“By rights, this should be a social-democratic moment. The economic crisis of the last two years has shown beyond doubt that the neoliberal economic paradigm, which has dominated academic theory and political practice for nearly thirty years, is – quite simply – wrong. Markets do not behave in the way that neoliberals say they do. They cannot safely be allowed to regulate themselves.
“It is not the case that government failure is more common than market failure. The rising tide of market-induced growth does not float all boats. Fiscal deficits are not always bad. State management of the economy is necessary – in good times as well as in bad. The unhindered pursuit of individual self interest does not hold the key to prosperity and growth; the assumption that it does has helped to procure the most devastating fall in output and employment for eighty years.…
… The crash has sprung the trap. Market fundamentalism is no longer the monarch of all it surveys. A space for social-democratic discourse – perhaps even for a social-democratic paradigm – should surely have opened up. Yet, so far, the only response has been a deafening silence.
“The Obama administration in the United States and the Brown government in Britain have signally failed to offer a new social-democratic approach to the new, post-crash world. Both seem bent on returning, as fast as they prudently can, to a cleaned-up version of business as usual…. On the Continental side of the English Channel and the North Sea, the landscape is equally bleak. In the heartland nations of the European Union, the right, not the left, is the chief beneficiary of the crash. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy and (astonishingly) even the increasingly battered … [Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi dominate their respective political communities.
“The implications are more profound – and a lot more painful – than most social democrats appear to realize. It is an illusion to think that, somewhere at the end of a rainbow, lies a shiny new political vision which would re-vitalize social democracy if only social democrats were clever enough, or eloquent enough – or possibly courageous enough – to discover and articulate it.…
“This is not a call for political quietism: far from it. We, as a species, will need every ounce of intelligence, skill, courage, determination, forethought and generosity of spirit we possess to avert the catastrophe that looms ahead. But social democrats have no special lien on these. Other traditions – in particular, the conservative tradition of Burkean prudence and the republican tradition of civic duty and public reasoning – have as much to say to the tormented twenty-first century as ours.
“We should stop asking
Whether social democracy has a future
Whether social democracy has a future
and ask instead
Whether the human race has a future.…”
Sources and notes
Eighteenth century British political leader and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was born in Dublin and educated at a Quaker boarding-school and at Trinity College, Dublin. His idea of a “Social Contract” involved generations past, present and future; and urged improvement through political change ─ change evolving over time: To Burke is attributed the line: “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” [Britannica and Cambridge Encyclopedia references]“A Deafening Silence,” political writer and academic, former Labour MP and chief adviser to the European commission David Marquand, January 19, 2010, Good Society Debate, Social Democracy, David Marquand, http://www.social-europe.eu/2010/01/a-deafening-silence/
Marquand profile, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_marquand/profile.html
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