What Happened to Social Democracy?
2nd August 2021
In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.
In its place, we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change. Abandoned by traditional Left parties, some voters have drifted into nativist—and sometimes openly racist—opposition while more have simply become alienated from major institutions and pessimistic about the future.
Ideologues traditionally attempt to skew the traditional definition of terms in order to hijack them politically by sticking a qualifier on the front; ‘social justice’ is the poster child here, with its mutant progeny ‘environmental justice’, ‘racial justice’, and ‘[insert your favorite buzzword here] justice’. One can usually say that if a term has a politically-biased addition on the front, it’s no longer the same term. ‘Social justice’ isn’t justice, any more than ‘gay marriage’ is marriage. Similarly, ‘social democracy’ isn’t democracy.