a use of force is undesirable, it is impossible in our day and age, our manners and morals being what they are, unless at least it is provoked by similar outrages on the part of the revolutionaries. If European civilization is forced to keep long and incessantly on the defensive against the tendencies of the various socialist schools, it will be forced by that very fact into a decline, and the decline will come whether our civilization tries to compromise, make concessions and come to terms, or adopts a policy of absolute coercion and resistance. In order to maintain the latter, it will have to abandon most of its idealism, restrict liberty of thought and adopt new types of government which will represent a real retrogression in the safeguarding of justice and in juridical defense. (p. 320)

Even though Mosca originally wrote these passages over a hundred years ago, it is as if he were shooting arrows into the future: you are here. Or, perhaps in the case of Italians, ‘you are here, again’.

At such a moment, many people will feel the urgency towards action. After all, it feels to some that ‘the time is right’. This is the view, for example, of Charles Haywood. My view is the opposite: this is precisely the time not to act because the regime is like a great dragon that has taken several mortal wounds: it is thrashing out wildly, in all directions, ever less rational, ever more moronic. If I am to lose my bet with Auron Macintyre and there is no containment or self-correcting mechanism to come – which essentially means the Kamala Harris types win out over the Tony Blair types – still well within the realms of possibility, we need to watch the final acts of this tragedy play themselves out. If we live through my containment scenario, then it will be the more radical left who will act and cause disruption, in which case they can be the ones to feel the full arm of suppression. In the containment scenario, we’d need to box clever and present ourselves in some sense as regime friends for a period. It is still not clear which future we will be facing, but the enemy is making many mistakes at present and we should not interrupt them.