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December 29, 2001
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Posted by Tyrone at 02:31 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2001
I'm thinking about the left,
I'm thinking about the left, which has been in terminal decline for years now. We see it everywhere, conservatism in the ascendancy, liberal-left parties winning power when they turn into milder versions of conservative parties, and trumpet that mildness as cause for celebration. Tony Blair's Labour government in the UK is held up as the model to emulate.
Leftist parties that even hesitate to do likewise (such as Canada's NDP) are jeered at or dismissed as pie-in-the-sky, irrelevant dreamers, fundamentally unelectable. Committed leftists retort back that power is hardly worth obtaining if it means behaving like Blair. In foreign policy, in particular, some of Blair's policies do seem unforgivable to a leftist, such as pardoning Augusto Pinochet, or virtually serving as butler to the United States in the current Afghan crisis.
To this comes the classic response of the Blairites - it's better to have part of a loaf than nothing at all. If you think we're bad, imagine being under the Tories. But when the difference is as small as this, idealists can be forgiven from taking scant pleasure in it.
We have a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between electability and principle. Why was it that leftist parties and progressive ideas once held sway, but are now considered discredited and old? What has changed in the public?
There are two answers to this; one at an ideological level, the other at a sociological level. Let me deal with the ideological first.
The economic ideology that the chattering classes have rejected is that of Keynes, who argued that, in times of economic downturn, the market will not move automatically to correct itself. The only way out is for governments to artificially stimulate demand either by cutting taxes or raising spending, running a temporary deficit. Government spending on social programs, therefore, wasn't just a measure needed out of compassion, it was essential to long-term economic stability.
And so, after World War II, governments across the Western world implemented varying degrees of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. The memory of the Great Depression was fresh in everyone's mind; no one wanted a return to those years.
Then came the 1970s. Just as Keynesianism was a response to the crisis of the 1930s, monetarism was a response to the crisis of the 1970s. Its basic ideas had actually been formulated earlier by the so-called Chicago School of economists, led by Milton Friedman.
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Posted by Tyrone at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)