Why I'm Still "Left"

...This, in turn, reSPRING • 1997 • 47 Why I'm Still "Left" quired social coalitions, not just for the near future but in the long run...

...and that, consequently, democracy ought to pervade socioeconomic in addition to political domains of life so that, to expropriate one pithy précis, the conditions for the freedom of one would be the conditions for the freedom of all...

...These other left traditions rejected as simplistic the radical opposition of planning to markets and incorporated markets into their thinking...

...But in the end, the SPRING • 1997 • 49 Why I'm Still "Left" need for an ethos of intelligent egalitarianism will remain because indefensible inequalities, like those I considered earlier in this essay, are still very much with us...

...I wish I could say that it has come up with persuasive responses where social liberals or just liberal democrats have not...

...I still want that movement to happen...

...of qualitative values that should discipline the market...

...or "the 1960s," "sexual permissiveness," and "countercultural threats" to "middle-class" values...

...In simplest terms (I am being schematic and telescope features from different countries), this meant that capital and labor were both exhausted and conceded some of each other's priorities...

...A glance at modern history shows how dependent the former was on the emergence of—more precisely, the demand for political equality within—the latter...

...The predicament—how to formulate a convincing strategic program grounded in a left ethos—shouldn't be underestimated...

...and I'll affirm that we who have identified ourselves as "left" should still do so.' Not out of fidelity to a maligned term or to a site on political maps, SPRING • 1997 • 43 Why I'm Still "Left" but on behalf of those values...

...Markets, then, would be kept to their proper station and unchosen inequalities would be rendered increasingly immaterial to human relations...

...In fact, one can interpret the historical fate of the welfare state as an illustration of how social liberal achievements, because they tried to remain on the political level, were inherently vulnerable...

...I'm still "left" because I'm committed to an ethos that is democratic and humanist, equalityfriendly and inclusive—not only in the political domain but in social and economic relations too...

...If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration...

...Surely, a pneumonia-afflicted six year old with lazy or limited parents doesn't rate lesser medical care than the child of assiduous or gifted souls...

...obviously, then, left and right are rendered meaningless as political categories...

...lest solidarity be hierarchical...

...Threats to democracy and liberty are more likely to come from burgeoning SPRING • 1997 • 45 Why I'm Still "Left" inequality...

...Consequently, an important linkage would have been secured in the minds of citizens— between social goods (like Social Security, education, and health care) and the idea of social citizenship...

...It may well be that lacking a radically new perception of horizons, liberal democracy's past, very considerable achievements will be jeopardized...

...That communists called themselves "democratic" as well as "left" never complicated things...

...we do so, as a nineteenth century thinkef, now unpopular, once said, "under given and inherited circumstances...

...Imagine if elections in twenty-first century America were contested not by Democrats ready to slash the poor's safety net and Republicans proposing welfare for the rich via tax cuts, but by Social Democrats advocating a classless society and Social Liberals upholding some version of the welfare state...

...This was a historical breakthrough for a conservative agenda based on the sort of harsh classical liberal ideology that had been routed half a century earlier by the Great Depression...

...Unless you can be said to have rated your progenitors, why should advantages or disabilities that attend accidents of birth be translated into social privileges...

...Concurrently, labor discovered that industrial workers would not be the "universal class...

...This judgment raises questions about assumptions that, unfortunately, are too common - that "those who have, deserve...

...Since my aim is to re-articulate left ideas, I draw on many thinkers, though a good many are not cited explicitly...

...It is probably not possible and in any event it wouldn't be very fruitful...

...The origins of "left" as a political term date to the French revolution, most famously when delegates with royalist, clerical, and aristocratic leanings settled to the right side of the National Assembly and those of more republican and democratic persuasion moved left...

...Of the three French revolutionary terms, the left has been supremely identified with the second, equality...

...of creating conditions that make equality before the law equally meaningful for rich and poor...

...In the meantime, social liberalism barely inches on to the far left end of today's political spectrum, because the "center" is so far right...

...Once achieved, universal suffrage set down roots deep in the political culture—so penetrating that the political culture was transformed and undoing political equality became, finally, unthinkable (except for fascists, and the like...

...Importantly, the welfare state was besieged just as globalization and revolutions in technology and communications gained momentum, making it easier for capital to reconsider its past concessions...

...You would think that today, more than half a century after the welfare state was launched, its experience would have dislodged some earlier ideological predispositions (the myth of "rugged individualism" or simplistic notions of meritocracy, for examples...

...We are in a historical moment that is inhospitable to left-wing values...

...Does that mean "naturalness" should be an all-determining criterion for human action...

...As right-wingers once acceded to left social standards in the form of the welfare state, now Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and their admirers accept ideological bottom lines drawn by the Reagan/Thatcher era...

...Frankly, "left" has never had happy associations, olfactory or otherwise, on American shores...

...Liberal democracies, whatever their international entanglements (political, economic, and so on) were bounded...

...We ought, instead, to present regulative ideas for a better society, and do so continuously...

...Hence Ronald Dworkin, a leading social liberal thinker, proposes that liberal equality requires political decisions to be "independent of any particular concept of the good life or what gives values to life...

...But two decades later the compromise crumbled as economic problems multiplied, triggered by the 1973 oil embargo...

...So the tools of political democracy are properly deployed to enhance social and economic democracy...

...This was not achieved—Bolshevik conduct, from early on, was censured by many leftists, leading Marxists included—but success was substantial enough...

...The right, always quick to denounce communist mendacity, decided that on this one point—that "left" meant Soviet-style dictatorship—communist parties always spoke truthfully...

...Later, especially for socialists, socioeconomic egalitarianism gave wholeness to the emancipatory project begun in the age of democratic revolution, to the summons to human liberty signaled initially by the "Declaration of Independence" and the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen...

...What, then, moves people "left" if not "equality of outcomes...

...Must they not be countered by a broad ethos marking out an alternative good life...

...An egalitarian reconstitution was, in fact, occurring, pressed forth by the idea of equal citizenship: the hierarchy of the old regime's three estates—Church, Nobility, Everyone Else (the Third Estate)—had been toppled, to be succeeded by a more level division of left, center, and right...

...also, to a considerable extent, why I'm still "left...

...This ethos presumes that an egalitarian sensibility, not a conformist mentality (be it expressed as rigid collectivism or abstract individualism), should animate our social, economic, and political life...

...Since they never had composed— and never would constitute—the vast majority in Western capitalist societies, workers needed allies in the middle strata to create a decent, or at least better, society...

...Beyond" was not, perhaps, the best word, because the idea was to thicken democracy in our society, so much so that a return to greater socioeconomic inequalities would be as unthinkable as, say, a return to property qualifications for the franchise...

...Our parents are a matter of chance, not choice...

...Markets, then, should be subject to qualitative human requirements, to standards external to themselves—not vice versa...

...domestic spending and aid to the poor were curtailed dramatically...

...We need to speak of an America in which social goods are not simply entitlements that individuals protect for themselves but social rights grounded in mutuality, in a culture of cooperation, in a dialectic of "I" and "we...

...it does, however, imply an ingrained orientation to living within a community, an orientation that animates public culture and governing institutions...

...So when issues of justice arise, it becomes necessary to talk not just about "personal 44 • DISSENT Why I'm Still "Left" achievement" in the abstract but of how unchosen inequalities shape the lives of individuals...

...And if there is one thing we should have learned from our era, it is that history harbors surprises, not that it ends...

...Social liberals do sanction considerable intrusion by politics (or law) into social and economic life, but they resist some of the implications...

...Once "liberal" pointed to honored features of our society...

...Of course, the counterculture was, by the late 1970s, mostly a thing of the past, and the middle class of what conservatives now proclaimed the "golden age"—the 1950s, not the 1920s—had actually been created by the very social liberalism they opposed (that is, it was the product of state action when markets failed to function "naturally," social welfare legislation, and strong trade unionism...

...Unlike classical liberals, however, they did not fetishize them...

...This meant targeting taxes instead of the various social benefits most citizens wanted to conserve...

...What a future left needs is surely not codified language, much less thought, but a combination of discrimination and openness in its intellectual conversation...

...The latter might still want to avoid disputes about the good life, but at least there would be a new context...

...We need to discriminate between public goods they produce and "public bads" (I borrow from John Roemer), be they social suffering or pollution...

...On one hand it embodied an impulse to freedom against absolutist politics and economics...

...Since equality's reach was for them properly circumscribed by the ballot box, the form of political life—liberal democracy— and the content of social life were separated one from the other...

...On the other hand, a social liberalism that believed in government action to ameliorate social and economic problems also emerged over the last century...

...The serious question is not how to live after history's "end" but how, if liberal democratic self-sufficiency is declining, do we discipline the processes of globalization on behalf of democratic precepts and (non-market) human needs and values...

...Then there was the cold war itself, in which "the left" was habitually, often maliciously, identified with Leninism or Stalinism...

...They represented the supposed nullification of weighty differences between left and right on socioeconomic questions...

...But when they proved unable to master the crisis of their compromise, they opened the way for its principled foes, the radical right exemplified by Thatcher and Reagan, to take over their parties, then governments, and to initiate war on the welfare state...

...This is what Americans commonly call liberalism—a legacy of programmatic ideals associated with the New Deal and Great Society...

...What meaning can self-government then have...

...They are prescriptions for a new age of intellectual conformity...

...What is the impact of economic classes and social organization and how do structured, often dramatic, discrepancies of power affect a democratic society...

...The politicians who were governing as difficulties proliferated were upholders of the pragmatic order, first on the center-right (for example, Heath in the United Kingdom and Nixon and Ford here) and then on the center-left (Callaghan and Carter...

...Next thing, taxes were cut to up the upper crust...

...We need to project an America with a sense of moral commonality both deeper and differently configured than that which was proposed by liberals...

...The regulative terms of socioeconomic, no less than political, conversation would be equality-friendly so that the ethos of a Reagan or a Milton Friedman, not to mention the priorities of transnational corporations, would produce perplexity—and crinkled noses...

...Success required some conservative stealth along with (social) liberal weakness in shaky times...

...Changes in the political constellation elucidate the story neatly...

...Unless, that is, she merits the comportment, not to mention genes, of her parents— whom she did not "freely choose...

...Indeed, the moral vocabulary of the welfare state lost its public hold with remarkable rapidity—liberalism became the "Lword"— even while citizens still coveted many of its programs (like Social Security and Medicare in the United States...

...First it meant advocacy of political and social equality...

...I, for one, don't object to being called liberal when the word is used as an adjective...

...This proposes that different individuals contribute to and receive from a classless society different things...

...True, a considerable segment of the historical left believed a command economy was a panacea for capitalism's ills...

...Compromises in goals, not just tactics, were unavoidable...

...How come "the ratio of the top 20% of American incomes to the poorest 20% is now nine to one"?' Why does the stock market plunge 171 points when employment rates go up—in a world that awards $90 million severance to an executive ousted after fourteen months on the job...

...This gave birth to a de facto and paradoxical propaganda alliance of communists and conservatives...

...Those circumstances permit or impede this or that access, enable this or that education, avail of this or that financial resource, allow time to cultivate natural talents or not...

...In fact, while it is difficult to think of historical cases in which increasing equality led to revolt against liberty, one can recollect numerous instances of democracy subverted by privileged strata or powerful economic institutions fearful of expanding equality...

...One reason, undoubtedly, is that we, unlike most Western countries, never had a mass socialist party—sharply distinguishing itself from communism—as a normal feature of our politics...

...Didn't Francis Fukuyama tell us that after 1989 liberal democracy is our unsurpassable horizon...

...that such is the "natural order of things...

...The latter happily concurred, because they wanted to be arbiters of what "left" meant, precluding a pluralist left...

...No, the problem is otherwise—in the pretense that unmerited privilege and social power don't exist...

...There are "natural" events (floods, for instance) that jeopardize countless lives...

...not as a slogan but as entwined imperatives, each distinct yet each in need of the others to flourish...

...If the precise sense of and the balance among the three ingredients were to be disputed often enough, they still stood together in contrast to the conservative trinity of order, hierarchy, and tradition...

...I can't--: and this indicates its real crisis today, not communism's demise (we wanted those dictatorships to fall as much as anybody, except perhaps people living under them...

...The more democratic, the more, in principle, citizens ought to have been able to see their wills take tangible form in policies...

...They were muddled to the advantage of the political right, which was now intellectually selfconfident...

...and of the myths of laissez-faire...

...Would it be "unnatural" to arrest them if we could...

...What happens when economic globalization, augmented and driven on by revolutions in technology and communications, increasingly deprives democratic governments of those levers...

...In the classical European formulations it was associated, albeit with divergent accents, with ideas like individualism, the market, equality before the law, and laissez-faire...

...This is what he meant when he said that history had "ended...

...Left," briefly, was a stance more than a hard concept...

...And it presumes that it is inequality that must be justified by its proponents or apologists...

...As I'm for democracy that is not atomized but social, I'm for a leftism that is liberal...

...nor are its immediate prospects so promising...

...Don't interfere with the market's "freedom," they urge...

...Modern English . . . ," as Orwell observed, "is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble...

...In any event, you'll be taken for a left-over...

...But why take their word in one case and not in the other...

...If you've reached this judgment, you may also recognize that you've been deliberating in a left-wing way...

...Liberal democracy as a whole, and not just social liberalism, may soon find itself in hard times...

...IV The difficulties raised for liberal democracy and social liberalism by the late twentieth century are shared to a significant extent by the democratic left...

...They helped to create a poor life for a lot of 48 • DISSENT Why I'm Still "Left" people...

...There is nothing wrong with modifiers...

...So the problem is clearly not just "left" but the fact that all political words and ideas to the left of the right have run into trouble...

...Indeed, in this globalizing era the relation between liberal democracy and economic power is increasingly complex, with new and unsettling problems arising that have nothing to do with the late Soviet Union...

...They can, however, also make us myopic...

...3 David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 128...

...But I don't see how the dictatorship of markets does so either...

...This has nothing to do with a foolish notion that indolence warrants the same, be it material plenty or life chances, as hard work...

...Precisely nowhere...

...Or to be blunt: why is it that corporate profits rose over 200 percent in the last decade and a half, while the United States "is slipping into a category of countries—among them Brazil, Britain and Guatemala—where economic stratification is most pronounced...

...that those who don't are culpable for their want...

...In any event, they recognized too that we interfere with nature in diverse ways...

...And significant inequality in socioeconomic power translates into political inequalities—into the disfiguring of democracy...

...To be "left"—my sort of left, anyway—is to be committed still to a triad of liberty, equality, and solidarity...

...We are, as John Rawls among others has argued, subject to a birth lottery...

...It's remarkable, you note, that conservatives, so insistent on their hard-nosed grasp of the "realities of power," become slippery when considering inequalities of socioeconomic power, their reproduction and consequences...

...What if we accept the claim that market mechanisms are "natural...

...Liberty is fortified when social and economic fairness, rather than the hunger of corporations and banks for profits, takes priority...

...Hobhouse remarked long ago, should be treated according to the illness, not the individual's "worth" on a labor market...

...We are, in other words, born into structured, unequal conditions, a world configured by unchosen social—among which I include gender and racial—inequalities...

...Of course it never went that far...

...The political horizons of liberal democracy and the nation-state have overlapped considerably...

...Notes I make no special claim to originality in these pages...

...By the early twentieth century most classical liberals embraced political equality firmly but, generally speaking, they wanted egalitarianism to go no further...

...I want, in what follows, to look at words and values...

...Those who, in the future, called themselves "left" usually embraced the legacy of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," but almost always with an eye to expanding its meanings and domains...

...Instead of pulling the center to the left, they chase a center that has been pulled far right by conservative dominance...

...It is obvious that a left ethos doesn't much inform our society today...

...In short, traditional (that is, pre-welfare state) economic values flourished...

...So we should have some patience with our times, though impatience with such intellectual shortcuts as "Left and right are now meaningless terms" or "We're all centrists now...

...This gave rise to the 1950s version of a theme that is again popular nowadays: "there is no basic difference between left and right," because ideological history (at least within the West) has ended...

...For criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay, I am indebted to Robert Amdur, Mark Levinson, Brian Morton, Debra Satz, Jeff Scheuer, and Michael Walzer...

...Yet they remain entrenched...

...their governments had levers to pull in order to shape domestic life...

...Left" is no leftover only if those values remain vital to the idea of a decent society, to social justice...

...sometimes the results are happy, sometimes not...

...50 • DISSENT...

...Why...

...what matters are the politics and ethos it properly evokes...

...But then a word's resonance also depends on its associations, its use or misuse...

...Nor does he merit the social power that may later be conferred by inherited stocks and bonds...

...When I speak of "the left" it is, admittedly, somewhat of an imaginary entity, more hope than actuality, although a potential nucleus is real enough (in labor, civil rights, and feminist ranks...

...or "welfare cheats" who, coincidentally, all had a common skin color...

...Class conflict became class sparring, enabling economic growth and social welfare legislation in an atmosphere of social peace...

...Still, my aim is not, in response to corruptions or ambiguities, to provide a canonical definition...

...Eventually these chance spatial positions also assumed social hues, with "right" more associated with the upper classes and emigres and "left" with most everyone else...

...Once these things seem to add up to more than a sum of statistical facts, once their causes and impact are not perceived as just happenstance but as somehow integral to our Western societies, then right-wing—no less neoliberalpronouncements about "individual autonomy" and "merit" sound suspect...

...Their values would seem as far-fetched to most Americans as, well, as many left (not to mention liberal) values seem today...

...46 • DISSENT Why I'm Still "Left" It is useful to recall that while classical liberalism helped historically to point the way to modern democracy, it didn't necessarily favor it...

...in accepting that a few minutes' gamble on a stock or currency or "futures" market "merits" one person millions, while a full day of factory labor "merits" another individual the minimum wage times eight...

...Hence it speaks of social individualism and solidarity as opposed to simple individualism...

...It was, one might say, a pragmatic settlement...

...Policies tilted according to election victors, yet there was no dramatic alteration as major parties, whether left or right leaning, didn't contest the basics...

...Intellectual quandaries can require a good deal of time to be sorted out...

...Attempts to do so have not enhanced well-being anywhere...

...However, other left traditions—social democratic, market and guild socialist, liberal-leftdid not equate socialization with nationalization...

...My kind of left is not so distant from this social liberalism in important ways...

...lest equality stifle diversity or autonomy...

...Neither should it be devouring...

...Later it meant siding with working people and the dispossessed, especially against private economic power...

...They recognized that an economy cannot be planned fully from its center, certainly if democratic decision making from below (in the workplace, for instance) is valued...

...But classical liberal economics, resting on the relentless pursuit of markets and profits everywhere, conflicts with liberal democracy—if the latter means that citizens have a say in determining the basic conditions of their lives...

...Let me explain...

...Indeed, the greatest flourishing of its political philosophy—for instance, the work of Rawls and Dworkin—in this country came in the 1970s— just before liberal welfare states descended into deep crisis...

...Respect for labor, after all, was always a cardinal left-wing virtue...

...This doesn't mean abolishing markets...

...I think it is the discovery, over and again, that it is not simply "free choice" or "fairness" or "nature" but structures of power and legacies of history, all of them human doings, that have fashioned our society— fashioned it so that the life-possibilities of a few are great and those of most people much more limited...

...You can support civil liberties, equality before the law, and "free" markets without sanctioning universal suffrage...

...We make our own history, but not simply of our own will, not in conditions we select...

...And since markets operate in historical and social contexts and not in "natural" vacuums—and as they are never "free" because freedom is an attribute of beings who make choices and markets are not beings—the left has claimed the moral right to intervene in the economic sphere...

...But it is only a complex notion, one of social individuality, that makes sense...

...In contrast, most of the left championed the vote for all in most European countries...

...The democratic left also supported a welfare state but wanted to go "beyond" it—beyond government-managed redistributory policies and institutions—to democratizing economic and social structures and the conditions of daily work...

...It could be said that the word "left" was victim of a double intellectual mugging...

...consequently, closure had come to fundamental debates about Western societies...

...One cannot speak honestly about "equality of opportunity" without addressing—redressing—them...

...An idea of the good life—which always means a good life among individuals living together—need not legislate for all dimensions of existence...

...Similarly, no shiftless son of a rich alumnus deserves admission to an elite university, however much money Father contributes (an affirmative action that rarely provokes ire...

...Still, this seems ominously credible: the more capital's "economic liberty" spreads int, ernationally—the more transnational financial institutions and corporations rather than popular mandates define priorities for a country's domestic condition—the more the value of liberal democratic government may be "downsized" in the eyes of citizens...

...2 U.N...

...But what if values promoting a bad life for considerable numbers of people are entrenched in a society, reinforcing or serving structures of unmerited, unjustifiable privilege and power...

...Its concepts should be receptive to adjectives—as in liberal socialist or democratic left...

...They understood that trying to administer all economic life from the center is likely to result in an attempt to administer the citizenry from there too...

...But when has the growth of socioeconomic equality (through, say, initiating a welfare state) led to an overthrow of liberal democracy...

...3 There is much debate about the ramifications of such figures and about globalization in general, particularly for the United States, with its large internal market...

...on the other it customarily legitimized capitalist cruelty...

...The more this settlement seemed to consolidate, the less did social liberals or social democrats feel a need to think beyond it (with some exceptions, notably in Sweden...

...those of us who are still "left" must keep them above water, think aloud and hard about them...

...The business class invested heavily in producing an intellectual stratum in the 1970s and 1980s...

...Democracy's vistas, therefore, need to project deeply within, to socioeconomic equity...

...Daily politics would concern dimensions of social citizenship, not the extension of social cruelty...

...Post-World War II Western society is often described as a "class compromise...

...After the sacrifices of depression and war, even the dominant strata recognized that things couldn't return entirely to antebellum patterns of hierarchical entitlement...

...Great events—like 1989—tend, quite naturally, to focus our attention...

...Capital acquiesced to a welfare state, some measure of redistribution, and collective bargaining, while labor accepted capital's hierarchical prerogative in the workplace and retreated from radical demands for public ownership and extensive redistribution...

...and that is also why I am still "left...

...People don't simply fashion themselves out of themselves...

...This included Marx himself...

...In short, we don't inhabit a world of rugged individuals...

...Left," after all, has no intrinsic worth...

...This was—it seems to me, still is—an attractive, regulative idea...

...As some on the left are wed to simplistic notions of egalitarianism, so it becomes obvious that many on the right embrace simplistic notions of personhood...

...According to one recent study, multinational corporations now account for 30 percent of gross global output, 70 percent of world trade, and 80 percent of international investment...

...Think about his axiom for an egalitarian community: "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs...

...Often, leftists are caricatured as proponents of a simplistic leveling of society, a forced "equality of all outcomes...

...So that equality in one would not be threatened by inequality in another and all citizens would actually have the means of individual liberty...

...Another way of saying this is: the "center"—indeed, the vistas of our society—would have moved decisively left...

...That notion captures the left socioeconomic ethos neatly...

...Not only through the redistribution of goods but by making the general conditions permitting the free development of one social individual the general conditions permitting free development of all social individuals...

...Their lives as well as their talents as individuals are—or are not— brought to richness or riches through a pre-existing web of social, economic, political, and cultural relations...

...This is one reason why, from a left viewpoint, social liberalism, with its disinclination to address "the good life," was too limited...

...corporations were given more and more freedom, with unions correspondingly weakened...

...Or, since tens of thousands of self-identified "leftists"—social democrats, democratic socialists, left-liberals, independent Marxists, Trotskyists, anarchists—were persecuted, imprisoned, or murdered by Leninist and Stalinist states, why not draw the obvious conclusion that these regimes were anti-left...

...Liberty will be threatened if egalitarian correctives are deployed to remedy social suffering caused by its "natural" workings...

...It's an old "left-wing" point: socioeconomic questions are also political...

...At issue is not simply a word...

...Lest liberty be operative mostly for those who can afford it...

...now it is the "L-word," a powerfully disqualifying epithet, comparable (well, not quite) to the S-word, socialist...

...Only if one sees communism as the exclusive question of the century and beyond can one make liberal democracy a final horizon...

...As earlier liberals divorced legal from political equality, these liberals favored segregating political from social or economic rights...

...Commodification does not define the human good...

...A sick person, L.T...

...Certainly the left has had its simpletons—it hardly surpasses the right or center in this distinction—but some of its most trenchant thinkers actually argued against reducing justice to one denominator...

...It doesn't take a lot of historical reflection to discern that "natural order" looked quite different in other times and places, although it is almost always invoked to justify hierarchy by those on its top...

...And there were obvious implications: communism's fall meant that ideology also had ended (yet again...

...They recognized that markets are means, not ends or self-sufficient creators of human values, let alone a basis for natural theodicies...

...It is in this spirit that I want to rearticulate and to reassert some basic left-wing values...

...The left—my sort of left, anyway—conceives itself as heir to liberalism's better impulses, all while repudiating its manifest flaws...

...And if our afflicted child's health shouldn't depend on her parents' industriousness (or lack thereof), neither should it hinge on their affluence or social class...

...Human Development Report, 1996, as summarized in the International Herald Tribune, July 16, 1996...

...Left" is, admittedly, a vague term, and this permits its easy abuse not only by foes but a little too often by friends...

...Liberalism has, of course, had varied meanings...

...With social liberals unable to conserve, repair, or advance beyond their own past achievements, and conservatives advocating classical liberalism but speaking nostalgically of an America fashioned by social liberalism, the public meanings of all political labels, together with the values associated with them, were easily muddled...

...This may seem a strange assertion just a few years after the conclusion of the cold war...

...The latter championed a welfare state and was content with its outlines...

...But why not just become a "liberal" of some sort...

...it grounded a basic socialist charge against capitalism, that privileges enjoyed by its dominant strata usually rest on the work of others...

...It seems to me that this is one reason why, now that the welfare state is besieged, its resilience is modest...

...Its inability to respond meaningfully to democratic expectations and social needs...

...Not a consummated utopia, certainly not an "end-state" enveloped by sameness, but the extension of democracy well beyond the political domain into social and economic life...

...As taxes paid for those benefits, the issues had to be recast—as the "culture of poverty...