Liberalism or Social Democracy?

There was a fascinating piece in the London Review of Books recently which had me thinking, and which I saw directly after reading this piece by Chris Trotter. Near the end of the piece from Trotter is this:

AND that’s the problem, really. As the years have passed, Labour’s Mall, once so new and exciting, has become old and tatty. Its Eighties’ architecture, all mirror-glass and chrome, has dated horribly, and the shops inside just haven’t kept pace with the new trends in political retailing.

What was politically fashionable in 1987 is now more than 20 years out-of-date. The bright young things who stood behind the counters when Roger Douglas was turning New Zealand upside-down, have become middle-aged and frumpy. Nobody wants Nuclear-Free NZ T-shirts anymore. The vibrant rainbow banner above Fran’s "Change the Law" café has frayed and faded. "Women’s Council" spent a small fortune on a product called "Section 59" – and nobody bought it.

It’s 2009, and Labour’s share of the political foot-traffic has fallen to historically low levels. The only shop that’s still attracting customers is "Sustainability".

This evokes a recurring theme in Chris's writing - the departure of the Labour Party from a social democratic project of building a more economically equal society, and into a project of building a society more equal on many fronts: a social democratic-liberal project, which was threatening to some proportion of Labour's more socially conservative, but still economically progressive, base vote.

The funny thing about that debate is that internally, most Labour people - no matter where they come from, be it youth or Rainbow or women's or whatever sector - believe in the pairing, the indivisible twinning, of a more socially and a more economically equal society. We see them as part of the same project, and able to support and enhance each other. But with the rise of the global hegemony of neo-liberalism, there were quite strong external forces that said "sure!" to social liberalism, but "no way" to economic progress towards a more equal society.

Our fifth Labour government did make some progress on the latter, but it made more progress on the former. That was I believe a key to its electoral success: it was the niggling "bossiness" of some of the policies, not the core liberal ones, that ended up hurting us in the 2008 election.

Anyhow. The LRB piece is here, and a key passage is this:

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

This is an altogether more considered piece than most domestic writing on the issue of the tie-up between social democracy and social liberalism. The deep point he's making is that the neoliberal project is OK with social liberalism - indeed demands it - but is against and threatened by any project of social equality. That's obvious enough: liberal economics demands unequal economic outcomes axiomatically. Nobody should find that surprising.

What I don't accept though is any reversal of that equation. Social liberalism and social democracy are not antithetical. There is nothing inconsistent between arguing for a more equal society on the economic front, and a more equal society on the social front. If the socialist ideal is a conception of human freedom where we are equal as human beings in society, then we can no more accept deep inequalities of income or wealth than we can accept hierarchies of gender, or sexuality, or race.

That's why I'm happy with where Labour is on these questions, in its instincts: we join and support both aspects of equality, economic and social, as being part of the same project of enhancing people's freedom and autonomy, their ability to live the life they choose. 

That, however, is not where the public sees us. Both Chris and other commentators - including perhaps you, dear reader - may share the widely held perception that Labour (and sometimes more strongly, the Greens) actually is about telling you want to do, about controlling things, about reducing the scope of individual freedom and autonomy and replacing it with a kind of grey, command and control economy and society, where fun is banned, the sun is put away, and everyone does what we want them to do.

All I can say in response to that kind of attitude is: bollocks. That's not what we are about. The fact we got some people to think we were is a major political failure, some of which is our fault and some of which is the consequence of clever campaigning by other people. 

What do we do about it? We simply be who we are and say what we want, and we bring about a better balance of the issues we are campaigning on. Social liberalism is only part of the Labour project, not all of it. We need to be more visible on basic issues of family incomes, public services, working rights and sustainability and economic development than we have sometimes been. That's part of the reconstruction that we are now undertaking.

And that'll do for now.

Jordan

Comments

[Bryce Edwards]

Jordan - there's some very important issues raised by your thoughtful post. In my view, this is a crucial debate and discussion for the left to have. And I plan to write a lot more about it myself. Having just read Denis Welch's bio of Helen Clark, I'd point out that this book also deals with these questions in depth in explaining the rise of Clark and the history of the Fourth Labour Government. Well worth reading, and I'm about to do a series of blog posts on Welch's book.

I totally agree with the need to understand the interplay between leftism and social liberalism. But, I'd also make the plea that we need to unpack this term "social liberalism" at some stage. We tend to lump in a whole lot of issues and concepts into this amorphos analytical term, and perhaps this make things murkier rather than clarifying anything.

In terms of the Walter Benn Michaels article - which I also liked - I'd also highlight his excellent book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality". I blogged briefly about this sometime ago at:
http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2007/02/the_trouble_wit.html

Bryce

[Henry C.]

Jordan, enjoyed your entry a lot! There're insights which I hope politicians and people in Hong Kong could understand, though I don't necessarily agree with a socialist economy outlook.

I see eye to eye with Bryce, that we need to unpack conceptions around the discussion. I had five years of philosophical training in university but I still found it extremely difficult to follow some discussions in political science and economics simply because of the jargons.

[Phil Sage (sagenz)]

The perfect riposte to this post is Chris Trotter and the dance.

You may excuse the loss as clever campaigning, but that is to patronise Waitakere man as being too stupid to make an informed decision, which is a big part of Labour's problem in the first place