"Ill Fares the Land"

[fiefoe]

I'm not sure Tony Judt's distaste for the New Left (those summer children!) is quite justified, but he does provide a historical perspective for the ebbing fortunes of the left.

• Moreover, the ‘public sector’ in American life is in some respects more articulated, developed and respected than its European counterparts. The best instance of this is the public provision of first-class institutions of higher education—something that the US has done for longer and better than most European countries. The land grant colleges that became the University of California, the University of Indiana, the University of Michigan and other internationally renowned institutions have no peers outside the US, and the often underestimated community college system is similarly unique.
• “Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilization.” —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
• Indeed, the thought that we might restrict public policy considerations to a mere economic calculus was already a source of concern two centuries ago. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of the most perceptive writers on commercial capitalism in its early years, anticipated with distaste the prospect that “liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations.” The revolutions of the age risked fostering confusion between the freedom to make money ... and freedom itself.
• In the first place, we cannot continue to evaluate our world and the choices we make in a moral vacuum. Even if we could be sure that a sufficiently well-informed and self-aware rational individual would always opt for his own best interests, we would still need to ask just what those interests are. They cannot be inferred from his economic behavior, for in that case the argument would be circular.
• So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence.
  However, far from inhering in the nature of capitalism itself, values such as these derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices.
• Keynes, like most of the men responsible for the innovative legislation of those years—from Britain’s Clement Attlee through France’s Charles de Gaulle to Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself—was an instinctive conservative. Every western leader in those years—elderly gentlemen all—had been born into the stable world so familiar to Keynes. And all of them had lived through a traumatic upheaval. Like the hero of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Leopard, they understood very well that in order to conserve you must change.
• The consensus was unusually broad. From the New Dealers to West German “social market” theorists, from Britain’s governing Labour Party to the “indicative” economic planning that shaped public policy in France (and Czechoslovakia, until the 1948 Communist coup): everyone believed in the state.
• (Even in the 50s) For all the lip service paid to competition and free markets, the American economy in those years depended heavily upon protection from foreign competition, as well as standardization, regulation, subsidies, price supports, and government guarantees... In the mid’ 60s, Lyndon Johnson pushed through a series of path-breaking social and cultural changes; he was able to do so in part because of the residual consensus favoring New Deal-style investments, all-inclusive programs and government initiatives. Significantly, it was civil rights and race relation legislation that divided the country, not social policy.
• Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II. This was a matter of some consequence: it was the fear and disaffection of the middle class which had given rise to fascism. Bonding the middle classes back to the democracies was by far the most important task facing postwar politicians—and by no means an easy one.
  In most cases it was achieved by the magic of “universal-ism".
• Interestingly, these decades were characterized by a uniquely successful blend of social innovation and cultural conservatism. Keynes himself exemplifies the point. A man of impeccably elitist tastes and upbringing—though unusually open to new artistic work—he nonetheless grasped the importance of bringing first-class art, performance and writing to the broadest possible audience if British society were to overcome its paralyzing divisions. It was Keynes whose initiatives led to the creation of the Royal Ballet, the Arts Council and much else besides. ... This was “meritocracy”: the opening up of elite institutions to mass applicants at public expense—or at least underwritten by public assistance. It began the process of replacing selection by inheritance or wealth with upward mobility through education.
• But two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.
• That the state might exceed its remit and damage the market by distorting its operations was not taken very seriously in these years. From the institution of an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank (later a World Trade Organization as well) to international clearing houses, currency controls, wage restrictions and indicative price limits, the emphasis lay rather in the need to compensate for the palpable shortcomings of markets.
• “To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.” —ADAM SMITH
• of course future taxpayers who will cover the cost of our outlays today. We are thus condemned to trust not only people we don’t know today, but people we could never have known and people we shall never know, with all of whom we have a complicated relationship of mutual interest.
• There may be something inherently selfish in the social service states of the mid-20th century: blessed for a few decades with the good fortune of ethnic homogeneity and a small, educated population where almost everyone could recognize themselves in everyone else. Most of these countries—self-contained nation-states exposed to very little external threat—had the good fortune to cluster under the umbrella of NATO in the post-1945 decades, devoting their budgets to domestic improvement and untroubled by mass immigration from the rest of Europe,
• Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter: social democrats, like the 18th century critics of ‘commercial society’, were offended at the consequences of unregulated competition. They were seeking not so much a radical future as a return to the values of a better way of life.
  Thus we should not be surprised to learn that an early English social democrat like Beatrice Webb took it for granted that the ‘socialism’ she sought could be parsed as public education, the public provision of health services and medical insurance, public parks and playgrounds, collective provision for the aged, infirm and unemployed and so on.
• The old Left, with its roots in working class communities and union organizations, could count on the instinctive collectivism and communal discipline (and subservience) of a corralled industrial work force. But that was a shrinking percentage of the population.
• In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals.
  Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely those benevolent overseers responsible for liberalizing old constraints or providing for the betterment of all.
• A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. (60s)
• The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. Curiously, the new Left remained exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands,
• Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.
• Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they once again find an audience for their views: high taxation inhibits growth and efficiency, governmental regulation stifles initiative and entrepreneurship, the smaller the state the healthier the society and so forth.
  Thus when we recapitulate conventional clichés about free markets and western liberties, we are in effect echoing—like light from a fading star—a debate inspired and conducted seventy years ago by men born for the most part in the late 19th century.
• There is nothing mysterious about this process: it was well described by Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”. By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of farmed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state. As for the dust and powder of individuality: it resembles nothing so much as Hobbes’s war of all against all, in which life for many people has once again become solitary, poor and more than a little nasty.
• Football Leagues across Europe have devolved into ultra-wealthy Super Leagues for a handful of privileged clubs, with the remainder mired in their poverty and irrelevance. The idea of a ‘national’ space has been replaced by international competition underwritten by ephemeral foreign funders, their coffers recouped from commercial exploitation of players recruited from afar and unlikely to remain in place very long.
• The danger of a democratic deficit is always present in systems of indirect representation.
• We no longer have political movements. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole.
• As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West—Europe and the United States above all—missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.
• On October 24th, 1884, the young Beatrice Webb describes herself in her diary as toying with facts, rolling them between her fingers as she tried “. . . to imagine that before me lies a world of knowledge wherewith I may unite the knots of human destiny.”22 As William Beveridge would later comment, people like the Webbs “. . . gave one the sense that by taking sufficient thought one could remedy all the evils in the world, by reasoned progress.”23  This late Victorian confidence was hard-pressed to survive the 20th century.
• That is why the fall of Communism mattered so much. With its collapse, there unraveled the whole skein of doctrines which had bound the Left together for over a century. However perverted the Muscovite variation, its sudden and complete disappearance could not but have a disruptive impact on any party or movement calling itself ‘social democratic’.
  This was a peculiarity of left-wing politics. Even if every conservative and reactionary regime around the globe were to implode tomorrow, its public image hopelessly tarnished by corruption and incompetence, the politics of conservatism would survive intact. The case for ‘conserving’ would remain as viable as it ever had been. But for the Left, the absence of a historically-buttressed narrative leaves an empty space. All that remains is politics: the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting,
• “[W]e achieved everything, but for me it turns out that what we achieved satirized what we had dreamt about.” —KRZYSZTOF KIEŚŁOWKSI
• There are many sources of non-conformity. In religious societies, particularly those with an established faith—Catholicism, Anglicanism, Islam, Judaism—the most effective and enduring dissident traditions are rooted in theological differences: it is not by chance that the British Labour Party was born in 1906 from a coalition of organizations and movements which drew heavily on non-conformist congregations.
• During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen. Whatever their political affinities, Léon Blum and Winston Churchill, Luigi Einaudi and Willy Brandt, David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. It is an open question as to whether it was the circumstances that produced the politicians, or the culture of the age that led men of this caliber to enter politics. Today, neither incentive is at work. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies.
• It is the gap between the inherently ethical nature of public decision-making and the utilitarian quality of contemporary political debate that accounts for the lack of trust felt towards politics and politicians. Liberals are too quick to mock the bland ethical nostrums of religious leaders, contrasting them with the complexity and seduction of modern life. .. humans need a language in which to express their moral instincts.
  To put it slightly differently: even if we concede that there is no higher purpose to life, we need to ascribe meaning to our actions in a way that transcends them.
• One source of our confusion may be a blurring of the distinction between law and justice. In the US especially, so long as a practice is not illegal we find it hard to define its shortcomings. The notion of ‘prudence’ eludes us: the idea that it is imprudent as well as improper for Goldman Sachs to distribute billions of dollars in bonuses less than a year after benefiting from taxpayer largesse would have been self-evident to men of the Scottish Enlightenment, just as it would to the classical philosophers. ‘Imprudence’ in this respect would have been as reprehensible as financial chicanery: not least for the risks to which it exposed the community at large.
• It was the distinctive achievement of the Enlightenment to weld classical moral categories to a secularized vision of human improvement: in a well-ordered society, men would not just live well but strive to live better than in the past. The idea of progress entered the ethical lexicon and dominated it for much of the ensuing two centuries.
• Of all the competing and only partially reconcilable ends that we might seek, the reduction of inequality must come first. Under conditions of endemic inequality, all other desirable goals become hard to achieve...
  In this sense, unequal access to resources of every sort—from rights to water—is the starting point of any truly progressive critique of the world. But inequality is not just a technical problem. It illustrates and exacerbates the loss of social cohesion
• Acting together for a common purpose is the source of enormous satisfaction, in everything from amateur sports to professional armies. In this sense, we have always known that inequality is not just morally troubling: it is inefficient .
• “The success of postwar democracy rests on the equilibrium between production and redistribution, regulated by the state. With globalization, this equilibrium is broken. Capital has become mobile: production has moved beyond national borders, and thus outside the remit of state redistribution . . . Growth would oppose redistribution; the virtuous circle would become the vicious circle.” —DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN
• But just as the intermediate institutions of society—political parties, trade unions, constitutions and laws—impeded the powers of kings and tyrants, so the state itself may now be the primary ‘intermediate institution’: standing between powerless, insecure citizens and unresponsive, unaccountable corporations or international agencies.
• But are we so sure that globalization is here to stay? That economic internationalization carries in its wake the eclipse of national politics? It would not be the first time that we made a mistake on this count.
• On this, Karl Popper, Hayek’s fellow Austrian, had something to say: “[a] free market is paradoxical. If the state does not interfere, then other semi-political organizations, such as monopolies, trusts, unions, etc. may interfere, reducing the freedom of the market to a fiction.”35 This paradox is crucial. The market is always at risk of being distorted by over-mighty participants, whose behavior eventually constrains the government to interfere in order to protect its workings.
  The market, over time, is its own worst enemy.
• That these were always incomplete should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.
  Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing them: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?