Liberalism at Large. Alexander Zevin

       Contents

      Introduction: The Economist and the Making of Modern Liberalism

       I PAX BRITANNICA

      1.Free Trade Empire: From Hawick to Calcutta

2.Walter Bagehot’s Dashed Doubts

3.Edward Johnstone and the Aristocracy of Finance

       4.Landslide Liberalism: Social Reform and War

       5.Own Gold: Layton and the League

       II TRANSLATIO IMPERII

       6.Extreme Centre

       III PAX AMERICANA

       7.Liberal Cold Warriors

       8.Globalization and Its Contents

       Conclusion: Liberalism’s Progress

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       Index

       Introduction

       The Economist and the Making of Modern Liberalism

      The Economist is not like other magazines; it does not even call itself one. No ‘newspaper’ – as it styles itself – has been anywhere near as successful in the internet age, nor able to defy digital gravity for so long. As print media shed audiences and advertisers, foreign bureaus and paid journalists, the Economist added them. How had ‘a magazine with a sleep-inducing title’ and ‘sometimes esoteric content’, asked National Public Radio in 2006, posted readership gains of 13 per cent the year before, comparable only to celebrity tabloids?¹ Four years on, circulation in North America topped 820,000, a tenfold increase since it began an additional printing there in 1981. The global total surged, nearing 1.5 million, or fifteen times the figure in 1970.² Editors and publishers at Time, Atlantic, Newsweek, Businessweek and US News all agreed on the need to emulate the Economist, while in Europe similar refrains echoed at Der Spiegel, L’Express and Panorama.³ But what was the secret, and why try to steal it from a paper a century older than any of them, edited from London continuously since 1843?

      For some, it was the clever covers, wry humour, strong editorial line. For the New York Times, the answer was simpler: slick marketing. Red-on-white banners tugged at the insecurities of striving readers, making the Economist a status symbol for the would-be well-heeled. Its ads said everything. ‘“I never read The Economist.” Management Trainee. Aged 42,’ ran one ad from 1988. Another quipped, ‘It’s lonely at the top; but at least there’s something to read.’⁴ This view owed much to James Fallows, whose 1991 broadside in the Washington Post argued that the Economist peddled conventional wisdom to US professionals too besotted by its snooty British accent and ‘Oxbridge-style swagger’ to be able to tell. A few other journalists sounded sceptical notes over the next two decades, when the Economist seemed unstoppable. For Jon Meacham, ex-Newsweek editor, it failed ‘even to attempt to do original reporting’. At the New York Observer, one reporter struggled just to open his copy, then quickly shut it – finding leaden editorials, airy adjectives in place of evidence, layouts so dense they recalled the telephone book – and wondered if others who swore to read it might be pretending.⁵

      The Economist does not walk on water, and in 2014 paid sales dipped for the first time in at least fifteen years. But in response, the Economist did what few other magazines could: it raised subscription prices 20 per cent to $180 for the electronic edition alone, making it the most expensive weekly in the US, with operating profits to match. At £54 million in 2017, these were still 60 per cent higher than they had been a decade before, despite the general collapse of ad revenues in the intervening years.⁶ But even if Economist readers are richer and more status-driven than most, the draw of the paper is about more than symbolic prestige, as a glance at its Letters to the Editor section might suggest. Here articles are nitpicked by whatever corporate, academic or government authority they incensed the week before: a lesson in the law from Philip Morris; a territorial protest from the Azerbaijani Ambassador; a budget clarification from South Korea’s Ministry of Finance; the case for a US weapons system from the ex-general in charge; a professor’s pained explanation that Chinese is logo-graphic, not ideographic. Too busy to write, Angela Merkel speaks to the editor when she is ‘cross’.⁷ Before her, George H. W. Bush could be seen with a copy pressed to his chest, striding up the White House lawn.

      Not all readers are this powerful, but many have plans to be. In Anthony Powell’s novel A Dance to the Music of Time, Sunny Farebrother – stockbroker, entrepreneur, amateur geo-statesmen – serves to satirize the type, retiring from dinner at the manor house he is visiting to scan the Economist. He has so annoyed the other guests, expatiating on everything from how ‘to handle the difficulties of French reoccupation

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