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
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