[PEN-L:1724] Re: Re: Social Democracy and Utopia

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>But Brad de Long (the resident Big Name neoclassical) pursues a strategy
>that defeats my efforts here. Instead of addressing my response to his
>abstract wish that social democracy would prevail (despite the US/IMF/World
>Bank/Rudiger Dornbusch/Paul Krugman jihad against populism, which
>undermines a possible route to social democracy), he simply _changes the
>subject_, just as he repeatedly changed the subject before. I know I can't
>assume that he agrees with me (just because he doesn't reply to what I said).

Hmmm... Your big post was hard to even think about how to answer for two
reasons.

First, it opens with a bunch of rhetorical moves that seem to close off
debate. To start with a reference to the "mad bomber of Hiroshima,"
continue by claiming that Castro would have been a social democrat had
Dwight Eisenhower not pushed him into the arms of the USSR, and go on to
say that the U.S. government "_prefers_ authoritarianism because of the way
the power elite's policies promote authoritarianism at every turn." It's
hard for me to see how any of those positions could be addressed--should I
tell a story about how even under Richard Nixon the U.S. Ambassador to
South Korea (Philip Habib, I think) worked hard to protect Kim Dae Jung
from Park Chung Hee? Or should I run through the details by which Castro
chose (and continues to choose, to the maximum extent possible) the
"democratic centralist" road? Such claims--your assessment of Truman, that
in his heart-of-hearts Castro would have been happy to be a social
democrat, and so forth-- are matters of faith alone. All you can do is
stake out positions, and move on...

Then comes a possible opening. The question of what, exactly, the
socio-economic (and cultural, and ideological) bases of social democracy
are--these questions are important and interesting ones--and you have a lot
that's interesting to say. But here my problem is that I don't really know
what I think (yet).

I suspect that you place too much emphasis on the state of the
international economic order (and thus are much too pessimistic about the
prospects for advancing social democracy over the next generation) and much
too little emphasis on the cultural and ideological bases of social
democracy (which can be changed and do change more easily). And as a result
I tend to read you as saying that my political project--to defend the
remnants of social democracy now and advance social democracy as the
political wheel turns--is a chimera, a fantasy without prospect of
realization.

And you may be right.

But I have been impressed by some of the arguments being put forth by Dani
Rodrik in his _Has Globalization Gone Too Far?_. I strongly suspect that
there is much freedom to construct social-democratic coalitions when the
ideological and cultural atmospheres are favorable. I suspect that the view
that globalization makes social democracy impossible is simply wrong--that
globalization simply calls for a different *kind* of social democracy.

And I don't think I have enough of the answers yet to take a strong
position on what kind of social democracy...

Brad DeLong