The State of Social Democracy

Here's an interesting lecture by Tony Judt. It is entitled What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy. There are a number of interesting things about this lecture:

• Over the last year he has suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease, so he starts his lecture talking about health care and social democracy.


• Judt's best critique of American culture is that it confounds economics with discussions of politics. He points out that public policy considerations have been reduced to purely financial consideration. We have lost the view of ethics (Adam Smith's "moral sentiments"). The result has been the confusion to think that the "freedom to make money" was in fact "freedom". So healthcare comes down to economic discussion instead of what is good, right, or fair.


• This is a wonderful review of social policies and the struggles between right and left from the 1920s until today. He explains why there was a shift from left to right in the 1970s. It gives you real insight into how we got where we are today.


• He compares the great figures of the right (Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter, and Peter Drucker) to one of the left (John Maynard Keynes). He points out that those of the right were from around Vienna and had watched in horror as that state fell to totalitarianism. Their conclusion was that you could save liberal society only by constraining the state and keeping it out of people's economic lives. On the other hand Keynes argued the opposite. The only way to keep the masses from being seduced by totalitarianism was to provide them with the comfort and security of social democracy. As he points out Keynes won the debate up through the 1970s, but since then the rightist views of the Austrians has taken over.


• Judt rants against privitization. He views this as the "steady unloading of public responsibility into the private sector" and he criticizes this as not efficient. He points out that the US and the UK have stepped back into the 18th century and use "tax farming", the very thing you read about that underlay the rage of the French in the French Revolution.


• He points out that we can't go back to social democracy. Even in the fact of the collapse of the ideology of the right. He points out that the language of social democracy doesn't match up to what can be done. The words of social democracy were written as opposition to Marxism and Communism. He points out that the social democrats won, so the Social Democrat parties of Europe (and Canada) can't win elecctions because the centre and the right are in fact mostly social democrat in policies (but the US is different!)


• Judt is pessimistic. He sees us entering an age of insecurity similar to the one that ended the era of globalization that led up to WWI. He thinks that Social Democrats have to stop talking about historical necessity and a better future. He thinks they need to talk about fear. They need to talk about the insecurity that we are entering because we have lost the vision of society as a collaborative enterprise that provides security. He concludes by stating that Social Democracy is something worth fighting for.

Here is the lecture. That takes you to the page. Click on the link and it will download a handler that will let you run RealPlayer to view the lecture.