What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? . . . Our shortcoming--forgive the academic jargon--is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. . . . The problem lies not in social democratic policies, but in the language in which they are couched.
His answer seems to be to recast social democrats as conservatives:
If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them. The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
If any if you are familiar with Big Tent Democrat's Lincoln 1860 argument -- essentially paint the opposition as extremists -- I think this is similar. This approach may not work so well in Europe, unless some version of Thatcherism replaces traditional Christian Democracy as the major approach of the Right.
I'd personally like to see a more positive program:
Messrs. Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf don't stop at analysis. They offer an Economic Bill of Rights meant to finish off the corporate state whose death struggle is giving us all such grief. To make employment more attractive and secure, they would offer public jobs to all comers . . . shorten the work week, control prices (but not wages) and discourage plant closings. To destroy invidious corporate power, they would make union organizing much easier, give communities control over investments by local banks and insurance companies, subsidize community-owned enterprises and the production of goods deemed ''needed'' by a public planning administration, give the House of Representatives control over monetary policy, and much, much more.
A great bumper sticker that is occasionally seen in the US that is impossible to ignore says:
"The Labor Movement (or Unions): The folks that brought you the weekend"
Basically, a new label for the same old thing allows it to appear fresh whilst rebranding away from terms that have been under assault for 70 years but at the same time gives it some weight and appeal to day-to-day experience. It's much easier than selling an entirely new vision, which terrifies many people, especially the elderly.
