One of the difficulties of struggling to post a few times a week is that ideas come and go, bits of posts get written and abandoned, and weeks sometimes pass between reading something and having a chance to react to it -- often to the point where a response no longer seems worthwhile.
Yglesias has written a couple of things in recent weeks that set my mind racing -- one was his piece, much emulated, about the books that most influenced his thinking. Another was his semi-triumphal piece in the wake of the passage of health care reform arguing essentially that it represented the final triumph of liberalism or as he puts it "the crux of the matter is that progressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are basically done." Implicit in the comment is that efforts to roll back the welfare state will be unavailing. Instead, we will be arguing mainly about the relative distribution of the resources of the welfare state between say the young and the elderly and various technocratic tweaks to improve the running of the ship of state.
It put me in mind of another triumphalist bit of writing that followed another epochal event -- a much more cosmic one at that -- the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, which inspired Francis Fukayama's "The End of History and the Last Man." In that 1989 essay (later expanded to book form) Fukayama argued that liberal, free-market democracies represented the endpoint of man's ideological evolution, a universal and final form of human government. My reaction to Fukayama's essay at the time was that it reflected a far too cold-blooded and rational assessment of humanity and its development. It failed -- in much the same way the far more banal and mediocre musings of Thomas Friedman throughout the 1990s did -- to really understand the degree to which hate is an animating emotion for much of humanity and that people are far more attached to their hatreds than they are to the idea of having cell phones and blackberries and laptops and efficient markets.
Similarly I fear that Yglesias doesn't understand that the battle to fully institutionalize the welfare state in the U.S. is only beginning. After a thirty year retreat, liberals have had a significant win -- but for the moment, that's all it is. As has been apparent for at least a year, the forces of reaction in this country are prepared to fight on the most savage of terms to destroy the Obama presidency and to discredit the notion of liberal, activist government, even of the most moderate nature. I remain worried, notwithstanding my hope in the long term demographic changes waiting to take hold in this country, that this onslaught, aided and abetted by a criminally complicit or negligent news media, coupled with the current economic crisis, will deeply undermine the standing of liberalism with younger white voters, and in the process render impossible the kinds of decisive political victories necessary to sustain and expand the welfare state.
Which leads me back to Matt's other post -- about our decisive influences. One of mine for the last fifteen to twenty years has been the historian Tony Judt, who has written extensively about Europe with a particular focus on French intellectuals and the left. Judt has been a model of a genuine public intellectual, a man of the democratic left who has always been willing to put truth before ideology. In addition to his scholarly writings, Judt has written extensively for the New York Review of Books and has sought a broad audience for his work without compromising its intellectual rigor.
Judt is suffering from ALS and his time appears likely to be short. He is unable to breathe without the aid of a machine and is largely paralyzed. Thus, it was with some surprise that I saw a new essay by him in the current version of NYRB, which serves also as the introduction to his soon to be published book "Ill Fares the Land." In this essay, Judt confronts the state of our public affairs in the United States (and to a lesser extent England and Europe) and makes the case that those of us who wish to make meaningful change here must do so in the name of social democracy and must, in the process, defeat the ideology of the extreme free market that has dominated our collective discourse for the last thirty years. Judt understands the desperate moral stakes of this battle and knows that it is not going to be won by a resort to technocratic approaches. In other words, Judt grasps what I think Matt is missing -- we are going to have to fight tooth and nail for a worthwhile welfare state and for institutionalizing the principles that will render such a welfare state permanently unassailable.
I urge you all to read the essay in its entirety -- it is not very long and is lucidly written. But I want to quote from it at length because I believe it poses the essential dilemma that everyone on the left must face, which involves transforming the dominant political, social, and economic narratives that have shaped the last three decades:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives.
It is this task -- for the left to "find its voice," to articulate an alternative vision of the good society that does not simply mean better governance within existing constraints, but rather knocks down those constraints by suggesting a different, more humane, more connected, and more humanly satisfying mode of living. This is the battle -- not some magical tweaking of a right-sized welfare state -- that we really need to address in a manner that is persuasive to a majority of our countrymen..
