"You're the one that I love only" (Or, Several Tactics of Social Democracy, Condensed)
Jeff Rubard
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The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is
the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy
and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats,
characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more
assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the
century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services
illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes,
the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a
social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not
trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth
century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the
answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect 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 those same
improvements: 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?
Tony Judt, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?",
*NYRB* Dec. 2009
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We, "canonically" the people of the United States of America, *ought
seriously* to consider Mr. Judt's recent essay (a follow-on to his
fine history of Postwar Europe) as a "counter-offer" *both* to
*Excessziv* promises from suspect "Liberal Democrats", and to our own
urge-towards-righteous-expression: there is indeed some point to being
serious about the policy gains of the *George W. Bush administration*
and Obama's early tests. That left-liberalism in government must
provide "all-weather" policies to suit every taste is no new thought;
what 'franchise' was it that Gladstone had to extend, etc? And
certainly, a "textual poultice" of serious *political criticism*
provides a "journalistic" basis from which the public sphere can
seriously, deliberatively, and *constructively* consider policy
options for meliorating social ills. In the weeks and months that
come, I intend to devote my writerly energies to "political
journalism" of just this kind; if someone 'of the right' is owed a
"hard truth", it had better not be with a wink and a smile on pain of
*seriously making good the 'credibility gap' the affable talker has
created in their *Lebensraum*, without, however, detatching themselves
from privilege*. I have *ever* engaged in this kind of thing before,
and am no stranger to even con'tro'vers'y; however, we must understand
there are those who "swing the lead", usually a compensable endeavor,
and those who *know how*; rather lesser a sight to see, if you ask me,
and bureaux London are about the "coldest comfort" as regards the "new
bad things" of policy up-talk, and too little heeded these days, if I
were to be asked.
Let's see what we can come up with.
Jeffrey Daniel Rubard