On Social Democracy

...This is the goal for 46 DISSENT / Fall 1999 the large majority of U.S...

...Copyright University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1999...

...Trade policies that enhance the mobility and property rights of corporations but ignore the human rights of millions of workers are not neutral...

...This is not to say they are selfish, nor a fortiori are they driven by economic greed...

...The negative accountability effects of large public and private bureaucracies must also be countered...

...This notion of the need for deeply embedded social rights alongside the operations of a market economy is unique to social democracy...

...Liberalism Past and Present Neoconservatives or liberals do not share this view...

...It is true that in the early years, having experienced Nazism and the Great Depression, social democrats were joined by others like Churchill, Roosevelt, and certain key Christian Democrats, who also saw the need for such rights and the corresponding need for the activist state...

...Returning veterans and ordinary people everywhere wanted no return to the 1930s...

...For millions, it was the Golden Age...

...They have reduced or frozen social entitlements and, by other policies as well, have increased the commercialization of life's activities...

...In both the nation-state and in foreign affairs, the objective was to reverse the postwar egalitarian commitments...

...In terms of social philosophy, in such circumstances it becomes morally quite tenable for the ordinary worker to accept a fundamental assumption of the market economy: unequal talents can result in unequal rewards...

...In both number and diversity, they produced a qualitatively different kind of society...

...Welfare States As the century closes we can now see that the great accomplishment of social democrats has been the creation of a new kind of democracy...

...As long as ordinary citizens can send their children to good public schools, have free comprehensive health services, benefit from income and retraining programs when they are unemployed, have an annual paid vacation with access to healthy air and clean beaches, and retire with dignity, most will regard with neither envy nor contempt the lifestyle of the jet set...

...Currently, in Sweden, France, Germany, and Canada, a majority of the rich send their children to the same public schools and use essentially the same medical services as other citizens, because the quality is maintained at a high level...

...A social rights-based form of market economy is not, therefore, either a compromise of liberal democratic principles or some halfway step to a Marxist utopia...

...The liberal sees human life as unfolding DISSENT / Fall 1999 49 in a society in which all citizens fundamentally compete with each other...

...The economy is based on capitalist principles...

...Taxes needed for universal social services obtain widespread support precisely because the services themselves are provided to everyone...

...This is a decision made in a political process and it can be achieved only by the state...

...Why should this be...

...Citizenship as a social enterprise disappears...

...Equality, however, is ours alone...

...At whatever level of provision, in other words, a rich lawyer should have no better treatment than a bank clerk...

...We need new approaches that take into account the radical change in the nature of families, the role of women in the economy, and the reduced need for unskilled labor...

...Over time, most social democrats came to believe that the goal of social equality was compatible with some form of market economy...

...Policies that promote the removal of all "shackles" to the global movement of capital, now as in the nineteenth century, reveal the self-serving ideology of Western economic elites and the world's only superpower...

...Roosevelt was rebuffed by Congress, which refused to accept economic or any other social rights...

...One hundred years ago, the leading German social democratic theorist Eduard Bernstein had quite plausibly predicted that the twentieth century would see the triumph not of liberalism, but of social democracy...

...Politics matters...

...At the same time, we see the democratic state as the essential means of ensuring that men 48 n DISSENT / Fall 1999 and women do not become enslaved to the severe inequality and commercialization of life that unfettered markets produce...

...But shortly after the appearance of Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism in 1898, social democrats increasingly saw themselves as those socialists who believed in the nonviolent transformation of capitalist society...

...They also supported foreign aid programs abroad...

...Unlike Marxists, old or new, the social democrat sees our permanent disposition to seek our own benefit as being productively useful...

...And from the mid1960s through the 1980s, there emerged a plethora of government programs targeted to women, visible minorities, the handicapped, and the poor...

...In his last State of the Union address in 1944, President Roosevelt called for the United States to adopt an Economic Bill of Rights...

...The United States did, however, create its own version of a liberal "safety-net" welfare state...

...What, we may ask, has been going on...

...The chalDISSENT /Fa111999...

...At the turn of the century "socialist" and "social democrat" were used synonymously...

...The elites that advocate such policies need to be reminded that earlier in this century laissez-faire capitalism denied real freedoms to millions, exacerbated class conflict, and contributed to the destruction of some European democracies while seriously destabilizing them all...

...During the three decades following the war, social entitlements ceased to be marginal in daily life...

...For social democrats there can be no simple-minded return to what worked in the 1960s...

...Balance is required...

...Just as totalitarianism eradicates the personal in favor of the collective, so neoliberalism eliminates the political pursuit of the public good in its triumphant promotion of the private self...

...As the century closes, a large majority of the governments in the North Atlantic world are once again made up of parties traditionally on the left...

...However, as they say, social democracy itself must first be understood...

...Such a life is to be experienced primarily in the personal realms of family, work, and neighbor50 DISSENT / Fall 1999 hood...

...Even the once mighty Asian tigers are under unrelenting pressure from the Americans and the International Monetary Fund to shed their state-led form of capitalism and adopt the "normal" model—that of the United States...

...Social democrats contend that certain goods, services, and activities should be deemed to be of such importance to human dignity that they should be removed from dependence on market criteria...

...On the continent, some Christian Democratic parties embraced a "social market" ideology...

...Contrary to what Marx had forecast fifty years before in the Manifesto, improvements had begun to take place within the "bourgeois" democracies...

...Rather than more liberalism, what is required is social democracy on a global scale...

...As it was fifty years ago, the principal challenge today is political...

...Deeply embedded unequal, two-class, two-tier access to the most important social services, education and health, have made this inevitable...

...Similarly, in education, all should benefit equally from high-quality publicly funded schools...

...The Future As the new millennium approaches, Bernstein's optimism of a century ago at first blush seems misplaced...

...It is instead the best kind of society that can be constructed, given these two differing aspects of our nature...

...That this is not the case in Britain reflects successive governments' failure to provide education and health care at a high common level...

...Should a social democratic state modify or eliminate a significant number of universal social programs it would, of course, at some point cease to be social democratic...

...Within a two-year period at war's end, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation almost won an election in Ontario, led in a national opinion poll for the first time, and in Saskatchewan formed North America's first socialist government...

...If liberalism in its various phases and contradictions has been with us for more than three hundred years, why should the time of testing for social democracy, its most significant offspring, be reduced to less than half a century...

...To ensure that social benefit would be the result, however, a capitalist economy required an intervening government...

...Social democrats' great contribution to twentieth-century democracy has been their commitment to equality...

...There are no certainties in history...

...It is this balance between market principles and nonmarket values—whose specific content varies over time—that has made possible the sense of freedom and social equality experienced by millions of ordinary people...

...This being acknowledged, we must ask, what about our new or residual problems— consumption as a way of life, increasing classbased inequality, sexism, racism, ecological destruction, unemployment...

...They should become citizens' rights...

...Fortunately, many recent studies make it quite clear that neither economic globalization, nor slower growth rates, nor postindustrialism makes it impossible to sustain social rights...

...Instead, our version of individualism rests on a view of humanity that is much closer to reality than the caricature that continues to be promoted by liberals...

...Other important political values—political and civil rights, transparency, accountability—we share with other democratic movements...

...The battle lines are now more clearly drawn...

...Social rights are established by citizens acting as equals in the political process...

...Unlike liberals, classical or neo-, social democrats see the human capacity to cooperate as a practical and moral foundation for universally based social objectives radically dissociated from market criteria...

...The rich do have more freedom...

...In order for us to continue the struggle against the world's neoliberals, it is important to understand how significant—and precarious—the social democratic legacy has been...

...Canada, whose population first began to describe itself as "sharing and caring" only after years of a mix of strong universal and targeted social programs had been put in place, could soon find that among the population both the practice and the self-description disappear...

...Canadians desire the personal choices that come from the market, but they have also created 175,000 voluntary organizations whose very essence is to do things with and for our neighbors on a not-for-profit basis...

...In some of these states—in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland, and Germany—poverty for citizens was virtually eliminated...

...Listening to Bach, playing baseball, or drinking beer and talking with friends on a sunny afternoon become real options...

...The social democratic movement has unquestionably been the principal democratic alternative to liberalism in this century...

...Once reassured of the universal entitlement to the opportunity of work, access to health services, and an adequate pension, it was believed, such citizens would more likely become supporters of political and social rights for others at home and be more generous in their views of those who lived in distant lands...

...To decide in politiDISSENT / Fall 1999 45 cal life where we should go, it's useful to have a prior understanding of what we are...

...And the market by definition, alas, provides legal leeway to this minority...

...With a continuing commitment by social democratic parties and leaders to the egalitarian essence of social democracy, there is reason to believe that the idea of social citizenship can indeed emerge victorious...

...Whether articulated in the humanist speeches of Willy Brandt or with the conceptual clarity of Olaf Palme or simply implemented by trade unions or legislatures in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, this commitment to equality has played a crucial role in the evolution of democracy in our century, one that produced a transformation in the lives of millions of ordinary people...

...Such citizens, in turn, would contribute to building and sustaining tolerant democratic societies...

...The social democrat rejects this competitive, individualist model...

...Conservatives, European Liberals, and Canadian Liberals, Conservatives, and Reformers...

...Neither the importance nor the political complexity of these changes should be underestimated...

...In any case, they contend, social democray had its chance during the four decades following World War II, and has lost out...

...In their view, cooperation in civil society is fine...

...They tip the balance in favor of the few over the many...

...The current policies of the federal (and many provincial) governments are undermining health and education programs...

...Necessitous men are not free men.' In the pursuit of happiness, DISSENT I Fall 1999 47 political rights are no longer sufficient...

...And without a strong, well-financed state, social rights are impossible...

...However, some are driven by selfishness...

...Democrats and Republicans, U.K...

...Having lived through the Great Depression, Nazism, and World War II, both Churchill and Roosevelt had come to believe that laissez-faire capitalism was itself a major cause of social and political conflict...

...S0, WHAT IS to be done...

...They were the first modern heads of government to do so...

...Citizenship thus becomes quite narrow in scope...

...Social democratic individualism is one that incorporates cooperation...

...Now, however, almost all conservative parties have abandoned their social commitments...

...While endorsing political and civil rights, it strongly opposes economic and social rights...

...Furthermore, the liberal emphasis on procedural rights alone is morally inadequate on other grounds...

...After ordinary people won the battles for political and civil rights, they used these new entitlements in the workplace and in civil society to their advantage...

...For social democrats, doing things with our neighbors for the common good includes using democratic government for the same purpose...

...Beyond these rights and entitlements there emerged the general expectation, encouraged by governments, that the fruits of cultural, scientific, and economic innovation would be broadly shared by all...

...IN POSTWAR states founded on social democratic principles, social and economic rights were established on the same moral basis as political and civil rights...

...position parties in over sixty countries...

...For neoliberals to say this is as historically absurd and morally offensive as it was for Leninists to have claimed earlier in the century that political and civil rights were a bourgeois encumbrance...

...Ignoring their international human rights obligations, they openly propagated the selfserving and intellectually fatuous view that commerce and rights don't mix...

...Quite the contrary, there is considerable evidence that shows states with strong social rights are better able to cope, have higher levels of productivity, and are more likely to have solutions to a world economy that is increasingly unstable...

...The difference is that a social right, whether in the form of individual payments (pensions) or a social good (health services), requires the allocation of economic resources by the state at a more significant level than those required to enforce most civil and political rights...

...In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan made a difference in the Anglo-American world...

...This is precisely what happened: affirmative action programs for women and people of color obtained the support of (or at least did not generate significant opposition from) white, male industrial workers, who thought they finally had governments that took seriously the task of ensuring an acceptable level of social justice...

...Those North Atlantic democracies with the weakest or nonexistent social rights traditions—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have moved backward...

...In Britain and the United States, wartime leaders moved in a new direction...

...Human dignity requires for its flourishing both sets of rights and their related sets of obligations...

...Markets: Harnessed and Subverted To social democrats, the possibility of ever-increasing social equality necessarily involves a complex set of relationships that serve to both harness and subvert the role of the market...

...Bill Clinton's policies have been more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower's...

...These are quite different...

...Within the new welfare states, it was expected that citizenship would now entail much higher levels of both economic security and social justice...

...In this thinking one's public obligation becomes so minimal and private life so significant that the former virtually disappears...

...When health care is established as a social right, its value at delivery is not dependent on a citizen's capacity to purchase but on the amount of resources a democratic state decides to allocate for medical purposes...

...The relative balance of class power began to change...

...No longer in global competition with Soviet communism for the hearts and minds of ordinary people, Western governments aided and abetted the spread of turbo-charged capitalism...

...But these steps will be inadequate on their own...

...the less choice, the less freedom...

...Unquestionably, its greatest political gift has been the amalgam of rightsbased representative government anchored by tolerant civil societies in which pluralism and the rule of law prevail...

...In social democratic welfare states, social entitlements were not restricted to the poor as bailout provisions but were provided as universal rights for all...

...During this period, throughout Northern and Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of the following came to be seen as rights by the average citizen: health care, education up to and including university, self-supporting income during periods of unemployment, and pensions at a level to ensure a life of dignity in old age...

...But both are bordered or touched upon...

...However, in continental Europe, where social democracy has been strongest both ideologically and in practice, the determination by governments and their electors to maintain the egalitarian essence of social citizenship, while adapting to new circumstances, is more durable...

...51 lenge to preserve social citizenship in the modern world rests with social democrats...

...The explicit goal of the International Democratic Union, established at a conference hosted by Margaret Thatcher in London in 1983, is the global spread of market economies and limited government...

...It also became the underpinning of what George Bush called the new world order...

...They created or supported political parties that would use state power to legislate improvements in work and other social conditions...

...And we strongly assert that such social equality is different in kind from income equality...

...The more these foundational institutions are changed, the less Canadians will see themselves as sharing and caring—the more they will feel they have to look out for themselves...

...THE POSTWAR shift toward the collective goal of social rights was the product of a constellation of powerful social forces...

...EDWARD BROADBENT, a former leader of the New Democratic Party, teaches in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...

...Safety-net welfare"—government provision to ensure that the poor don't become destitute—is the liberal norm for social policy...

...The well-functioning social democratic state after the war offered an imperfect but feasible moral alternative to both capitalism and communism...

...This essay is adapted from "Social Democracy or Liberalism in the New Millennium," which will appear in The Future of Social Democracy, edited by Peter H. Russell...

...Social democrats join with liberals in a commitment to all political and civil rights...

...But cooperation through the democratic use of the state for social purposes, as Reagan once said, is misguided...

...Values matter...

...The value of equality and the role of the state are crucial...

...It is no accident that the sense of class inequality continues to be felt more deeply in Britain than in any other modern democracy...

...As if this picture were not ominous enough for the left, many of our own political parties, notably in the Anglo-American world, seem to have discovered once unsuspected virtues in liberalism...

...Nor will it be, until the British are willing, like their continental neighbors, to pay the taxes necessary to make it possible...

...Furthermore, they have been joined by new parties whose narrow capitalist orthodoxy is even more intense...

...Liberals work for formal equal access to political and civil rights...

...The result was the neoliberal World Trade Organization, which lacks workers' rights or environmental conditionality provisions, both of which are profoundly affected by economic change...

...THE MARKET, however, inevitably raises the possibility for selfish or greedy behavior to become more widespread...

...Although this entails inequality in assets at birth, for the liberal, equal access to education should make it possible for all individuals to compete more or less on equal grounds...

...Having a narrow and distorted view of the human personality, they attacked social rights as an unjustified burden on individual self-realization...

...They combined to insist that their governments provide for their social needs as well as their political rights...

...Any resulting inequalities, to a liberal, are exactly as they should be...

...It's an individualism that derives from seeing human beings as inescapably social creatures, which results in pursuing both personal and common goals...

...The federal government cut billions of dollars needed and is now planning pre-election tax cuts with the surplus...

...This rejection is not based on a utopian counter-vision that sees humans as unalienated, creative, and altruistic...

...the less cash, the less choice...

...However, with progressive taxation and with the strong presence of egalitarian social rights, the negative effects of marketbased inequalities can be considerably reduced...

...And the political strength of the newly elected Labour government in Britain as well as the strong presence of the left in Scandinavia and elsewhere on the continent illustrated the depth of the desire for change...

...We have also seen the successful emergence of a new global association of conservative, liberal, and republican parties...

...It provides for a broad range of individual and collective rights, the opportunity for personal and community good...

...Reproduced by permission of the publisher...

...The difference between the two categories of rights is not found in the principle of universality, which applies to both...

...These Anglo-American leaders attacked the notion of collective and cooperative social identity on every conceivable occasion...

...Social democrats were responsible for a remarkable new concept of citizenship that began to take root in the North Atlantic states following the war...

...Individualism The social democratic welfare state should be seen for what it is: a principled, functioning, real alternative to liberal, U.S.-style capitalism...

...We maintain that a substantial degree of social equality based on citizenship is an essential characteristic of a good society...

...SOCIAL DEMOCRACY' S fundamental concern and basic difference from liberalism centers on equality...

...During the same two decades, international trade and development policies have been characterized by policies and treaties that deliberately exclude any consideration of justice or human rights...

...Although the ideological leadership for this recasting of citizenship came from the left, other forces were also at play...

...We should begin by acknowledging liberalism's significant contributions to humanity: artistically creative societies, rapid economic growth, scientific discoveries, medical cures in abundance, and for ordinary people a supply of consumer goods and services that only ascetics can decry...

...Like all marriages, it is precarious...

...But our commitment to equality entails much more...

...Left on their own in civil society, ordinary people can have the formal benefits of political and civil rights, but civil society cannot itself produce social and economic rights...

...Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, ever sensitive to what was needed to maintain power, immediately produced a federal policy agenda that resulted over the years in a number of universal social programs...

...It now has a membership of seventy governing and op*Throughout this essay I use the terms "liberalism," "neoconservatism," and "neoliberalism" synonymously...

...The Neoliberal Challenge The social democratic marriage of the welfare state brings together the two human dispositions of cooperation (equal universal social programs) and self-interest (unequal wage and salary incomes based on market performance...

...And the more they see themselves this way, the more they will support low-tax policies that undermine the institutional foundation of social rights...

...The market does allow for the normal disposition of most people to work on a regular basis simply in terms of self-interest...

...True individual freedom," he said, "cannot exist without economic security and independence...

...Thoughtful social democrats rightly contended that they could create new societies with a much higher level of personal freedom and distributive justice than had ever been thought possible...

...Indeed, the strong presence of social equality can serve to alter considerably the negative effects of income differentials...

...Thus they accept many of the inequalities that come from a class-divided capitalist economy...

...Although Churchill was swept from office at the war's end, it was his coalition cabinet with Labour that made the decision in 1942 that social and economic rights were to be added to the liberal legacy of political and civil rights...

...They will simply be indifferent...

...In a well-functioning social democracy neither selfishness nor altruism dominates...

...Hundreds of millions liberated within the old Soviet empire have seen Leninism replaced by unregulated capitalism and minimal government...

...This combination —social rights, market economy, and activist government—laid the foundation for what was neither Marxist nor liberal, but rather a superior new notion of democratic citizenship...

...We must not be misled into thinking that the time of social rights has passed, that somehow they have become an obstacle or irrelevant to the "economic" requirements of the coming century...

...They must use this moment in history wisely...

...We see it as self-evident that the exercise of these rights cannot be equally available to all in a society with a significant degree of income inequality...

...The rise of strong trade unions and the social impact of the war helped generate the impetus for major social reform on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean...

...only individuals do...

...The social democratic version of the welfare state was predicated on a set of universal social and economic provisions functioning side by side with markets...

...It was no wonder that the extremes of left and right that flourished during the Depression withered away during this period in the North Atlantic democracies...

...She thereby justified her slashing of state provisions as "liberating" citizens from all inessential obligations imposed by the state...

...I willingly pay today because I or my children will be a beneficiary tomorrow...

...52 DISSENT /Fall 1999...

...Thatcher once even claimed that society does not exist...

...BECAUSE the state depends upon the innovation and productive efficiency of the market to ensure social goods at a level beyond scarcity, social democrats sanction private ownership, competition, and differences in income...

...Freed in major elements of their lives from the compulsive and restrictive elements of the market, they come remarkably close to having the free lives that liberals talk about but that only social democracy can make possible...

...It is equality of opportunity, not substantive equality, that counts...

...If self-interest is replaced by selfishness or if altruism is expected to prevail over cooperation, the social democratic welfare state runs into trouble...

...When left to their own devices, the Hobbesian competitive forces of the market inevitably pressure us all to move in the direction of selfishness...

...And the neoliberal attack was not restricted to domestic politics...

...During the past two decades, in many of the developed democracies the state has been in retreat before the onslaught of the market...

...For us, cooperation doesn't stop where the state begins...

...Values, leaders, and ideology count...

...Neoliberalism has not only triumphed on the political right, it has also been co-opting the center...

...Social rights are our raison d'être...

...For them, the good society is one in which all citizens start out on the basis of formal equality in political and civil rights...

...I am even willing to pay more than "my share" on the condition that others do their share of work and the overall level of social programs continues to meet my needs...

...Indeed, such provisions required the economic growth made possible by a market economy...

...In a market economy where the large majority of goods and services are bought and sold, choice requires cash...

...The problem with the welfare state that Tony Blair inherited is that, in crucial respects, it was never social democratic in the first place...

...Most of the dominant parties had come to accept the legitimacy of an activist and equalizing state...

...We see the market mechanism as the best means of ensuring the production, distribution, and sale of the large majority of goods and services...

...Unlike Leninism, which led to the fanatical suppression of liberty, social democracy managed to achieve within many states the foundation for what a feasible socialism can be—the most highly textured mix of liberty and equality the world has ever seen...

...Even inequality in assets at the beginning of one's life can be acceptable if in the same society such inequality is compensated for by the provision of a wide range of social and economic rights that otherwise might never be achievable...

...In fact, for many neoliberals "politics" is outside the ideal of the good life...

...In Canada, more serious political change was underway...

...WE MUST NOT allow the more avaricious aspects of capitalism, particularly the dominant Anglo-American variant, to wipe out the great postwar social reforms...

...In Britain and Western Europe, unions had reached the peak of their power at this time...

...economic rewards are allocated on the principle of greater amounts going to those with greater innate ability or to those who make a more energetic effort or perform a task the market deems important...

...After all, if democratic electorates could be persuaded that private consumption is the goal of the good life, then any future return to an activist state could be made less likely...

...In all welfare states, more people had more freedom than ever before in history...

...And the stakes are high...

...In the United States, at least at the highest level, similar thinking was at work...

...Liberal democracy may have been bourgeois but it was not a hoax...

...Thus the modern welfare state was born...

...We must address the problems of social and economic life that began to emerge during the period of the welfare state's Golden Age (19451980): the lower rates of economic growth, greater proportional costs of health and pension programs, postindustrial patterns of work and the globalization of capital...

...During the past fifty years it has provided the guiding ideology to many governments, and these governments have changed the world for the better...

...The ideology of those controlling the state is thus of great importance...

...This belief took a decisive turn in the years immediately following the Second World War...

...Free from the time demands and anxiety otherwise needed to make personal decisions about health, retirement, and education, they are literally freer to choose how to spend their time...

...Although the nation-state must devolve certain responsibilities both downward to civil society and outward to new global institutions in order to make corporations and investors accountable, in the foreseeable future the democratic state itself must remain the key instrument of power for ordinary people...

...They can be taken away by the same process...

...However, to live without illusion and still have hope is not such a bad beginning for the new century...

...Whereas some earlier pragmatic conservatives had supported the left in establishing the welfare state, these two radicals led an all-out attack on its ideological foundations...

...Contemporary liberals claim that such matters either require stronger doses of some aspect of liberalism, or are irremediable in any form of free society...

...This family of rights was to be put in place not only in postwar Britain, but as an integral part of the postwar global order...

...The level of benefit is dependent upon a given nation's stage of economic development and on the competing claims of the state's other financial obligations and on the political will of the government...