”What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy” (Tony Judt)

Dagens artikel av Göran Rosenberg fick mig att tänka på en text av Tony Judt som jag läste för någon månad sedan: ”What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy”.

Texten är ursprungligen ett föredrag som kan ses här. Tony Judt lider tyvärr av en dödlig sjukdom. Han föreläser från sin rullstol och med andningsutrustning inkopplad. Förmodligen har han högst ett år kvar att leva.

En fin artikel, ”The Trials of Tony Judt”, som beskriver Judts karriär och nuvarande situation finns i Chronicle of Higher Education. Där anges också att ”What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy” förmodligen kommer utvecklas till en liten essäbok.

Judt börjar med följande anmärkning:

[It] is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

Men Judts huvudtema är att diskursiv, och han avhandlar 1900-talets långa debatt mellan keynesianer och österrikare, och skiftningar i idéklimat och praktisk politik.

Judts ärende är detsamma som Rosenbergs:

I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to ”economism,” the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.

Både Keynes och österrikarna (Mises, Hayek, Popper) försökte, i grund och botten, hitta ett svar, tolkning och botemedel av vad som hade lett till den europeiska liberala civilisationens fall och fascismens uppkomst. Judts analys att Keynes länge hade ett överläge, och att under tre årtionden byggdes välfärdsstaten upp. Men sedan dess har vi sett ”the revenge of the Austrians”. Skälet är, enligt Judt, att stödet för välfärdsstaten undergrävs av välfärdsstatens själva framgång.

The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks against a return to the horrors of the past. But their successors—even in Sweden—began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place.

Judt vill påminna om vinsterna med det samhällsbygge som skapades efter andra världskriget. Och minnas historien.

We are entering, I believe, a new age of insecurity. The last such era, memorably analyzed by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), followed decades of prosperity and progress and a dramatic increase in the internationalization of life: ”globalization” in all but name. As Keynes describes it, the commercial economy had spread around the world. Trade and communication were accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Before 1914, it was widely asserted that the logic of peaceful economic exchange would triumph over national self-interest. No one expected all this to come to an abrupt end. But it did.

We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways.

[. . .]

Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse. We find it hard to conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But it was just such a breakdown that elicited the Keynes–Hayek debate and from which the Keynesian consensus and the social democratic compromise were born: the consensus and the compromise in which we grew up and whose appeal has been obscured by its very success.

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.

(Uttrycket ”social democracy of fear” är en tillämpning av Judith Shklars ”the liberalism of fear”. Judt refererade även till Shklar i sin minnestext om Kolakowski som jag tidigare refererat. En möjlig koppling här är Michael Walzer, som jag för övrigt tror är en inspirationskälla för Rosenberg.)

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.

[. . .]

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come.

Personligen skulle jag nog invända mot en del av Judts ekonomiska resonemang. Men i övrigt: jag är trots allt socialliberal, en värnare av välfärdsstaten — dock en som, med Raymond Arons ord, vänder sig mot ”. . . the disregard of economic necessities”  och som anser att ”. . .an economy, liberal in its functioning, social in its goal, holds the most promise”.

Men skälen för välfärdsstat och för socialpolitik är för min del inte en avancerad rättviseteori, utan den illusionslösa ”social democracy of fear” som Judt pratar om. Och det förklarar för övrigt, inser jag nu, mitt djupa förakt för unga vänstermänniskor som ockuperar hus och anser att boende i centrala Lund är en social rättighet, etc, etc. Är det några som har glömt historien, glömt 30-talet, så är det dem. Medan det enda som i mina ögon motiverar välfärdspolitik är just detta slags historiska minne.