Wednesday, September 5, 2018

The Democratic Party Needs a Compelling Societal Mission Statement


In the early 1960s, groups of both liberals and conservatives separately gathered to produce documents which would serve as guides for how to remake the political landscape to improve society in future years.  The liberals were concerned with making an active government more responsive to demands of the people.  The conservatives were focused on limiting the scope of government to only absolutely necessary functions such as defense, protection of property, and crime containment.  In 1960 the conservative product became known as the Sharon Statement.  The liberals, in 1962, produced the Port Huron Statement.  The liberals’ document ran to 64 pages; that of the conservatives required only one page.

A liberal might view this vast difference in length as the liberal recognition that the world had complex problems requiring complex responses, while the conservatives used simplistic and naïve theories that predicted the problems would solve themselves without government intervention. 

Looking back over history with a fifty year plus vantage point, a liberal would be forced to conclude that the conservative approach had been more politically effective.  That one page with its simple message is still relevant today.  The 64 pages of policy approaches produced by the liberals might still have some relevance—were anyone to go back and read it.

Today, liberals continue to accumulate lists of policy proposals that generally make perfect sense when taken individually.  But when viewing them as a whole, they often seem responsive rather than innovative; trying to recover what has been lost, rather than a call to march in a new direction.  This assessment has always been troubling.  Why can’t the liberal cause produce a compelling one-page document that will stir the souls of the citizenry?

Tony Judt was a perceptive student of twentieth century history.  He assembled a collection of essays he wrote on that period in hope that the knowledge and lessons learned would not be ignored in the twenty-first century.  The essays were published as the book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.  Judt found the development of the great social democracies in Europe in the postwar years as one of humanity’s great accomplishments.  But he recognized that over time many of the social structures that had been created were being diminished as subsequent generations took over.  He viewed this with sadness, but also with an historian’s critical eye.  The last chapter in the book, The Social Question Redivivus, addresses this evolution of the social democratic states.  It consisted of an essay he wrote in 1997.  In 2008, when the book was published he inserted this comment on his 1997 product.

“I opted to discuss the new ‘social question’ of poverty, underemployment, and social exclusion and the failure of the political Left to reassess its response to these and other dilemmas of globalization.  Nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary.”

Although his text is directed at the Left in Europe, Judt was quite aware that the same failings existed in the United States.  He provides this historical perspective on where the Left found itself after its postwar successes.

“Since the late eighteenth century the Left in Europe, variously labeled, has been the bearer of a project.  Whether this project has been the march of progress, the preparation of revolution, or the cause of a class, it has always invoked the historical process, and history itself, on its behalf.  Since the decline of the industrial proletariat, and more precipitously with the end of the Soviet Union, the Left in the West has been shorn of its agent, its project, and even its story—the ‘master narrative’ within which all radical endeavors were ultimately couched, which made sense of their programs and explained away their setbacks.”

Judt describes the Blair era in the UK and the Clinton era in the US as examples of liberal responses made without any firm liberal conception of the future.

“Without a working class, without a long-term revolutionary objective, however benign and nonviolent in practice, without any particular reason to suppose that it will succeed or a transcendent basis for believing that it deserves to do so, social democracy today is just what its nineteenth century founders feared it would become if it ever abandoned its ideological presuppositions and class affiliation: the advanced wing of reforming market liberalism….”

Here he describes what seems to be the motivation for much liberal activity.

“Is the European left to be reduced to defending hard-won sectoral gains and glancing nervously and resentfully at a future it cannot understand and for which it has no prescription?

Judt provides this assessment of the Left’s problem.

“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly.  Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, education reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial.  But nothing binds these policies and proposals together into a common political or moral narrative.  The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society.  In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest.  And the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”

What Judt is saying is that before the Left gets into making a list of policy proposals, it had better generate the liberal equivalent of the conservatives’ Sharon Statement’

He finishes with a warning based on twentieth century experience.  If the Left is unsuccessful, things can go horribly wrong—as they have.

“Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left?  The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen.  The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free.  As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away.  It goes instead in search of more radical answers.”

 
The interested reader might find the following articles informative:




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