I think this article should be mandatory reading for all "Democrats" worldwide.
The increasing failure of Democratic leaders to trust in their constituents has resulted in those constituents slowly abandoning them. At their core, the working masses are losing their trust in their leaders to promote their economic interests and instead have seen these leaders embrace a form of globalism which ultimately drives income towards the wealthy by producing goods where wages are low and undermines the ability of developed nations to maintain their social safety nets.
Worldwide Democratic leaders are foregoing endorsement of their international agreements by their Congress, Parliaments, or other elected legislative bodies. And so the working masses have been disenfranchised by those they trusted to represent them. Is it any wonder that conservative populism in on the rise? Put another way, Democratic leaders have embraced the idea of a bureaucratic elite running a country instead of relying on the "wisdom of crowds" to sort through issues.
2
The best brief summary of the current political landscape I have read to date. Very well done and exactly true. There is no consensus or unifying demand among the voting public in the West as there was during the Cold War. If anything, the concerns are much more diverse and fragmented. We are immersed in cultural issues that dilute many of the traditional economic and political priorities of just a decade ago. What is identity politics? I have no idea.
But have you heard the words "campaign finance reform" at all? Or 'balance budget" from anyone? Were they resolved to allow us to move to new issues and leve them behind? Thank you again for the excellent summary.
this guy is 100% right. protect your country, protect its citizens or don't expect to stay in office. citizens are the tax payers, the voters, the shareholders, the customers - pick your analogy - they are who you answer to.
You are not running the UN, you are running a state. Get your head out of the clouds and run the state to help its citizens. period.
1
It would be interesting (to this populist/nationalist) to know the extent of Euro Media proselytizing in favor of the Davos/Brussel axis. Here, we know it works and which is to blame; there, I'm just not sure, but it is certainly crucial to understanding.
Government is failing to protect the rights of workers and redistribute wealth, but the problem of immigration is wider. It involves refugees, those who have left home because home has been destroyed.
One question is how that came about and is continuing? Another is what can be done about it?
Trump’s solution is to push refugees elsewhere than the USA, even though the USA is the major cause of the problem. In Europe there is physical acceptance of refugees, but no understanding of how to assimilate them. Hoards of dislocated, lost, people who do not comprehend their new predicament is a huge problem. Confining them to horrible enclaves to fester won’t solve anything - but real solutions are very expensive and the wealthy running the government don’t see need for their personal effort, nor for helping the governments they largely control to implement solutions.
Instead, their view is to let the chaos sort itself out, while continuing to eat cake.
2
A very serious person, no doubt, but what exactly is his print?
Bittner is spot on correct. Both the SPD and Merkel's CDU seem to be overly willing to kick the nation state under the bus to further an aggrandized EU -- one presumably to be dominated by Germany with an assist from France, but at the cost of watering down to the point of being meaningless the separate national identities of European states. This makes no sense. It's bad for Germany and the rest of Europe. People don't fight for beaurocrats; they fight for their families, friends, communities and nation. When I read that 53% of the German populace is unwilling to fight even for a NATO ally, I do not see strength . . . I see weakness (and worse). Image how much higher this percentage would rise if Brussels really called the shots? It is not in the interest of the USA for major European states to be unable an unwilling to defend themselves and their friends. To me, that is the real problem with the an ever more strengthened EU, a policy that Schultz is pushing. It's not a path to Global relevance for European elites, but a path to subjugation to the next tyrant who wields enough power to test them. European states have (mostly) friendly relations and this has been accomplished in part through the EU: quite an accomplishment. But that great accomplishment does not justify the further weakening of nation states: the dangers are just too great.
2
A very informative article, thank you. Let's get to the heart of the matter, in the U.S. and in Germany: in the US, wealth and income have been transferred upwards since 1980, in a dramatic way, Trump being the false prophet of populist nationalism: instead, he continued Reagan's dangerous trajectory. In Germany the wealth extremes have not been as inegalitarian, but workers have been asked to sacrifice for the sake of Neoliberalism's austerity-competitiveness on the world stage, and immigration has become the scapegoat. In the US the left underestimates the old capitalist motivations for immigration, as in breaking the building unions in the DC area, and resentful workers have turned right not left as the Democratic party here too is the party of Davos and the Clinton's international charities, and the AFL-CIO is dependently muzzled - even in its Labor Day speeches.
Until Sanders appeared.
It seems to me the way to break the contradictions highlighted in the article is to have a more generous social democratic state, especially towards labor markets. That's the trade-off for keeping international trade going, with major adjustments: but in the US we're obsessed with Russia, not China, and Germany is also wrapped up in the China trade.
Without condoning anything about Russia's behavior, to help workers in the US and Germany, and Western Europe, big adjustments are needed with China trade. As Bill Greider has urged for decades now.
4
At least they tried. in the US there are few benefits for actual living citizens, unless you are rich or want special religious rights.
2
The underlying force is equalization of standards of living across the globe. Although it is desirable to raise the world’s overall standard of living, this is being accomplished by moving all kinds of jobs offshore where workers are less costly and putting the profits in the pockets of the elite, who deem themselves very deserving.
Immigration is a different form of the same process: import people who will work for less and put the money saved in your pocket. Likewise with automation: replace people with machines that work 24/7 and don’t have unions. Put the profits in your pocket, and live in a penthouse apartment where everything looks rosy.
A broader vision of using the profits to benefit everyone is lacking, and as government falls under the control of those of the rich with neither vision nor empathy, discontent among the general populace pinched by selfish policies will increase.
3
Surprise, surprise. Social Democracy is losing popularity in Germany. Could it be because Angela Merkel opened up the country to unfettered immigration welcoming people from Muslim countries who have not integrated into Western culture and sexually assault women at a larger percentage than native Germans? Is it because German citizens are tired of paying for very generous welfare benefits for these immigrants with some of them committing terrorist attacks? The backlash against these immigrants has begun in Europe and the U.S. and it will continue. Even Canada is starting to second guess their immigration policies.
7
Jochen Bittner may need to look a little deeper for explanations of contemporary times. The core is in the arrival of ‘neoliberal’ doctrine as he mentions but this was a reordering of national priorities to fit the needs of the financial sector (Davos and Brussels as he notes) and the concessions made by the New Way in the U.S. and G.B. and the S.D.’s elsewhere that yielded to globalization and increasing inequality and failing social protections.
He could read Gus Standing’s publications for a solid description of the process and see his precariat. The difference between twentieth-century social democracy and today’s emerging politics is that, whereas the proletariat’s primary antagonist was the employer, the precariat’s is the state, representing the interests of global finance and rentiers and Parties no longer matter. Not a happy time, anywhere.
5
Correction:
New Way should read Third Way, the the Clinton - Blair shift to the right.
He says, “You can’t promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time.”
Great clarity and a question to ask ourselves: is having more immigrants worth the cost of the electorate choosing more right wing leaders?
Immigration is necessary. But, humans also need time to adapt. Perhaps with a slower, lessened influx, people will not feel drawn to right wing extremism.
11
To anyone who thinks that immigration is a threat to welfare, take a look at Canada. It's an extremely successful welfare state, funded in part by hard working and skilled immigrants from all over the world.
The author of this article is using a lot of buzz words to draw false dichotomies, but the answer for liberals is surprisingly simple. Open your economy to free trade. Open your borders to hard working and skilled immigrants. Tax the winners of both policies, and use it to fund the welfare state.
2
Not quite! It is small businesses free trade destroyed. Small businesses are
taxed by three levels of government in Canada. Most of the taxes paid are not on earnings but are forms of taxes which become a cost of doing business— costs which are uncontrollable ... Property taxes, payroll taxes, minimum wages, value added taxes, adding up to more money than the owners of
the businesses make. Value added taxes alone amount to a minimum
of 10% of sales. Few businesses earn 10% on sales.
Immigrants are subsidized to the extent that they live better lives
than many people who labour in the economy.
Government workers earn about 15% more than the private sector
worker and get free dental, and free glasses on top of extraordinarily
generous pension. Most of societies main structural edifices are
compelled by the courts not Parliament.
Big businesses enjoy monopoly advantages. Banking is a monopoly.
Big businesses log profits at source not at the point of sale.
Big government in Canada is running out of money ... As are the
people burdened with actually paying the taxes.
As to health care. Waiting times for specialist care is four or five months.
General practioners and specialists are at a premium.
15
Canada has a merit based immigration system, no chain migration, and takes only a small number of refugees who are women, children, the elderly and families. Single male refugees are not admitted. It also has very, very few illegal immigrants. Thus, Canada is much more capable of admitting migrants who are a good fit economically and culturally.
9
What is bad about Government workers get paid higher than private ones? If the private businesses are offended by the fact, they always can increase the pay for their workers. And 4 months wait is still better than never see the specialist because you could not afford the visit.
2
Mr.Bittner, stuck in a neoliberal mindset, can't figure this one out.
Like Democrats in the US, the SPD in Germany betrayed its constituents.
Bill Clinton did his infamous Welfare Reform and Gerhard Schröder his Agenda 2010, a package of structural reforms that included cuts to unemployment and health care benefits and a reduction in state pensions.
Had it not been for Monica, Slick Willy and Newt Gingrich were set to cut Social Security here in the US as well.
Barack Obama was also willing to sell out his voters in his Grand Bargain, had it not been for the Tea Party (!).
Schröder reforms also increased the gap between rich and poor and created a new underclass of low-paid and part-time workers.
As a result, the German left split.
Oskar Lafontaine formed a new left-wing party, which grew rapidly on the back of its opposition to the reforms. In 2007 it merged with the PDS, the old East German Communist party, to form Die Linke (the Left Party), which won 12 percent of the vote in 2009—much of it from disillusioned SPD voters.
It was also the SPD who set the tone for Germany’s response to the American-made financial crisis, what the historian Adam Tooze has called the “anti-debt consensus” in Germany, demanding deep spending cuts in their self-righteous campaign against Greece.
The SPD (like US Democrats) is lacking a true political vision and they don't fight for their "values" even when a majority of Germans would support them.
The answer to your question is BETRAYAL.
7
As rightly remarked in some comments, the German Christian Democrats have taken over many ideas from the Social Democrats.
In spite of all its faults, Germany now has, as a result, the sanest political and economic system of the whole world. It is also still democratic.
Name a leader in the rest of the world comparable to German leadership.
Social democracy may be in decay. But what is the alternative: the likes of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, May, the corrupt leadership in the rest of world, in South America, Africa? What public debate is there in China, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan? I do not know much about India, but they may still be the sanest. So how can one conclude 'And rightly so.'?
Is it not obvious that globalization and capitalism are leading us to a dystopian nightmare of a global dictatorship by the rich?
4
The unification of Germany destabilized Europe in ways that the leaders of Euope did not foresee. Italy, Germany, France, and the UK enjoyed a rough population and economic parity until Germany added another 30 million citizens from the DDR. Mitterand (socialist), Thatcher (conservative), and the social democrats in Italy and Germany all mistakenly believed that EU expansion and a common currency (Euro) would keep the equilibrium that had fueled Euope an prosperity. As we know, it didn't work out:Eastern Europe was too poor and Germans too stingy to share the wealth. "Austerity" was the death knell of the welfare state and technology emasculated the power of labor. Social democrats are the dieing dinosaurs after the meteor strike. We're in a new environment and new species will rise to dominance
4
Sorry, George, but East Germany only added another 16 million citizens to the re-unified Germany, not "another 30 million".
1
There is a lot can`ts both in the article and the responses. If we can send men to the moon we can refine social democracy. The end product of a worthwhile endeavor will require both mental and physical sweat equity but finding that balance of the common good for all is well worth the sweat. The alternative is to learn how to navigate your way through the destruction that worldwide Vulture Capitalism leaves in it`s wake.
3
The sky is the limit when defining what is left and right, etc. Germany has grown strong in the last thirty years, and they did it from their cultural strength as law abiding, hard working people. They deserve what they have. Yet, I have noticed, all things being equal, that times are changing. It is clear to me the German people feel it is time the government remember the people put Germany 1st, and the programs, decisions, policies by the government that lacks rewarding the working class is not going to be rewarded at the voting poles. The rewards of Germany's achievements need to be better served within Germany, certainly not to the millions of immigrants, or welfare policies handed out. One must remember there are limits to being gracious and generous.
9
Germany is not the US, the US is fighting with two parties at the fringes,
germany is fighting with six parties, four of them in the center.
US-politics is polarising, german politics is a meddle in the middle.
But underneath we are both fighting with the same issues, our economics are changing faster than the societies can. And this is not the usual class-warfare, which had been the traditional battleground for the social-democrats.
We all need our nations to move forward, and our political elite is deeply tangled in an yesterday world. Citizen don't understand that, too, but they feel it. We feel the insecurity, the lack of direction, we are looking at the last stand of the traditional political parties.
3
What contradiction? In a more competitive world economy there is even more need for investments in education, health and infrastructure. All the small open economies that are more globalized have invested heavily in their populations. Too many are using globalization as an excuse for austerity policies based more on inter-regional and inter-ethnic resentments.
4
There is no recognition in Mr. Bittner's piece of the need of human beings to have an identity, to have roots, to have a place where they are understood without uttering a word. Why are the indigenous peoples of Europe expected to give up all that supposed weakling nonsense, while seemingly everyone else on earth gets to celebrate their patrimony? Any chance that is part of why Germans have rejected the globalists' fundamentally wrongheaded and unfair objectives? For the time being, at least, we're dealing with humans as they are naturally, not the human-bot hybrids that we'll supposedly be turned into in a generation or two. Maybe globalization will work then.
11
There is no paradox - multinational corporatism has undermined democracy worldwide in its relentless lust for greater profits. Social democracy is dependent on the concept of responsible “corporate citizenship”. Corporations have abandoned any sense of their responsibility and gleefully participated in the wholesale redistribution of income upwards. The resources necessary to extend the social safety net to refugees and desperate economic migrants were among the first casualties.
No paradox, merely greed, and politicians who shamelessly served as vassals to their corporate masters in feeding that greed.
10
The Liberal intelligentsia, also known as the "elite" in some US circles and not in a flattering way, is way out over its skis right now.
Most Liberals in policy-making are spending their lives in cocoons nurtured by similar educations, married to like-minded soulmates, nurturing their children to adopt post-modern ideals, and devoting token amounts of time to real grubby engagement with the vast people they want to "save" unless you count mandatory "community service hours" or working in soup kitchens a handful of times as real knowledge.
To borrow a poker term, the "tell" was when Hillary declared war on "deplorable and irredeemable" people, terms (particularly the latter) which are hard to comprehend coming from an aspiring national leader. Obama's classic was "clinging to guns and religion", and these pages are routinely filled with contemptuous comments equating belief in God to "unicorns" and Christianity to one among 5,000 aberrant religious systems tallied around the world.
Somewhere the Left jumped the shark and now seems to be speaking to nobody in particular, if you take away each other, and seems intent on ripping up a "nostalgic" and backward-looking America to be replaced with exotic food, foreign languages, new and exciting spirituality (without god), and free services to all (based on usurious taxation of a despised 1%).
I am no fan of what is coming from either Party. It is too harsh, too reckless, and too fast. And it is terrorizing the least of us.
23
O dear, the invasion of the exotic food soul mates and body snatchers!
You must feel so threatened, as Boston has a harbor where exotic teas and coffee are imported. Yet at least be happy that you're going to perish in a cesspool of exotic foods, but not German foods.
Those would be so much more hard to swallow and digest!
1
With reference to " postmodernism" the center/left should also examine its stand toward another manifestation of modernity: multiculturalism. While the German experience with Das Multikultaralismus differs considerably from what one sees in North America---and even the Canadian example is also quite different from the American "melting pot"---people who deem themselves center/left worldwide should ask themselves what multiculturalism means to them. Unfortunately, many aforementioned view it as a medium through which they can exercise smugness and self satisfaction; they support immigration because it make them feel enlightened---nothing more, nothing less. The caricature of the disingenuous liberal often reveals itself in its ugly majesty too often.
Many of those who voted for Trump last year did so because they were victims of globlaization; they had seem the American dream vanish before their eyes. Social Democrats have failed to address the decline in manufacturing, and more importantly, that nothing productive has replaced it. Blue collar workers shouldn't naturally vote Republican in the USA or conservative elsewhere, yet can one blame them for harboring feelings of abandonment?
10
The Social Democrats in Germany,like Democratic Party in USA under Clinton- Obama, or Tony Blair 'New Labor' in UK are neither social nor democrats.Each have disdained the post Second War 'mantra' of welfare state where haves-not well being has been the supreme objective of the governance. Instead, treaded on the suicidal irajecvtory subservient to big money and corporations.
The Neo-Liberal economy under the name of globalisation and 'free market' has proved a total disaster for the working and the midle class.The ' Neo-Liberal' economy has only made rich richer and instead of Adam Smith 'trickle down',it has brazenly brought about 'trickle up'.Consequently,the under- privileged and haves-not remained at their haves-not status for more than three dacades.
The upsurge of 'immigrants' has addded fuel to the fire when the size of the pie-its major portion went to the top one percent.
Germany Social Democrats ruling with Merkel has fossilized the ' Welfare State' concept.Hence,their apparent extinction in Germany is their own making.If they enter another collision with the CDU under Merkel they will be liquidated.
Social Democrats ought to take some lessons from Bernie Sanders of USA and Jeremy Corbyn of UK and revive themselves while remaining in the opposition. They need to revisit even a few pages from Karl Marx original text, ' Das Capital'.Das Capital talks a great deal about "Capitalism" and its evil which is so relevant in the 21st Century.
3
Left Liberals and liberals in Canada were aspirational as youths ... but not
entrepreneurial aspirants. They mounted the podium of the
educated elite and made war on the true entrepeneur — the
businessman, the creator, the inventor, vilifying them
in every medium, university, cultural and institutional
community. They have done everything to vilify invested
savings, i.e. capital, and the savings from enterprise, i.e. capital,
while happily employing unions to act as their protection
rackets.
Today's elites in Canada are bureaucrats and those whose
paycheques are paid by governments.
The people who make the money have been enslaved by
government. Money is debased by all manner of economic
fiddling. And when the capital and know how leave, the response
by the ruling elites is to create more social hires in government,
raise minimum wages, raise taxes and give themselves raises.
International businesses, big monopoly businesses, big banks and
big government rule. Mussolini in 1921 named this form of government
Fascism.
1
"The response of Social Democrat leaders was to label such critics “right-wingers” and to demand they embrace even more liberal virtues, like identity and gender politics. This prompted a defection of hundreds of thousands of Social Democratic voters to the far-right Alternative for Germany, which scored almost 13 percent in the election."
This passage demonstrates just how antiquated the terms "left" and "right" are to describe political ideologies in the contemporary era. Increasingly there are two parallel dialogues going on in Western democracies, one about the government's role in economic regulation and one about cultural values. These two dialogues are at once analytically distinct and yet intertwined inasmuch citizens in Western democracies care, to varying degrees, about the repercussions of both debates.
Modern political parties are desperately scrambling to figure out how to appeal to voters who hold a range of opinions about both economic regulation and cultural values. So far they are not having much luck.
All of this explains the emergence of singular politicians such as Donald Trump and his populist counterparts in Europe who reach out to voters by appealing to immediate and pressing issues in ways that political parties cannot. Political parties are like hard-to-steer battleships while politicians like Trump are like easily maneuverable speedboats.
4
No mystery on how to win - if you are willing to anger the donors.
Democrats would be doing even worse, except for two things:
1. Historically, Democrats were the party of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ - truly economic populists. Many still assume this is still the case: It is not.
2. Republicans are even worse. I voted for Obama, believing his populist rhetoric. I was furious when he hired Goldman Sachs alums to advise him, bailed out bankers, and left homeowners in the lurch (60 votes in the senate). And then he appointed Simpson and Bowles to try to cut Social Security. The only reason he got my vote in 2012, was because he was running against Mr. Bain Capital / 47% (Romney). I am done. No more banker funded Democrats will *ever* get my vote again - even against Trump.
80% of *Republican* voters support Social Security - as do an even higher percentage of Democrats. Over 70% support a higher minimum wage. Nearly everyone wants to end decades of trade deficits. Yet we have almost no pols in either party pushing these *winning* and *unifying* issues.
The reason Democratic pols do not use strong, effective messaging to advocate for these policies, is that their donors will not allow it - period.
If Democrats fought for popular *economic* issues - against the wishes of their donors - they could easily win electorally, and thus win legislatively on *all* issues.
Democrats (like Republicans) would rather betray voters (and lose), than incur the wrath of donors.
9
The left is in a steady process of suicidal. The combination of technocratic liberalsim, identity politics, multiculturalism, "free spaces" in Universities, the political discourse of "rights" , "the right to have rights...." all of this have abandoned the old working class. It is true, that the old white working class is in process of dissapearance. However, they still have two or three elections in line and probably will use them to tare the social liberakl dream apart.
The 60 years plus are taking revange and the first to pay the price are the young socioliberals.
6
What happened to them is themselves. They went against the political and cultural grain of the voters by allowing too many immigrants and refugees into Germany. Just go to a bar anywhere in Germany and that is what the volk say. Open your ears and give a listen. Afterall, if politicians only serve their own interests and ignore the interests of the voters will vote for someone else.
12
I am an unashamed globalist but I understand that nationalism is a real and potent force. Asking people to be just generic “human beings” is unfair and unrealistic. We are all invested in our specific identities: American or French; Christian or Jewish; liberal or conservative. Cultures give meaning to individual lives and they cannot simply be discarded in exchange for cash handouts. But there is no alternative to free market, free trade and global integration. Center-left parties better come up with a solution that acknowledges social dislocation as the price of the future but offers cultural and national pride to local communities and nation-states that want to preserve their heritage.
6
The center-left has tried to bring up the issue of inequality - but what we forget is that since 1989, the media elites have consolidated so much power of the discourse throughout the nation. They have the power to characterize left-of-center candidates, such as Howard Dean - who was torn down by a scream. How about Bernie, who rarely got coverage during the primaries, or Hillary Clinton whose policies never got air-time but her e-mails were trumpeted as innuendos of all that is wrong in Washington. The power at the top will not give up the treasures they have stolen - they will subvert democracy if they have to (gutting voter rights acts in the US), control and consolidate the media (as recent FCC decisions have enabled), and continue to carpet bomb voters with cultural issues (BLM, transgenders in the bathroom) before election to scare social conservatives, and then promptly cut off coverage after their party won...typically a party more friendly to big business and will further inequality. Case in point: Trump and his recent tax cuts. The fear of communism before 1989, forced elites to compromise with workers and the middle class that Democracy became a byproduct. In the US, the 1960s saw an expansion of democracy to include blacks and women in the workforce. After 1989, communism collapsed, and democracy is slowly being devoured by plutocracy. The latter is so slow that many still live in the delusion we live in a democracy.
5
It is interesting (and saddening) to observe the effects of a decade of artificially high equity returns on long standing social agreements in Germany. While Globalization is part of the story, it is NOT the whole story. Germany's pension system had to mov our of a pay-as-you-go because of demographic changes common in modern economies with higher female labor force participation. That puts enormous pressure on financial markets to deliver high equity return to in turn assure the high retirement income Germans had been accustomed for many decades. As with the Democratic party in the US, the Social Democrats in Germany need to improve their economic and financial knowledge to overhaul their economic model. The Green Party as well, there are plenty of opportunities in the environmental industry, that can be harnessed if we start pricing natural resources correctly and develop models to calculate the return on investments in the area- an alternative to the trickle down model of industrial economies. The best way to assure collapse of our democracy is to stay boxed in the old paradigm of the trickle down model that promotes big industry
3
Great article. However, the comment about "California hipsters" is completely misplaced. Our state's population is roughly half that of the entire nation of Germany. The percentage of "hipsters" to the rest of us is extremely low. What people in other nations do not understand about our system is that 40 million Californians are completely disenfranchised: we have the same two senators as the tiniest and least significant of states; we aren't represented in the House either, due to the 435 member ceiling established almost 100 years ago; the electoral college has twice in just 16 years thrown the presidential election to the popular vote loser. Add in gerry-mandering, Citizens United and Fox "news" and one can see the demise of a democracy at warp time speed. California is just a cash cow for the minority rule we have entrenched today. Only something like a revolution will give the state of CA its proper national influence--hipsters, farmers and right-wing business people alike.
5
I concur with this analysis of fracturing political parties in our hyper-individualized civilization. Europeans, with their parliamentary democracies, are better equipped than the US to govern by coalition politics. For all Trump's authoritarian bluster, he has been almost completely neutered by his lack of formal political support. I see a future of weaker, not stronger, US Presidencies.
We are having increasing problems keeping *nations* together politically and economically, yet some blithely cling to hope that the world will be saved by some post-national utopia? And citizens are supposed to believe that ceding ever more control to unaccountable elites, separated by yet more layers of bureaucracy, is somehow going to reverse the long term trend of decreasing financial security for the masses? Or elect government more responsive to voters than donors?
It is very convenient for the "haves" to call for the destruction of the welfare state, for deregulation, and for reduced wages, in the name of some global utopia - while continuing to deliver worse results for the existing middle and working classes of developed nations. And those very few benefiting, find it convenient to demonize and dismiss critics, to dismiss the very large numbers of citizens negatively affected - dismissing them as "entitled", simply for wanting the financial and job security that their parents and grandparents once enjoyed. Yes, it is very easy to dismiss all these losers of "globalization" as unworthy: So long as leaders can point to a single third world citizen who has it worse, these ungrateful citizens can be scorned and dismissed as "entitled". True, outsourcing labor to low wage third world nations *has* benefiited some there: But the vast majority of the benefits accrue to the haves - not those third world workers, about which the 0.1% pretend to be so concerned.
8
The Cold War allowed post-war Germany to take a vacation from history in many ways. The Cold War's ending, and the rise of globalism, has ended that vacation.
7
Want2know something about globalisation?
Look at this layout of locations of a so-called "hidden champion".
https://www.schuette.de/en/company/worldwide/
It´s Alfred H. Schütte GmbH & Co. KG, specialised on grinding machines. This is German "Mittelstand" - from my home town.
Before financial crisis they had a lot of competitors. Now just a few are left. Nevertheless globalisation is a threat for Germany too it´s a thread for US - one of the few things your POTUS has got absolutely right. Therefore there is a subsidiary in Michigan established long before Mr. Trump was elected. The main reason for establishing was to be close to clients in US for support reasons. But it´s helpful right now. (No, I don´t own anything of this company.)
In general you might be right: The copy right for this kind of globalisation is truly American. In this case it´s owned by Ford Motor Company - a company that has a subsidiary in Cologne since 1927. But unfortunately any patent protection for this kind of strategy had expired long ago - if there ever was some - so why not copying a good idea? Schütte did.
In addition there was NO vacation at all. Never one day. But only a few have realized it in US up to now.
The crisis of SPD has nothing to do with economic crisis. German industry has a giant surplus German state too. To put it in a nutshell: Managers and workers are much better than social democratic party officials here.
The parties are the problem.
1
The history of social democracy of the past 20 years has been a history of steady decline as you mentioned. The structural decline is due to the deep transformation of the traditional constituencies of social democracy: blue collar workers, white collar workers and regular employees. Gradually all
these social categories have undergone dramatic political and sociological transformations which have been brought about by recent economic and workplace changes.
Social democratic parties must come up with new solutions which, in my view, would mean a historic shift in the direction of regulating the markets. Otherwise you can’t do anything at all. You cannot redistribute, because neoliberalism is about maximizing profits, exploiting more, privatizing constantly and elimination of the "public good" or "community" and replacing it with "individual reponsibility". There is nothing good there for ordinary and poor people. Going back to more interventionist policies doesn’t necessarily mean going back to the 1970s. Social democrats really have to change or they are doomed. We have seen that in Greece, in Spain, and France may follow.
7
Gabriel's comments reflect a misunderstanding for what happened in 2016. Besides being a generally lousy candidate, Hillary Clinton proposed a generous immigration policy which Trump has turned in electoral gold in areas where "white" decline was most pronounced. 2nd and more important Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. The electoral college has given two lousy Republican candidates the presidency (Trump and Bush is 2000) with all the powers that go with the position. Bush led the country into the obscene Iraq war and the 2008 recession and Trump is an unspeakable eye sore. The areas of the country that were most progressive and economically vibrant voted for Clinton in a landslide.
4
Well, that's the dilemma of our times: how to blend capitalism with welfare state and wilth globalism. Those three elements will have to come together sooner or later, otherwise we won't solve any small regional or national problems in a long run. What happens overseas will increasingly affect local economies everywhere, there is just no way around it. What happens in Guatemala or Panama will affect US, building wall will not solve anything, unless the solution is neocolonialism, and this would only postpone inevitable: global crisis.
Does anyone knows how to solve this dilemma? Unfortunately, no. We can't even understand how to solve increasing inequality, both in US and Europe. It seems that at present we are going in the opposite direction.
2
If the author is correct and given the human psyche, it seems well nigh impossible to have a functioning, global democratic socialist state. If so then we will almost certainly self destruct as a species.
3
Social democracy is not the social democracy of the 60's or 70's. There are no Ben-Gurions, Nehrus, Brants orBetancourts. What happened in Germany and many countries around the world you explained very well with the word "complacency". Depending on the country, social democracy is a movement of the right like in communist Venezuela or is a movement of the far left like in Trump's America.
As an old guard social democrat myself, I miss those International Socialist events where I could listen to Willy Brant, Felipe Gonzalez and, Carlos Andres Perez. But I miss more the way we would sit down with our Christian democrat friends and figure out what would be the best policies for most people and how to favor social mobility.
7
We are living in a new age and it is not only that Social Democrats got complacent. It is that the public got deep into consumerism and complacent too. Easy target for the nationalist and right wing propaganda. Social media have enabled this propaganda big time last two years, a new phenomen.
Next 20-30 years are going to be way more chellanging. We are on the verge of new crises caused both by global warming and another wave of automation caused by AI-based technologies. For Social Democrats, or any new successful democratic political party of the future, they would need to develop a completely new philosophical framework to include all these challanges in a realistic political platform. A monumental task, no doubt about it.
One thing is for sure, conservatism has no solutions whatsoever!
4
outstanding analysis
5
The Globalist Insanity of the last 20 years has hit a high water mark, and will recede. Yes, the EU has some accomplishments. No, it is not sustainable. Germans are not part of the EU, they are Germans. Poles are citizens of Poland. Merkel has probably destroyed the EU by her stupidity with invaders. By throwing open the door and eliminating borders, she has eliminated 1000 years of history. Her problem is that a majority of Europeans, from Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, do not want to experience another period of Ottoman tyranny. The old east will NOT accept the forced imposition of Muslim tyranny in their countries. Hungary will NOT accept the muslim invaders. That is going to destroy the EU.
17
Socializing risk and privatizing profit isn’t all bad, but it isn’t all good either. I thought the idea was that we balance the dynamism we get from subsidizing risk and privatizing profit with regulation and taxation in the public interest.
Deciding how best to do that is difficult. Which risks do we subsidize, and how? What, how, and how much do we tax and regulate? How do we spend the tax money?
But perhaps we should consider the proposition that, at some point, to wage a broad political and legal war against what one might think of as the basic equation of capitalism and cooperation in a democratic system of ordered liberty is to war against the social contract in the West. We can and should argue about which risk subsidies, taxes, regulations, or spending decisions are fair or wise. But we cross a line when we refuse to recognize that some business risks should be and are in fact subsidized, continually demonize the very idea of taxation or regulation, or refuse to do our best to fairly consider what should be done as a society and what should be left to private initiative and personal decisions.
Defending this basic equation while promoting dignity and equality for all is what I’d expect from the center-left. For me, the center-left doesn’t do its job when it acquiesces in trade and immigration policies that leave the populace too exposed and offers instead identity politics and gender wars.
3
This is the best explanation for the rise of anti-immigrant populism I have yet seen.
5
The degradation of democracy is a direct result of arrogance, and complacency.
5
1990 – The German Democratic Republic ceased to exist.
That country’s name was surely a joke. The GDR was one of the most fervent examples of communist government in the post-WW2 world and where citizens spying and “reporting” on one another was the order of the day. In 1990, one of the world’s most economically and culturally advanced countries in the world allowed the East Germans to join them – even going on to let one among their midst, Angela Merkel, become their Chancellor.
Segue to the German elections in 2017. How did the East Germans show their gratitude? Well, they didn’t. A look at the election results published by the NY Times shows that the biggest gains by the “alt-right” party, AfD, were by far and away in those areas once under communist rule. It’s much the same in Poland, Hungary and other once communist countries.
The life blood of communism is that your government does it all for you. Life doesn’t require any initiative on your part. We are now seeing the same demands made of democratic governments, often expressed by “me first” populist demands.
Such ingratitude – for, among many other things, being able to live a life where your neighbor is not a government spy – is beyond belief.
There are some similarity between US and Germany. Maybe that's what the author really wants to tell us.
2
At least it's not 1932.
"You can’t promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time"--this is such a crucial point for liberals in this country to understand. It's why I think the most important issue for Democrats to change course on is immigration.
We should absolutely never become anti-immigrant demagogues like Trump and his ilk, but we have to embrace the enforcement of immigration laws. Widespread immigration, especially illegal immigration, undermines the welfare state and hurts the wages of too many working Americans. It's time for a candid recognition of this.
20
There is as yet little sign that the Democrats understand why Trump was elected. They have doubled down on their support for illegal immigration and sanctuary cities as they watch the Trump wrecking crew destroy environmental and financial regulation for the benefit of the plutocrats, continuing to brand as racists anyone daring to question the wisdom of the open border sentiments that turned so many against the Dems in 2016.
11
The Europeans would be crazy to want to be a "United States of Europe", as they almost became a European Empire starting about 80 years ago.
4
As always, it comes down to us (the masses, middle classs included) vs them Davos crowd of privatizers of humanity's wealth.) Real democracy would deliver the (oil, mineral, manufactures) wealth of each country to the people in the form of welfare (good schools, clean air, food, healthcare.) Such democracy is defeated by vultures who steal the peoples' wealth and leave them poor (or on the case of the middle class, bought off.)
We can go a long way toward making things fairer by real progressive taxation and prohibition of tax havens. These shameful giveaways and exploding of needed regulations must stop.
Democrats of the world, unite!
5
Most brilliant analysis of this worlwide phenomenon. Thanks for having commissioned Jochen Bittner to write it. This - for now - unstoppable transit of disillusioned voters to right-wing populism in Europe and mad Trumpism in the US is chilling.
8
It is entirely stoppable - the western left simply needs to recognize that few people anywhere want to see their own culture diluted or destroyed by a flood of immigrants from very different cultures. Favoring us over them is one of the most basic attributes of the human psyche; fighting ethnocentrism through accusations of the usual list of -isms and -phobias is doomed to failure and backlash. Politicians and social engineers can only succeed by acknowledging and working with human nature, not against it.
11
It's true that "fighting ethnocentrism through accusations of the usual list of -isms and -phobias is doomed to failure and backlash." It's equally true that cultures evolve as people mix and mingle. We need to quit both the ethnocentrism and the scolding.
2
The author blames greedy neoliberals for ignoring the needs and fears of “the people” living in the Rust Belts, people who then lose their influence inside their own countries because their own parliaments (or the US Congress) have joined foggy international alliances and opened the gates to a flood of refugees. So Angela and Hillary and their allies rake in the money while demeaning the true people, the struggling nationalists, as “rightists.”
Two objections. First, the so-called neoliberals have not been the key force in breaking down national boundaries. Once manufacturers and entrepreneurs (like Ivanka Trump) discovered that they could have their goods produced a lot cheaper by sending their orders to Indonesia and China, where women stitch up fancy clothes in sweatshop conditions, the gates were opened. Business led the way.
Second objection, gleaned from experience in the 2016 presidential campaign in the US. If the audiences that flocked to Donald Trump’s rallies and cheered when he spit out insults against journalists, competitors, and protestors, the Trump “people” who swallowed the story that Hillary had folk assassinated over the years and was running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor, all those Trump supporters who resented not only immigrants but also African-Americans and Gays, whom they perceive as equally alien ... if these are the true, long-suffering “people,” we are in deep trouble.
To me they looked a whole lot like fascists.
3
"Trump supporters who resented not only immigrants but also African-Americans and Gays"? You mean, the ones who voted twice for OBAMA, and then provided Trump's margin of victory in the Rust Belt? It seems somethin's happenin' here and you don't know what it is.
3
Maybe a little less "redistributing wealth" might have helped...
3
“…the plight of the Democrats in the United States shows ‘how dangerous it is to focus on issues of postmodernism’” (embodied by the Clinton/Schumer wing of the party) rather than the economic dislocation caused by transnational capital and labor flows and wealth-hoarding by the rich (emphasized by the Sanders wing).
And we now see the plight of the Republicans as they further enhance that economic dislocation while promoting a xenophobic, nationalist message of (white) American exceptionalism to counter what they view as the postmodern threat of a borderless world.
When James Carville said “It’s the economy, stupid”, he was referencing the perception by individual Americans of their economic security. That is what Sanders, OUR Social Democrat (or Democratic Socialist) addresses, not by trying to halt transnational trade, travel, and communication, but by striving to make the rewards thereof more equitably shared. A more progressive tax system, with its proceeds invested far more wisely in its HUMAN capital, is what he called for. Will we ever heed that message?
5
What happened is no mystery. Their party leader Merkel is an enormous fool who has let a few million muslims, mostly young males, into the country.The result, which was obvious to anyone knowledgeable, which excluded Merkel, has been an epidemic of rapes, sexual assaults, and a string of terror attacks which has claimed the lives of dozens of people. Let Germany be the lesson for similarly inclined 'progressives' in America who exist in their delusional bubble yet retain enough sanity to understand the foolishness of their ways.
11
If you could upvote this article I'd do it.
5
I agree with much written here, but one thing that is not made clear is that the problem is capitalism. Just as was predicted by those we are told to abhor, capitalists have exploited the people to the point of extreme inequality.
The Social Democrats in Germany and the Democratic Party in the U.S. have failed to protect working people from exploitation and have instead been fawning over banksters.
There can be no collaboration with capitalists who have shown that they will bankrupt the world in order to enrich themselves beyond all need and all reason. There are many so-called "rich" people who do not fit this description and are willing to look for a better way, but oligarchy limits options for all of us.
Germany should take a look at its own treatment of countries like Greece and Portugal, too, as those are clear examples of a wealthy elite imposing great suffering on working people for the benefit of bankers.
3
Read this essay in conjunction with another one in today's Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/opinion/culture-war-corporate-america... . In essence, we have shifted from forms of government which used their monopoly on power to protect citizens' economic rights, to ones in which corporations pit citizens against each other in order to prop up the governments that serve them. Political parties in the US as well as Europe fight each other over identity & culture because corporations have used globalization to take over the rights of economic self-determination which had been the foundation of democracy.
5
Excellent analysis. Therein lies the problem with Social Democrats and US Democrats...Open Borders and Free Trade mean that large parts of the native populations will lose, as younger, poorer people from other parts of the world will take over jobs both locally (in North America and Europe) and also make / service stuff far cheaper, which will then be exported and again, make American, Canadian and European workers lose their jobs.
When will Democrats address these inherent contradictions? More importantly, is it even humanly possible to address them fairly and convincingly? Will they simply wallow in meaningless boilerplate hype about "freedom and security for everyone"?
11
The meaning of modern Germany for Americans, not to mention Germany as an example of Social Democratic society, and insofar as Germany is central to the European project, the meaning of Europe today to Americans?
Exactly nothing. Germany means nothing--unless you want to mention a society utterly irrelevant, controlled, and sterile with respect to speech and writing (language) and invested entirely in technology, which is to say a largely silent, machinelike, petty functionary society. No one knows Germany for much of anything other than technological production. Its football team wins the World Cup and that has to be played down. No one knows it for anything like the history it had culturally.
Worse, capitalistic and right wing tendencies in Germany seem to have as little to say as left wing tendencies and they just seem to want to wrest the technology in their direction. Whether you speak of right or left you get a sterile, controlled speech, bureaucratic society focused almost entirely on technological advancement. And this model seems to be spreading worldwide.
The average person in America reading about what comes out of Germany or Japan or other nations usually just sees a dry list of products and political trends and little more; it's almost as if language as a human tool is in decline worldwide and being superseded by some strange mathematical-technological seeing and acting. The language that exists at best just drapes society, and most is on the floor.
2
Excellent article by Bittner and some terrific commenters putting in informed perspectives. What a relief to get some insight into a issue that isn't mired in the mudslide of "It's all Trump's fault."
9
The Social Democrats lost their souls and many voters when the party, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, introduced Hartz IV, a reform of welfare benefits and unemployment insurance that to this day is considered very controversial. Jochen Bittner seems to forget that many people who used to reliably vote for the Social Democrats prior to 2005 are still so upset by the party's betrayal of the working class that they will absolutely not believe what any of the party's new leaders promise. So when Martin Schulz stated that he intended to reform the Hartz IV system to make it a bit more generous, many voters simply did not believe him. So why would they vote for him?
What is especially egregious about Hartz IV is that the Christian Democrats (a kinder version of the American Republican Party) would probably never have been able to introduce it; it took a Social Democrat willing to betray the German worker to reform welfare benefits and unemployment insurance in a way that has greatly hurt blue collar workers and their families.
And those who say that this reform was necessary to make Germany more competitive need to look at Sweden and some of the other Scandinavian countries where individuals enjoy a much higher quality of life and are perfectly happy to pay for it.
1
In an essay for Der Spiegel, he wrote that the plight of the Democrats in the United States shows “how dangerous it is to focus on issues of postmodernism.”
This is a very interesting point of view.
It is the modern world and its corrupt modern institutions with their intellectually bankrupt ideologies that are falling apart, and Mr. Gabriel blames postmodernism?
It is postmodernism that is offering the people of the Western world a new era of deliberative democracy and Enlightenment. If you are somewhat knowledgeable or aware of postmodernism, you would know that it creates an environment where it is nearly impossible to construct an ideology. Yet, he thinks it is better to keep the old status quo alive without offering any new modern ideas, instead of embracing the postmodern future.
Seems to me that Mr. Gabriel has no idea what postmodernism is.
Or, that the postmodern path is far more damaging to power structure the elite of the Western world have built for themselves, than he and others are willing to admit.
1
Don´t stick to the term "postmodernism". Mr. Gabriel had targeted the common focus of "liberal party elites" on gender and diversity issues instead of focussing on real life issues - as there are middle class jobs, study loans and health care in US and as there are the refugee problem, the fix some issues in social security and attempts to solve foreseeable problems in future working life. Remember Mr. Shapiro´s comment.
This problems of inability and/or unwillingness of many party officials of the "left elite" in both nations are leading to ideological narrow-mindness and to an escape in ideological worlds of (small) minorities is an abstract one. In this regard it is similar. It´s not similar when it comes to substantial problems. Many parts of Mr. Sander´s after-election-demands are nothing but a copy of existing parts of European social systems - only parts - for example so Germany itself did not suffer from financial crisis so much. When it comes to this there is much more to fix in US than in Europe.
The effect of the unability of powerful "left" party officials blinded by too much ideology to get it fixed is always the same - no fix of substantial things and those who are interested in keeping the "status quo" as it is can go on unimpressed.
"Let them play with their gender stuff. This is fine with us as long as the lefties are occupied so much with this so that they don´t try to get us to pay an expensive contribution for mass health care." That´s the issue.
2
Here you get the reason why so many old industrial workers and their descendents - their daughters and sons they had sent to university for a better life who are now white collar workers lawyers, physicians and plant manager as new working class in the age of automation - have left the party:
In opposite to political scientist, social intellectuals and "heads made out of concrete-officials" ruling social democritic parties these poeple are classic social democratic and are able to look through their schemes. Based on their old school family work ethic - even Grandpa in his coal mine was "left" but interested to do his job as good as possible - demand solid fixes when the smell issues that have to be fixed. If they only get nice cloudy well sounding words of good-weather-narrow-gauge political philosophers "you have do this and that" in return and nothing will happen they will turn their back on them.
When left-wing conservatives are doing a better job and deliver better solutions they will prevail. That´s how Ms. Merkel and her crowd won their majorities in their great age.
They are no neocons as many commentators had said. When macroeconomic neocons of "Sachverständigenrat" will present their annual expert opinion with pledges to cut social subsidiaries (as they always do) Ms Merkel always will say no - like her grandmaster Mr. Kohl also did in his days - and then she will add moody remarks sounding nice for those who don´t understand "Mommish". No room for SPD left.
2
What an interesting reply.
I believe once I factor out the broken English, I think I understand what it is you are saying: There are similarities, between SPD and American democrats, but the problem faced by SPD is really all of their own making.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my comment.
As with most analyses of this sort, Mr. Bittner forgets that for a short period labor too was international, or at least threatened to become so. From about 1918 up to the second world war, workers could put enormous pressure on their national governments, who feared the spread of communism.
Social Democrats were always a watered down version of labor parties. The two pronged assault on workers, welfare and consumerism, undermined labor solidarity. Those now demanding higher taxes are falling into the same trap.
The answer is worker empowerment across national boundaries, just as capital has erased borders. When American, Chinese, Mexican and German workers stand together demanding the same wage, capital and their "representative" governments will listen.
The SPD also sold its soul to Moscow and by doing so also lost its moral high-ground in international relations and support for the EU.
Bittner is writing about Germany - but he could be writing about any country in Europe or even the United States. He writes that you can't have "transnational governance without limiting the powers of national parliaments" and Brexit is probably the most glaring result of this philosophy. I would add you can't expect jobs to be shipped out of a country and workers displaced and expect loyal happy voters - which is what we have here and in many other European countries. As unruly as the results were in the German election - at least it seems the voters there really do have a voice.
4
The article makes some accurate “high level” points. In the end though politics is a hands-on business and depends highly on the level of integrity, competence and vision of the leaders in place. Merkel has shown, as is now clear to almost everybody, none of the above attributes and was able to bamboozle the whole world, especially Germany and the SPD in making believe she was and still is a great leader.
1
The decline and malaise of social democratic parties is very real and surprising given how influential, dominant and successful they were most of the 20th century. In my theory of this decline, a big part is the fall of the Soviet Union. As we have learned in recent years, the Soviet Union played a very active and remarkably large role in funding and organizing political activity in Europe. This activity pitted communists and socialists against social democrats, which focused the latter and kept them fighting for the allegiance of the working class the socialists sought to win over. With the Soviet Union gone, and the very loud, active and visible far left mostly disappeared from the political scene, the social democrats have lost focus and their way. There is a lot more to their decline, but this is part of it.
As an aside, anybody familiar with leftist European politics of the Cold War, is struck by the eerie similarity between the brazen insolent aggressive antics and behaviour of the communist left of Europe and the right wing conservative activists of US politics of today. The European communists were funded and organized by the Soviet Union, the right wing agitators of the US are funded by the Koch brothers, the Scaife's, et. al. There is always a nefarious hidden force stoking the fires of discontent.
Who has a job? Who has a job that pays enough for a home and some security? Who has so much wealth that excess and luxury are common traits? These are the real and economic questions of the world. Basic ones. Food, housing, education, health care, employment, retirement. Not difficult to understand the basic human needs.
But, we are led by fairly corrupted and selfish people and structures. We don't really do 'community' as much as selfism. What do 'I' get? Trump is a good one at that. This whole charade of economics (actually plutocracy with a hint of oligarchy) will surely collapse. Then, from the ruins, we can create something better. We can.
Be compassionate, centered, strong, honest and good-hearted. That's our better angels. That will be our saving grace.
1
It had, ultimately, to come to that :blame it on emigrants which , in Germany in particular, is a thesis that holds no water !
More than any other major economy Germany was rebuilt in the after war era by avidly sought srangers , wooed into emigrating to Germany bu a multitude of social and health etc services unparalleled in the world.
Germany has no valid moral reason to complain achieving what it did, a lot, by a welcome policy towards foreign labor which most emigrants wish to join!
While Herr Bittner seems a bit brighter than someone as brilliant as Francis Fukuyama seemed when he wrote "The End of History" after the collapse of the 'next to the last' Soviet "Evil Empire" on earth (aren't they all, Ronnie), we must be mindful that Fukuyama had reversed himself on that illusion of "free-market capitalist democracy" almost two decades ago in "America at the Crossroads" between the real choices of Empire and democracy.
1
I don't understand his analysis. Why does the concept of the EU contradict assisting refugees and poor people. Why can't wealthy nations of a transnational organization contribute to the poorer ones? It does happen in the US through the tax system. Is the problem that the EU is weak and lacks a truly political and economic structure? States rights, which is now raging in the US has been a feature of the US since it's founding. Why do we blame the victims for the racism, jingoism,etc of others. a Did we blame Jews and other victims for the German monsters? Of course not.
" you cannot have transnational governance without limiting the powers of national parliaments, thereby limiting the power of the people." Sez who???
The above conflation of the power of national parliaments (governments) with the power of the people is a false equivalence. Centralized power in nation-states all too often means loss of individual power and rights. One advantage of systems of semi-autonomous national governments is as a means of checks and balances that protect individual rights and privacy from their governments and corporations. Thus, European courts can protect citizens of member countries which are leaning toward suppression, while EU ministers can seek to protect EU citizens in Britain from abuse resulting from the Brexit process.
"The problem is that these benefits have been dwarfed by the trickle-up effects to a fortunate few." Just so. Social Democracy succeeded in Europe exactly because it made ordinary people's lives better in ways they could understand. As that ceases and wealth inequality runs rampant, people are told the problem is immigrants, not billionaires. Thus are the new aristocracy of wealth (on the American model) protected in their High Castles.
2
Globalism is nothing less and nothing more than the eternal quest to seek slave wages, no Unions, few regulations and no OSHA like workplace protections. When formerly Left Wing parties get in bed with bug business for globalism they are abandoning the hard fought consumer, environmental and workplace protections they once stood for.
Is it any wonder the malaise at the ballot box? Ask Corporate Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump got no surge of voters- he got about what Republicans have been polling. Ms Clinton underperformed what Obama got in 2008 and 2012 by a considerable margin.
3
Herr Bittner supplies some insight into the decline of the SDP in Germany and center-left parties in developed countries but offers no practical solutions. There is an inherent tension between nationalism and globalization, between competition among nations and cooperation. Capitalism emphasizes competition, socialism cooperation. What we are seeing is that global cooperation is limited to the wealthy elites and competition to workers, particularly the most unskilled ones. Globalization has promoted overall economic growth as predicted by most economists but the benefits are most unevenly distributed, wealth leads to more wealth while those of modest means see their incomes stagnate or even decrease. Until nations agree on common policies that force the transfer of wealth downwards without destroying the creation of wealth unhappiness with politicians will keep rising and demagogues will profit from it.
4
Social democracy as an idea and organising principle of society is not only relevant but still a better alternative than the pseudo nationalist conservative polics that thrives on divisive nativist appeals, and currently gaining a temporary ascendance over the liberal democracy. The electoral reverses suffered by the social Democrats in recent months are neither long-lasting nor irreversible if met with proper response in terms of strategic redesign and organisational revamp of political parties.
2
Your ignore, sir, the most basic element of politics, be it international, national, or local.
That element is self-interest. It is the element that drives people to vote and to vote as they do.
It is also an element that will not be stifled, either now or in the future,
1
An alliance between Merkel's party and the center-left Social Democrats shouldn't surprise anyone. The center left has become indistinguishable from the center-right regarding globalization and economic policy for years.
In the US, we decry increasing polarization in politics, but the center on both sides of the aisle marginalized itself by crashing the world economy for the middle and lower economic classes and reducing the political and economic power of their own citizens, while increasing it for multi-national corporations with no loyalty to the country or its workers, just their single-minded pursuit of profit in international markets.
Conservatives sought refuge in right wing extremism, because the extremists, at least, acknowledged their despair and frustration and promised to get rid of the status quo. Progressives moved towards Bernie Sanders, because he, at least, acknowledged their abandonment by center-left politicians more interested in seeing multi-national corporations and financial institutions succeed than their own constituents.
Being so polarized ideologically prevents the 99% on the left and right from uniting to work to preserve their economic and political power, while the 1% continues to cash in and democracy and the rights of the people are increasingly threatened.
We need an alternative to the coalitions, parties, and ideologies that exist today - a coalition that makes democracy work as it should, and increases economic prosperity for all.
7
The EU is also in many ways representative; there are elections. So why must transnational governments be "limiting the power of the people" -- unless you are taking for granted that a "people" are defined by nation-state boundaries and not, in a democratic sense, one person one vote? The quintessential problem with transnational governance is that Europeans have never been ready to give up their nationalism, for all the trouble it's caused them.
3
Why?
Because, like in the United States, the constituent political entities must cede sovereignty to the centralized authority and consent to all that the centralized authority determines best suits the union.
On a continent like Europe, it means overturning centuries of cultural development that is best described as having nationalistic overtones.
3
Many of the most powerful in Brussels are appointed, not elected. Therein lies the problem.
I thought the most interesting part of this was in noting that "Risk of failure has been handed downward to the citizens". This might be getting at what is, probably correctly, perceived as the basic unfairness of our overall system right now. I think people are more accepting of the wealthy being that way when they had to take risks and work hard to achieve it. It instead now feels that risk and reward are hitting different parts of the citizenry with the working class bearing the former while the upper class and wealthy reap the latter. Similar to how it is often observed that our system increasingly privatizes profits and socializes risk. Seems there has to be a breaking point somewhere and it may not be pretty when we hit it.
23
It is not control of capital that is the issue, it is tax revenue available for public services. Capital flows both in and out in an open system, so long as it makes the countries wealthier, it is a net positive. If policies are not in place to adequately redistribute these gains in a way that increases standard of living, security, and entrepreneurship, that is the failure of specific policies, not a systematic problem with social democracy or globalization.
Ideas like "The United States of Europe" are means to achieve these desirable ends--they cannot be realized without further integration. The lack of fiscal coordination in the wake of the European Debt Crisis left Europe with a much slower and uneven recovery than the U.S., and led to great human suffering.
The refugee crisis was the result of decades of inadequate investment in defense and security. By allowing the Syrian Civil War to fester in its backyard, Europe sat by and watched the crisis unfold in slow motion. Again, more coordination (an "EU Army") and resources could solve the problem.
To say "globalization got us into this mess, so less integration is the only way out", is an oversimplification--it would actually exacerbate many of the issues facing Europe. Being a club of democracies, is up to European leaders to sell this idea to their people ways that win elections, otherwise the EU will never realize its potential and people will continue to be disillusioned with the bloc (and rightfully so).
6
Have you considered that it is a "potential" the Europeans, through their votes, aren't so interested in achieving?
Put another way...Until you can kill off the concept of the French being the French, the Germans being the Germans, the Spanish being the Spanish, etc,, you are not going to see that potential being explored by any other than the bureaucrats in Brussels and like-minded politicians in the EU states.
The People aren't buying what they are trying to sell.
5
Fascinating essay.
Social democrats, wherever they are located, need to refocus on the immediate needs of the voting population, including— and perhaps especially— the have-nots.
It’s a great deal easier to embrace internationalism and strengthening market forces if you are economically secure. If you are not, a populist program that favors redistributing to the overlooked will be far more attractive.
This paradigm is obviously applicable to the U.S., too. Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the American equivalent of the Social Democrat. Clinton was vulnerable to populist appeals from the left (Sanders) and the right (Trump) and understandably so.
The lesson for Social Democrats and for the Democratic Party in the U.S. is clear: focus on the economic security of those you hope to govern.
22
I think your comment was apt, except for this: it will do NO good for the democratic party to focus on the "have-nots." At this time in our history, that's a group comprised of a mash up of people: homeless, some illegal immigrants, people of color in the former states of the confederacy, some urban poor people. Most Americans are "have somes;" that is who the dems should try to motivate and unite. It is the cost of medical care, higher education and housing (in some geographies) that make incomes seem so small and stretched. It is the coming assault on SS and medicare that makes us feel so economically insecure. It is the obnoxious and ostentatious wealth of the few, and the overly funded Department of War which makes your average American feel ripped off. It is NOT that we have nothing, it is that what we have seems threatened.
1
Capital and labor can never work together because their interests are the opposite of one another. Capital seeks to reduce and replace labor costs with capital. Why would labor support the people that want to take away their jobs and incomes?
As capital has taken ever greater shares of the economic pie labor has become more and more stressed. The paradox is that as capital makes things harder and harder on labor that seems to make labor more and more conservative in their voting. Just the opposite of what is needed.
7
Some of Bittner's comments are highly relevant but when he dismisses "Social Democracy" he's ignoring the fact that social democracy is the prevailing economic and social model in just about every country in Europe whether the left are in power or the right. It is indeed perhaps more accurately described as welfare capitalism where an enormously complex and inter-connected globalized economic system (on which the economic and physical security of all depends whether they like it or not) has substantially eroded traditional ideas of national borders and sovereignty. We're seeing a classic demonstration of this reality as the UK desperately flounders around trying to separate itself from the EU. In this environment people's economic security is relatively unthreatened and so it becomes a question of slight adjustments of goal posts to deal with day to day problems by, in the case of Germany, the CDU and the SDP. In real terms the differences between these two parties is fairly small. This is all pretty boring stuff, not the raw material of grievances and revolutions and so their is plenty of opportunity for the fringes on left and right to whip up emotions about abstract issues or by promising utopian solutions and so siphon off support from the traditional parties which is what happened in the recent election in Germany.
16
"Social democracy’s second contradiction is that you can’t promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time. "
There are similarities between Germany and the United States with the exception of geography (and proximity) which heightens the impact of democratic decisions.
The "second contradiction" that I quoted above pretty much sums it up: in any country, there's only so much to go around. The influx of refugees that Merkel welcomed have ticked off the populace who wonder why foreigners are benefiting from government programs.
This is the essence of Trumpism which based its campaign on the old "us versus them" dynamic, and a "war" on immigrants, legal or otherwise.
With much of the world at war, this is bound to continue and inspire far-right reactions in many countries. How the various countries of the world handle the problem of "haves" and "have-nots" will dominate the next decade, in my view.
Here in the US, of course, the choice seems pretty clear: the "haves" have won, possibly forever, because once disparities of wealth and privilege reach a certain tipping point, power centers likely become permanent.
But in countries with multi-party politics, it may take longer. The risk, of course, is that democracy will suffer if the people become willing to listen to demagogues and lean in to authoritarian regimes that may make them feel "understood" but stomp on their freedoms.
23
Isn't it somewhat axiomatic, Ms. McMorrow, that "the haves" will always end up winning because the "have nots" while, perhaps, garnering significant political victories, must turn to "the haves" to sustain their political hegemonies?
Can you give us examples of pure democracies that haven't turned into abusive, even self-destructive tyrannies of the newly empowered elites??
1
So Mr. Bittner, who has been endlessly maligning the AfD in this paper along with the only other German contributor Sauerbrey, embraces one of their fundamental policy positions: That to rescue our welfare state, we need to strictly control immigration into the welfare system. Pretty obvious, yet all mainstream parties along with virtually all journalists in Germany have been casting this thought as something only a Nazi can say.
34
@GS - "to rescue our welfare state, we need to strictly control immigration into the welfare system". Immigration IS strictly controlled in Germany, and the SPD supports it. Of course, so does Bittner. The only people Merkel (with the support of the SPD) let in, were Syrians fleeing a vicious civil war. The others are being sent back unless they have some connection to Germany (family ties) or can establish a claim to asylum. Those that will be sent back, will be treated respectfully and firmly. This is true in all Northern European countries, even Sweden. What the Nazis say, is line them up and shoot them - preferably on the border. What would YOU do?
2
Nothing that I read in the American press supports the validity of equating the AfD with Nazi's or with their positions otherwise being beyond the pale of reasonable discussion.
1
The problem with pro-capital politics is that it already winning too well. Most of the wealth of the world is already in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations. In fact, some corporations have more wealth than some individual corporations.
When I see statements like "...social democracy has always relied on the nation-state as the framework for safeguarding the rights of workers and redistributing wealth." and "...the increased competition of a global economy," and "...welfare-state capitalism..." I think there is some spin being used.
This terminology is used to justify the uneven "distribution" of money upward. Business likes to talk about their "fair share" of a market and what's needed to capture their "fair share." Well, workers want a "fair share" too, not a "redistribution."
And "increased competition" is not a "fair" framing of what's happening. It is unfair to pit low-wage workers against higher-wage workers. This is "redistribution." Giant corporations could use some competition. Unfair! And sad!
Finally, "welfare-state capitalism" is only bad when it benefits the lowly workers of any nation-state. But the welfare enjoyed by giant corporations is always good and never spoken about. Shhh! Monopolies, no-bid contracts, taxpayer money flowing into their coffers. No, this welfare and redistribution of wealth is almost invisibile. Nothing to see here!
105
This is why German Social Democrats are toast, with the analysis of it indicating Mr. Bittner is the last person to be proposing remedies:
"Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, recognized this and pruned back Germany’s overgenerous welfare spending to make the economy more competitive. It was the right move, however unpopular, and the party wisely defends it today."
Schroeder only opted to sell his progressive values out to market demands after he decided not to seek re-election (and promptly took a fat job his chum Vladimir Putin secured him at Gazprom). And he did so claiming to follow the lead of two other notorious turn-coat progressives: Tony Blair, who ceded the British economy to finance markets before turning right politically, too, in embracing George W. Bush; and Bill Clinton, the original worm in the progressive apple with corrupted triangulation and contractual politics claiming to advance socio-cultural liberalism by surrendering anything markets, lobbyists and the wealthy demanded. The result is the wealth gap -- aka economic injustice -- that voters see, and wait to be addressed. Mr. Bittner's cure: "more of the same, please."
The reason seemingly quixotic leftist leaders like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbin and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are on the ascent is because they've stepped into the void created by right-charging "progressives" to propose veritable leftist alternatives to the status quo. Are those viable? Dunno -- but they aren't the same old bait-and-switch.
24
In the crash of 2008, when Wall St. caused the evaporation of trillions of dollars world-wide, only the U.S., the country at fault, had the ability to essentially print money to soften the fall of its economy. The rest of the world governments had to cover their losses the old fashion way because they would have spurred devastating inflation if they followed the tactics of the U.S.
Quantitative easing is a word few Americans understand, but one would expect more Europeans would be conscious of the crimes of Wall St. and how the U.S. got away with this economic treachery- the mob boss gets away nearly scot-free while the captains serve hard time.
The social unrest in Europe now is largely the consequence of the economic devastation of the crash of 2008.
It's great to be king- even if you are a bad one.
53
It was the German government, led by Ms. Merkel, that prevented member states of the EU from being able to use the same tools that the US did to ease the consequences of the financial crash.
In the US, automatic transfer payments kept the country largely stable and went to the regions that needed it most urgently though all states suffered. In the EU, no such system exists. The ECB *could* have engaged in QE, but did not have the political will.
2
This version of history is false memory. US woes may have been central to the global crisis due to its central role as the largest economy in the world. Facts are that countries like, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Greece suffered even greater from their own reckless lending, hubris. They had their own real estate and credit bubbles that was far more excessive that what was seen in the US. And thus their greater fall.
ps: I don't think folks like Assad, Hussein, Putin, Kim are right-wing politicians.
2
Alan: Thank you for mentioning the “ devastating inflation” part, there is a feeling of that in the stock market, certain housing markets and areas such as health care where the costs have risen much higher than the “reported” rate of inflation. The middle class in America is now paying the bill for Wall Streets criminal acts. I would add that the social rest in Europe is also due to the neocons war of choice begun by Cheney/Bush/Blair with the bombing of Iraq. I would also add that nothing has changed, the feeble attempts to rein in Wall Street have been or are being negated rapidly.
2
Can Nordstream choir boy, Putin toady former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder sing the schwarmerei carols of “get it or lose it” to those less than 1%?
Mr. Schröder‘s passionate embrace of “all things Putin” has paid lucrative dividends for his financial security. The Nordstream tentacle to bypass the Ukrainian shut-off valves of oil his Kapelle pulpit.
These less than “volk-centric” SPD actions of a former Leader reveal the duplicity of Politicians to many voters.
The SPD relevancy to voters who feel marginalized and bypassed requires a Kapellmeister who can connect and not contradict the song of success.
1
In Dutch, we use the German phrase 'Welt-fremd' as a loanword. It means, to be totally ignorant of what is happening around you.
One wonders, is there a competion going on in Germany between Ms. Merkel and Mr. Schulz? 'Transfer-union' and 'United States of Europe' and ''Grosse Koalition' for that matter are the ultimate topics to destroy their parties CDU/CSU respectively SPD.
1
I just read the piece about how corporations are the primary beneficiaries of our governing system. International corporations and the very wealthy elites are able to operate for their own benefit beyond national borders.
Those who have been left behind as economies went international, as in the Rust Belts, have suffered and continue to suffer as inequality thrives and opportunity withers. I doubt that weakening safety nets and making life more difficult for those "losers" is the answer.
The kind of capitalism we had during the Cold War was mitigated by "competition" with the Communist ideology. As the Soviet Union fell apart and other Communist countries took on some aspects of capitalism to hasten development, the perception that there was a need to protect the vulnerable faded.
Sadly, it's likely that we will experience difficult times before we find a better way to address the challenges that nation states find difficult.
58
The author uses 1989 as a dividing line and it was in a shift to a unitary world power structure, but the demise of communism (in Europe) has little if anything to do about the change in Economic thinking, save ‘the Washington Consciences’ under IMF and World Bank were ‘doctrine’ along with emerging ‘Neoliberalsim’ across the world. And that can be traced back to before Reagan/Thatcher. Globalization and Inequality were to come into force later but roots in 1970’s. Change will be as you note be long in coming.
1
They are too busy trying to absent themselves from the opening of their borders to unruly throngs of medieval cultists, who do not share their respect for free speech, civil rights and the fair and equal treatment of women.
10
Theyt are too busy trying to absent themselves from opening their borders to unruly throngs of medieval cultists, who do not share their supposed respect free speech, civil rights and the fair and equal teatment of women.
1
The erosion of the German Social Democratic Party is a trist fact. But one can't blame the party. It's the German society's failure: people here are living in the DREAM that the good times will never end. They have completely lost their political brains.
People are closing their eyes facing the future. They are fat and lame: why fight for a better future? - It's the appearance of a degenerated society. Sad but true.
A well-written article, thank you Mr. Bittner. And thank you NYT; it is is refreshing to read an OP-ED in your publication that is correct and factual, rather than the usual ideologically slanted view of reality.
9
Wer hat uns verraten? Die Sozialdemokraten.
The SPD is weak because it betrayed labour and embraced center-right neoliberalism, without an electoral mandate to do so.
The CDU is weakened because Merkel's voters have not voted for her to enact the social-democratic programm.
You don't have to look further. Germany's elites tried to move beyond politics, in a world of neoliberal technocratic consensus. The only reason why the crisis has not been deeper is the strength of the economy, that shields the politicians of the worst backlash.
4
The same goes for the Dutch social-democrats. They lost dramatically the last elections. Lacking clear ideas about the to hasty growth of Europe, the common coin, inlux of immigrants and their medieval belief systems. And the ther are the taboos within the leftwing parties to even start thinking about that, but enthusiastically supporting useless topics of the most bizarre identity and gender "politics". They forgot about their own middel of the road voters.
8
Germany got where they are, the leader of the EU, with sway over Brussels, relying on their percussion complex and concentrating on a coalition form of government . Then what ever possessed Merkel to believe playing Mother Theresa was a fit, is beyond me. Like many leaders before her, she has simply been in power too long. She has done a good job, but as most, failed to admit she should step aside. She and Obama had a vision that hit the wall both sides of the Pond.
22
They march to the beat of a different drummer?
1
They say that History rhymes. Wind your clocks back to 1906 (Upton Sinclair: 'The Jungle') That's where we (western economies) are headed - based on our current course co-orrdinates. Take a rest in 1926 (Frederick Soddy: 'Wealth, Virtual wealth and Debt'). Stop over in 1952 (J K Galbraith: 'American Capitalism: the concept of countervailing power') and perhaps do a bit of island-hopping amongst that author's other economic writings. Move alon to 1995 for a change of scenery (Bernard Connolly: 'The Rotten Heart of Europe'. Finally on to 2016 (Robert Gordon: 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'). Then a rapid re-set to 1899 (Thorsten Veblen: 'The Theory of the Leisure Class' stopping off for some R+R in 1958 (J K Galbraith: 'The Affleunt Society'. I'd suggest some liquid fortification for your journey.
We have been here before. Who was it mentioned that some folk neither learn anything nor forget anything?
5
Write this on the board fifty times: "You can't promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time."
39
Hey, perhaps THIS is why my Streit Council has not been able to dramatically increase our support for world government over recent years: http://streitcouncil.org Nevertheless, a democratic world government, with respect for all cultures, and war eliminated, is surely in our future. One person, one vote!
It was the weak social democrat government of Bill Clinton and Al Gore that repealed financial regulation in the 1990s and got excited about globalisation and transnational governance - a bit like Thabo Mbeki's government here in South Africa, which put more effort into allowing white capital to move their listings to London and to remodelling African regional governance into an African Union than in addressing ordinary people's trauma in the face of an HIV/AIDS epidemic or the need to deepen Nelson Mandela's efforts at racial reconciliation. The result was Mbeki's defenestration in 2008 by an alliance Marxist-Leninist groups and rural African populists and the elevation of Jacob Zuma as their corrupt champion, who after winning his second term in 2014 ditched the left and began asset-stripping the state with gay abandon with his wily associates, the Gupta family. The result is a country at odds with itself and incapable of putting together a solid cross race and class political society that can address the precarious new world emerging after the Great Recession of 2008. Whether Cyril Ramaphosa, the new ANC president can pick up Mandela's mantle and forge a new form of inclusive social democracy that can dig South Africa out of the social, political and economic riot of misrule and disaster of the past ten years is the open question on everyone's mind.
4
And the same thing has happened in the US. Many Democrats have NO sympathy for the people who have born the costs of globalization. Their answer, education, will not do enough. Many Democrat leaders in the past, from Barbara Chavez to Cesar Chavez, did see that immigration would lower wages of the poorest Americans. Today's Democrats do not care.
27
Ach, Deutschland...that country where many people will avow that their only mistake in WWII was to lose. The status of women in Germany is nowhere near what it is even in the United States, where deeply entrenched notions of gender roles permeate the labor force, such as "women should be doctors and nurses because those professions are about caring for others." A country still dominated 75 years later by the same oligarchy of factory owners, former aristocrats who retain wealth, and war criminals who escaped the Allies' denazification initiatives, is a country that paid lip service to social democracy. Socialized medicine and the modern welfare state were Bismarck's initiatives to prevent the left from making significant inroads under the Kaiser. The SPD was shambolic for its existence given this and innumerable other preemptions on the ruling class's part. In anno 2017 Germany is still a profoundly right-wing country as its neo-fascist tendencies have shown.
2
Beating up on Germany over WW2 is ridiculous, especially the assertion that it is still run by war criminals, since a 30 year old in 1945 would be over 100 now.
Have you lived and worked in Germany? I have. The direct descendants of these oligarchs that include many prominent war criminals own most of the capital in that country. Beating up, indeed. Germany is like Britain with an intractable class system.
1
I am American and live in Germany. What strikes me as the central problem of the left-of-center parties here is that they have never taken seriously to develop expertise in the industries and work processes “of the future”: automation / AI, digital tech, biotech, new energy, design areas, jobs mixing creativity with production. There needs to be knowledge about new technologies, new media, automation, and cultural capital-to-money-conversation that is combined with a political vision of jobs and more economic equality. Without that, knowledge of the future is left in the hands of business people to make money for the privileged, and techno-enthusiast startup companies. I think that the “postmodernism” of hipsters can be a big part of this coalition vision. Postmodernism is about cyborg theory, “posthuman” relating of humans to AI entities as more than machines, decentralization economics in the Internet (blockchain), and how to deal with simulation and virtual reality. Also, “postmodernism” takes the rise of right-wing authoritarianism more seriously than Marxist-inspired Left ideas do. The latter are too focused on their anti-capitalism to be interested in forms of political power. Historically, the Social Democrats take their inspiration from the mid-20th century; the Greens from the 1970s anti-war left (which they then largely betrayed), and the Left Party from the “Stalinist” left of East Germany. One of these parties should instead develop a vision for the future.
10
The "industries and work processes of the future" are merely mechanisms for further concentrating wealth. They are capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. Perhaps a few hipsters and technical workers benefit from the new technologies (until they, too, are replaced by AI -- just as autonomous drivers are replaced by autonomous cars).
Meanwhile, vast numbers of workers are left only with "right-wing authoritarianism" (or a fiscally bankrupt social democracy) as outlets to vent their rage. The results of the former are ugly and brutal -- of the latter, ineffectual, unless the left regains the backbone to demand redistribution, and stops mucking around in the invidious claims of the Oppression Olympics (i.e., identity politics). This might not be "anti-capitalism," but it nonetheless demands serious pushback against the class warfare perpetrated by the elites.
1
What happens if all of this post-modern, techno-optimism turns out to be an overblown Shibboleth? AI development will continue to change production processes, but the idea that it will fundamentally change the nature of being human is simply foolish. Every utopia has foundered on the shoals of bitter reality. Homo sovieticus went extinct in 1991.
One need not be a Marxist to intuit the relationship between political power and the accumulation of capital. The type of capital, be it social, cultural, virtual, real or tangible, only determines who gets empowered.
1
I don't see any political party in Europe actually prepared for the new age. People at large are not ready for it either. Germany's wellbeing depends on exports so they have to be particularly sensitive to what is happening elswhere. The isolationist spasms across the Europe are all ill advised, they actually are reinforcing all bad trends of the old order. They will solve nothing, just reflect people's fears.
Mr. Bittner elegantly illuminates this core nexus between globalization and national protection that vexes governments around the globe, including ours. In this issue where there are not direct contradictions in values and policy, there is a host of issues where policies of globalism and nationalism need to work in harmony in order to be effective.
As Mr. Bittner points out, there are different winners and losers when the system is not governed well. When governments adopt policies that open the floodgates to globalism, the few win and the many lose - at least in the developed world such as Germany and US.
Opening the floodgates is easy. Carefully crafting policy that protects the population while maintaining a strong international standing takes time, cooperation and hard work in many facets. Consequently, people who favor trickle down can win by adopting a posture of blocking or not cooperating.
In the US, Obamacare is a good example. The model is a three-legged stool, one of which is community rating. To get community rating, we need a mandate and to get a mandate we need subsidies. Crafting the legislation took great care. To break it, the GOP needed only to kill the mandate, thus breaking a critical leg of the stool.
1
I'm all for the AfD replacing the Social Democrats as Germany's second main political party; I mean, they are already the third largest bloc in the Bundestag.
4
Simple economic concept of scarcity, you have to make choices and there are consequences for the choices you make. If you bring in millions of immigrants and export capital, there will be consequences for the domestic population's access to jobs, housing, educational opportunities, community identity, etc.
The Social Democrats were not loyal to the German people and should be permanently pushed aside.
48
No mention of the forces driving a lot of what's happening in the world --- a human population that has increased from 2 billion when I was born, to 7.5 billion and racing towards 8, plus enormous numbers of REFUGEES created through war, climate and political destruction. We live on a planet that is literally flooded with weaponry of every sort, and leaders who still continue the outmoded practice of conquest to extract the lions' share of wealth from the grasp of others. Think bigger, people -- Cooperate or perish.
2
Nonsense. The immigrants are an asset. Population decline in Germany was a part of the German embrace of immigrants. The increase in population will provide German socialism with the revenues the larger population must have. Germany is acutely aware of the impact of population decline experienced in Japan and has embarked on a remedy that will preserve social welfare for the aging population. What Merkel has failed to do is explain this necessity to the population.
America has population growth thanks to immigrants. That is why racism is so successful here right now. Whites are declining and brown skin persons are growing and even while many are “illegal” they are net contributors to our tax base and Medicare and Social Security (which they are not entitled to today). Trump was able to inflame whites and white racists with the help of the longstanding GOP racist “Southern Strategy”, and Putin’s propaganda campaign against Clinton. Merkel faces similar racism and Putin propaganda to overcome.
Democracy is vulnerable to demogoguery, cynicism, and immoral oligarchs. Hitler proved that; talked about it and rose to power by manipulating these weaknesses. Unfolding in Germany and America and in other democracies is a full frontal assault by Russia coupled with oligarch’s (who have recently stolen $1.5 trillion from the US Treasury) and foster inequality and resentment in all democracies.
Moving to the “right” is always dependent on ignorance, fear, hatred, and racism.
2
Is that why you adopted 50 children for your heirs to share your estate with?
2
Interesting piece, but doesn't give any solutions. At least Martin Schultz, whom Bittner so cavalierly dismisses, has proposed a solution. Everybody sees that Nationalism has appeal to the losers in globalization. One should never forget that these forces in Europe are the direct descendants and in some cases, the same people, that created the holocaust.
Macron wants to extend what he did in France - challenge the assumptions of both the left and the right to get EU friendly parties of all stripes to work together in the European party. Now that Britain is on its way out of the EU, this might be possible. The solution is not in MORE nationalism. That is certainly the way of the past. It is in cooperation between all parties that recognize that Europe is stronger working together to provide ALL its citizens with a decent life.
1
Good explanation that applies just as well to the United States Democratic party.
7
Here in the U.S. we have the same problem. Basically the elites betrayed their own people - for money.
Hillary and the DNC rigged the campaign against Bernie and the people for money.
"You cannot serve both the public good and money."
41
The next wave of global competition will be for workers with the skills needed in today's (and tomorrow's) world.
No, the people will never want free and open borders for hoards of refugees and migrants who will need welfare to survive.
But there is a shortage of workers with critically needed skills. In the U.S. an estimated 6 million jobs sit open in large part for a lack of qualified workers.
2
Germany pays a socioeconomic political diplomatic military demographic geographic nation state price for leading Europe into two world wars that it lost. The primary purpose of the NATO military alliance and EU/EZ socioeconomic currency alliances is to keep Germany as a peaceful participant in European affairs.
The most populous economically, technologically and scientifically advanced European nation Germany is struggling against these historically imposed restraints. While Putin's Russia rises and Trump's America sinks.
Putin speaks fluent German as a result of his Soviet Union KGB residency in East Germany. Putin also speaks some English. Trump is the grandson of a man who fled to America to avoid criminal prosecution for dodging the German military draft. Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany and speaks Russian. Trump hardly speaks English.
Ironically and paradoxically there are more ethnic German Americans than there are any other kind of ethnic Americans. While the British royal house hides it's deep German origins behind a World War I circa selected alias Windsor English surname. Brexit makes Germany even more influential.
7
Angela Merkel has moved the Christian Democrats perceptibly towards the center (i.e., leftward) and by doing so, made it possible for many classic liberal elitist yuppies like myself to vote for these old fogeys for the first time in their lives (if with gritted teeth). By the same token, the classic working class Social Democrat voters always had a socially conservative outlook and couldn't care less for "unnecessary elitist obsessions" like gender equality or ecology. So in my view, the Christian Democrats are simply the "right wing" of the slightly, slightly more "leftist" Social Democrats. And the combined score of these parties at the last election was still 52 percent of all votes. Not so gloomy and doomed after all, right?
40
To quote Bill Clinton “A-rith-met-ic” things did not add up.
To posit, as the author does, a fundamental contradiction between globalisation and social democracy, is to ignore the role of taxation.
Concurrent with both of these phenomena has been the relentless cutting of taxes, particularly for high earners, in the West. Keeping nation states starved of funds for investments or welfare has been a key strategy of the Right, reducing the state’s relationship and importance to both workers and the poor.
2
The high earners who from global sources move away from high taxation and take their skills, capital, income, and jobs with them.
The Ruhrgebiet is not the rust belt and in the NRW state election in 2017, the AFD won only 7% of the vote. The winner of the election was the pro-business, ultraneoliberal FDP which is now junior partner in a center-right coalition government. The FDP was also a winner of the federal election, along with the AFD. The argument that voters are tired of neoliberalism rings a bit hollow when they keep voting for neoliberal parties. The AFD btw is hardly a party of economic populism, and neither is the Austrian FPÖ or the Swiss SVP, not to mention the Brexiteers with their dream of the "biggest free trade area in history", just without the regulation that they hate the EU for (who needs protection for workers or consumers or the environment?). And don't get me started on Trump's plutocratic fascism - neoliberalism without the liberalism. Right wing voters are motivated by right wing ideology. How surprising is that.
2
Here´s John Perkins: "The world economy today is a total failure. Less than 5 percent of the world´s population lives in the U.S. and we consume nearly 30% of the world´s resources, while roughly half of the world is close to starvation or actually starving. That´s an abject failure. It cannot be repeated in any other country because (...) this distribution of resources is unsustainable. We have created an economy that is based on death and ruthless destruction. It is highly militarized and it is dependent on destroying nature. I call it a death economy. What we need to create right now is (...) a life economy." (From "The Light" by Keidi Keating, 2015)
Perkins used to work with the international finance hawks that have blackmailed practically all third world governments into subservience to global U.S.-led extortion terms for its multinationals. If their leaders, in highly exceptional cases, do not cave, as was the case with President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, the jackals are sent in and they die in mysterious 'accidents'.
European Social Dems were also undermined at every step and given no choice but to surrender. Yet with the internet came the counter revolution and the trolls grip on us has seen its best days already. Never in parliamentary history grass roots voices overruled the establishment against all odds and Bittners and pundits and delivered Corbyn to reenergize a party with people's content. Never before did we see anything like the Sanders rallies. Yes we heal.
5
In politics, success always sows the seed of failure. Therefore no socio-political system, no hegemony, no partisan victory endures. The clearly superior solution to the pressing problems of today always creates new problems which it can not solve.
The article is spot on. The Social Democrats lost touch with reality after the end of Chancellor Schroeder's term in 2005. His pact with the unions, and not any measures introduced by Chancellor Merkel, was the main reason for Germany's subsequent economic success. He also opposed the invasion of Iraq, which made his party even more popular.
Today's Social Democrats want to destroy the nation's already strained social network by inviting millions MORE uneducated, religiously and culturally dissimilar foreigners, in uncontrollable numbers, to benefit from financial revenues and privileges that few indigenous Germans enjoy despite pulling a full shift, each and every day of the year. The anger is both palpable and justified. (Refugees can take 100-Euro taxi rides to the hospital, gaming the system by claiming a medical emergency, while Germany's poorest citizens have to walk or pay for public transport).
Germans are also aggrieved that the U.S. didn't invite the Muslims it displaced through Wars of Choice. This would have taken the strain off Germany and spread some of the burden to those who truly caused the mess: The U.S. invited 45,000 Muslim refugees in 2016. Compared with Germany's population and refugee intake the U.S. figure should have been 3.5 million, not 45,000.
Yes, there is lots of anger, but also directed at Angela Merkel to whom the Social Democrats aligned their future. None of the German parties is particularly popular at present.
12
I reject your assumption that anyone has an obligation to accept large numbers of refugees. They should fix the place where they live. Arab culture took the road that led away from consensual peaceful political and social structures long before the United States was even founded.
2
KBronson, just because the Middle East has been the focus of Western dirty tricks as part of the Great Game (read Peter Hopkirk's historical account) for over 100 years it doesn't give the U.S. any excuse to invade Middle Eastern nations in order to physically grab their natural resources.
U.S., the U.S. is (primarily) responsible and, as Colin Powell once famously stated before participating in the fabricated evidence fiasco, "If you break it you own it."
"If you break it you own it."
Fair enough. The problem here is that those that went all in to break it - say, for starters, the Bushes, supporters, both R and D - are the ones who profiteered from the breakage, while the poor here get the resultant tab. Twas and is ever thus. So now we now have Trump.
The Social Democrats are getting slaughtered because they can't give Germany social democracy anymore. And they can't give it social democracy because it's not possible anymore.
Social democracy is a State where the private sector trickles down some of its profits to basic, universal and essential public services for the working class. The key here is universal: contrary to the philantropy system of the USA, in social democracy the private sector pays a little bit of its profits in the form of taxes, which the State decides how to invest.
Social democracy is not possible in Germany anymore for very simple reasons:
1) Germany lost its post-war windfall of reconstruction under USA rule. In 1985, the Plaza Accord made it to valorize the Mark against the Dollar, ending its industrial expansion, thus eliminating its private sector's super-profits (i.e. profits that derives from huge surpluses against the Third World);
2) Even after the neoliberal reforms (Hartz reforms, creation of the EU and the Eurozone), Germany's profit rate continue to fall, given its high organic composition of capital.
As a result, the social-democrats had to decide which to save: the welfare state or the profits of corporations. Since the profits of corporations are the very basis for the welfare state, the choice was rather easy (actually, a false choice). The Social Democratic Party became a living fossil.
13
Interesting take on Germany.
And we in our own country fail to act over decades now on the knowledge that corporations own our Congress etc.
Is it a fact that we blithely accept the Corporate State?
Are we OK with it? I believe we are. Now we all can watch what happens next.
1
"Center left" parties, wherever they are, don't occupy space anywhere near the center. They have become unwitting tools of Davos capitalism.
Yes, a world without borders sounds like something nice people ought to favor, but in practice globalization allows capital to seek jurisdictions that allow labor to be abused and exploited while the movement of peoples (not just people) creates, as it always has (think of the effects of the Visigoths on Rome, the Anglo Saxons on the Britons, the Normans on the Anglo Saxons, the English on North Americans, the Spanish on the rest of the western hemisphere, Tamils on Sri Lanka, Mughals on India, and on and on) conflict and oppression.
The "center left" is so busy being "modern" and "compassionate" that it's come to despise its own constituency.
Which leaves us, in America, with no hope but Bernie Sanders.
6
Excellent comment--until I got to your final sentence.
Fate of the social democrats in Germany 2017, and the German future?
Germany, and not just Germany but Western society as a whole, looks more and more like a Kabuki play of freedom, of an open society, which is to say for all internet, globalization, communications, public life political and corporate in the Western world within and between nations appears a strangely stiff process, a ritual of freedom for citizens than an actuality, and the internet as a whole appears to be turning into a platform of either the Kabuki language of the powerful or a powerful upsurge of the "trolls", the "dangerous", the "far right or left wing voices in society".
It appears rather obvious that traditional politics and business in the Western world, not to mention across the world as a whole, has no real idea how to manage millions upon millions of people and increasing coupled with staggering and often dangerous technology advancements. All of regular society, for all freedom, appears more and more as a vast refugee camp of millions upon millions with each person having his little share doled out, while the wealthy and/or vulgar right wing and/or micromanaging left wing elite look over things--and I mean really look over things, intrude with technology in every aspect of people's lives, whether this means identification papers or cameras or internet spy games--and go through their Kabuki movements which appear odd to anyone having received a basic education. Stiff or vulgar outburst life.
2
"...left wing elite." We might look there for the elephant in the room.
Do they not take more than any enterprise can earn at the best of
times. Engineering their own wages is hardly a market economy.
Public sector unions are simply protection rackets. The left
at one time were the disposed not the entitled. Today's left
enjoy cash flow earnings out of all proportion to the capital
returns capitalist enterprise expects. The entire economy in
Canada is so riddled with taxes that real work does not pay.
Teachers in Ontario only work 180 days each year — nine months.
An elementary school teacher after 10 years earns $95,000 a year.
They retire after 35 years earning a pension greater than the
average family income in Canada whom may never retire.
A new math scores in Ontario are falling.
A reasonable return on Capital is how much? Say 5% ...
A teacher after retirement would have to have saved approximately
$1,500,000 ... many teachers are married to teachers or equally
well paid public servants.
And any accountant in Ontario will explain that teachers are far better
able to take advantage of every know method of legal tax avoidance,
not excluding moving frequently so as to take advantage of rising
real estate values, which not succeptable to capital gains taxes
Teachers are significiently entrepreneurial. This is progressive socialism.
And the Canadian banks are not exposed to risk for one single dollar.
But real entrepreneurs are crowded out. They are a risk.
I think Mr. Schulz is basically arguing for a stronger federal framework under the European Union. Use the transnational platform as the requisite state apparatus to champion center-left positions. I think someone needs to help him with his speech writing techniques but the idea isn't so outrageous. Impossible but not unreasonable. You wouldn't need to worry about migrant hostilities if welfare was administered by the European Union rather than individual national governments. You might avoid micro-bubbles like the Greek debt crisis as well. Germany, as the largest economy, would be the guiding political force anyway.
Besides, in general, European labor is already freely migrant. The Schengen Area basically outlines the blueprint if not the details. Social welfare is not transnational though. At the very least, leftist dissenters argue that it shouldn't be. You can see the source of contention coming from the Ruhrgebiet. I would expect to see just as much resistance if German workers were asked to share their benefits with Spanish migrants as I would anyone else globally. Unfortunately, as the wealthiest state, Germans will probably be the biggest losers while securing the social welfare state sustainably. Them's the breaks. Workers will lose more if they abandon the left entirely.
1
There is no contradiction between globalization and the welfare state, and the power of the people increase with the democratically elected European Parliament that complement the local democratically elected local German... parliaments! Capitalism/greed is a problem that needs global rules/laws! Immigrants and refugees are a potentially profitable resource, and the welfare state become stronger the more effective it gets to take advantage of this resource!
One thing the author doesn't mention is the fundamental instability of capitalism, as analysed by Marx and Piketty, and clearly visible in the modern world: capitalism is a constant drain of wealth to the rich. Marx proposed revolution as the way to stop this drain, but here is another possibility: taxes sufficiently high and sufficiently progressive to redistribute the wealth and form a more stable pyramid.
I guess the author will claim that with internationalism, taxes can't be much higher in one place than in another, capital will simply move abroad. Is the wellfare state simply incompatible with globalization? I wonder: looking at Germany and it's million refugees from Syria, I see a country that essentially gained quite s lot. I have seen aging cities like Bremen and Hamburg revitalized by the migrants. Still, Syrians are one thing and Nigerians or Malians another: those Syrians are often educated and skilled. Most of Africa would move to Germany if ir could, and it would no longer be Germany.
1
Except what Marx proposed can't ever happen. Who decides when taxes are 'progressive' enough. Who decides how to 'redistribute' and to whom? Its like asking people to 'pay their fair share in taxes'. What's the fair share?
In a utopia, a mind game, on paper those questions are easy and logical to answer. In reality things are never easy. Gripes, grievances, ambitions, etc all take hold. Eventually some are more equal that others so your pyramid is even more unstable that before.
Case in point: Venezuela and Cuba.
I won't even get into the immigration debacle except to say that no one has a 'right' to go where they please.
Good observations. With desertification of much Africa and the Muslim world and conflict over shrinking resources in relation to population growth from Pakistan and India all the way to Marocco Germany can look forward to a significant deterioration in the social safety net. The world the social democrats envisioned and realized appears to have been a momentary aberration in the long human history of oppression and inequality. In 100 years one can hope the population of Germany and the Muslim world will be fully integrated and indivisible as one vibrant culture.
They way it is working in Lebanon and Syria after 1300 years?
1
It’s tricky. Perhaps the rush to supranational political structures has been too quick. But whatever happens the best brains need to find ways to properly tax global corporations so that they pay their fair share. Perhaps another task is to reset global economic structures with another Bretton Woods type of agreement. However with the current governments in power especially in America that would be all but impossible. It’s also massively complicated and our degenerate political culture of today only bends toward simplicity and shouting.
Corporations are organizational structures for people. Their profits can be easily and fairly taxed merely by taxing the individuals who receive those profits through salaries, employee perks, dividends, and capital gains.
Provincial economic resentment is real, and it's been a long while coming. I don't know if frontiersmen along the Alleghenies begrudged the expense of the Louisiana Purchase, but I do remember people in that region comparing the cost of the space program in the early 1970s to the perceived lack of federal support for local needs, and things were relatively better then than now. Today it feels like nearly 50 years of loss, while know-it-alls in distant cities tell them their problems are due to their own retrograde culture. The Democrats' stance starts to look like a Homer Simpson parody: "I hate you so much, why won't you vote for me?"
5
Excellent piece, sir. Your parallels between your social Democrats there and the Democrats here are spot on, but ours are too up their own tails to recognize it, or too deep into their own bubble to care. Don't know it you have a counterpoint to our Republican party, the other part of the equation. Who most likely realize full well that supply side econ doesn't work for most of the populace, and most definitely don't care. No wonder people don't bother to get out and vote for cancer or polio.
As a big city born, bi-coastal, globally oriented, diversity loving, genetically liberal, descended from immigrants, 60 year old man who believes Ezra Pound's words at the base of the Statue of Liberty express what's best about America, it is hard but necessary to admit that the Democratic Party in the USA and Germany's like-minded Social Democrats, must take a harder and more nationalist line on immigration.
When I talk to Trump supporters, once we get past hatred of Hillary, the bottom line reason they give for having supported Trump over other Republicans and all Democrats is illegal immigration and fear of accepting too many refugees ("Look at Germany...").
It can't be noted enough that Donald Trump's percentage of the Latino vote was the same as Mitt Romney's. This was despite Trump's truly hateful rhetoric. How can we explain it? The answer is that American citizens and voters of Latino descent want immigration controlled too.
It is not inconsistent with liberal democracy and embrace of diversity to say that a country's first obligation is to its own citizens. The degree of obligation can be a debating point, but the fact of that obligation must be acknowledged to stem the rise of right wing authoritarians.
19
"A country's obligations?..."
Only people can have obligations.
People can have obligations to themselves only ... Everything we experience
is is the consequence of people looking out for themselves.
The international elite are a class of people with no loyalties to any
state. They fly flags of convenience. The elite live in every country.
They collude with the governing elite in every country to loot the
population of their assets, their freedoms, their self esteem.
Every country is peopled by citizens whom collectively have no idea,
no knowledge, no understanding of the world they live in.
Everyone has an opinion which is easily used against them.
They believe every kind of propaganda. Indeed they believe their
own rhetorical contrivance. Left, right, communism, socialism,
Marx this, Keynes that ... believing that tomorrow will bloom.
Tomorrow can be no different than today ... Because today is no
different than yesterday.
Somethings cannot coexist ... Globalism is simply a metastizing
of people choosing betterment as opposed to restraint.
Progressive socialism cannot exist without the ability to
transfer money from those who have to those who don't.
Except the wages of those who do the transferring go
up exponentially while those whom are taxed simply leave
with their capital, know-how, and know-whom to jurisdictions
clamouring for these, while the middle are squeezed and squeezed
to help underwrite the welfare state.
The interesting thing is that if you talk to 2nd or 3rd generation Latinos they will say that we need to cut the influx too. Each generation becomes more and more American.
Bittner´s analysis seems correct – to some degree, it also applies to smaller European countries like the Netherlands and Denmark, even though the Social Democrats in the latter (my own country, btw) have now adopted elements of the programme of far-right Dansk Folkeparti, probably getting some voters back by being, among other things, strict on immigration and tough on immigrants who are not willing to fit in in society (or capable of doing so).
5
To all that was said here I would add, lets not forget that the 2008 market crash was the result of lies and dishonesty on the part of Wall St.
And Goldman Sachs misrepresented some of the facts regarding Greece, helping to cause their meltdown.
1
Well, I like Herr Bittner's economic thesis on internationalism & the welfare state. But it does not acknowledge the racism, bigotry and scapegoating that is endemic with conservative politics and its appeal to blue collar workers displaced by globalism and wealth inequality.
If working class voters will only accept larger social & economic equality & these values when their plates are full, we always only 'the next recession' or 'economic crisis' away from their return to authoritarian politics in western democracies. Is the larger social contract so fragile with working class voters that they inevitably revert to their worst instincts when challenged by economic crisis?
History it seems, is doomed to repeat itself.
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RC Wislinski: Unless I misunderstand you, you misonstrue the connection between economic justice & racism. It is true that the right is able to exploit xenophobia & racism because of economic marginalization. But opposing racism & xenophobia does nothing to advance economic justice across the general population. If the centrist or leftist parties defend the rights of minorities without also advancing broad economic rights & justice, then they are, essentially, acting the same as the Right: exploiting the cultural issue for the votes they lose by representing corporate, instead of democratic, interests.
3
Yes, what struck me most about this essay is how it equates "democracy" with ethnic nationalism. E.g., democracy "has pushed back" through "ordinary people" (read: ethnic Germans angered by an "us" versus "them" narrative) against the "elites". That's not democracy, except in the sense that those people voted. That's ethnic-driven nationalism. And the horrors of a Europe driven by such nationalism is exactly why the EU was founded in the first place.
"Is the larger social contract so fragile with working class voters that they inevitably revert to their worst instincts when challenged by economic crisis?"
The Social Contract has become fragile, in Germany, the US and elsewhere.
1
Transnational governance does not necessarily take away the rights of the people if enacted properly. Local issues can still be decided locally. Transnational issues can be solved properly if the good of all - earth, animals, humans - is considered. The challenges is in defining what is truly local and what promotes the greater good. Likewise, open borders do not necessarily make welfare an impossibility. The challenge is in defining what needs are inalienable and how to provide them in a way that promotes the appropriate productive participation in society. Balance and a broad view are required by all.
8
Utopian, unless you have some Angels in your closet that you can pull out and put in charge.
3
Agreed. Communism is probably the most logical way to share power. Problem is that it can't work because humans aren't logical. You may start of utopian but it always falls apart.
I see one factor that has not been addressed in this essay. Mr. Bittner writes that globalism is in direct conflict with social democracy. He writes that is takes power away from the people and places it into the hands of the elites.
What he ignores is that there used to be mechanism that prevented this concentration of power. It's called a progressive tax system.
Without a progressive tax system, the owners of companies reap the spoils of globalism. Companies make more money and those that own the companies receive the money. This effect is further exaggerated by taxing investment income at a much lower rate than labor.
Bittner targets 1989 as a turning point in the decline of social democracy. That is the period when Reagan/Thatcher economics was installed. That's when the banks took over the world.
Social democracy and globalism isn't causing problems for the rust belts of the world. It's a tax system that favors the rich and ownership of capital.
P.S. As far as the refugee crisis is concerned, right wing politics that starts wars, blows up nations and attempts to install puppet governments creates a lot of refugees.
151
He addressed the decline of the progressive tax system with the observation that "you cannot attempt to control capital at home while loosening the reins that prevent it from moving abroad." It is why even the Obama called for a reduction in corporate tax rates in the US. We had fallen behind the other advanced nations that have been reducing taxation of capital and so have been bleeding capital.
5
Bruce Rozenblit, your P.S. succinctly highlights the Neocon policies that created so many refugees to begin with. Why does Germany have to bear the brunt of those barbaric decisions? Why don't the U.S. and Britain, in particular, display greater conscience and accountability for the human suffering they caused?
4
A nice piece. However, the definition of democracy at work is a particular one. It leans heavily on ' will of the people as expressed in elections'for its argument. This is an indispensable element of democracy but not the whole story. It also rests on processes and communication of a public that can only be sustained if the demos effects the policies in a significant way. You are exactly right that the social democrats ' embrace of Davos cosmopolitanism is a crucial mistake. But then many at that time were also pleading to read that move for what it was: siding with the international class that served as the engine of global immiseration now that politics as the site of class struggle was supposedly overthrown. But no serious student of history or politics bought that Fukuyama line because it was clear that it was a victory for capital not democracy. And then Sachs, et al, walked in and shock privatised the place just to put a fine point on it.
Now it is deja vu all over again. Capitalism increasingly unfettered instrumentalizes states for the Davos elite . And this is the same story the left should have stuck to , denouncing the Soviets and Wall Street both precisely because they both are essentially anti-democratic systems of domination.
But while postmodernism, and by this I think you mean identity politics, challenged the longer left narrative, a big tent approach still remains to be developed in a way to overcome the contradictions you list. It can be.
20
"the Social Democrats’ woes are as simple to explain as they are difficult for the party to accept"
That is true of politics everywhere, certainly of our own two parties. The biggest challenge is not seeing what must be done, it is the agreeing on it.
Here, our author illustrates that problem by getting wrong the basic "simple" questions.
"Yet the truth is that you cannot have transnational governance without limiting the powers of national parliaments, thereby limiting the power of the people."
Sure you can, with real elections and real democracy in the transnational government. What you can't do is have a bureaucratic elite run the place call it democracy.
"Democracy has pushed back" Yes, and it always does push back against those who "knew better" and try to run things in disregard of democracy.
"The increasing wealth has been spread unfairly, and not just in terms of money: Risk of failure has been handed downward"
That is neo-liberal economics, an economic theory pushed by governments. There are other theories, and they can be elected too. They were before.
"you can’t promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time."
Sure you can, if you limit the welfare benefits in ways that prevent benefit chasing. That does not contradict any benefits.
"recognized this and pruned back Germany’s overgenerous welfare spending to make the economy more competitive"
That was neo-liberalism applied to welfare limitation -- "we'll just take it all."
38
Real elections and real democracy in a transnational government is an impossibility as it would instead just create a larger nation. But if the voters have different cultures and values and a cultural identity as separate "nations" in the traditional ethnic sense of the word, the minority nation will resist the forced marriage and it will fail. Could Germany and France form a single democratic nation based on one man, one vote with sovereignty to the majority for more than a handful of election cycles before the less populous participant took there exit? When the people have been given a Democratic choice in Europe, the tendency has long been to vote against the transnational European system.
2
KBronson -- It would form a larger state, not a larger nation.
The nations within could have defined autonomy, the larger state specific limitations, as is done now in Switzerland with its canton system.
The US is arguably more than one nation, and is supposed to acknowledge that with its Federal system, although that over the centuries has tended to submerge. Then again, over centuries, problems do change.
4
The US became a nation only after a bloody war in which the consent of the governed of the minority states and their effective sovereignty was erased. Only then was democracy approached by forceful imposition of somewhat uniform rules of suffrage. Its history before that leading up to secession illustrates my point. The differences were not that great and the state sovereignty considerable but they became irreconcilable under a single system of governance.
The author makes a haunting reference to a "degradation of democracy" that commenced in 1989. I think a "degradation of the Social Democratic will" would be a more apt description of our current predicament. Success bringing down the Wall was coincidental to the ascendancy in the US and Britain of trickle down economic policies, such as the breaking of the air traffic controllers and coal miners unions. These actions epitomized the undoing of longstanding norms promoting labor prosperity and a more equal distribution of income - two essentials of Social Democracy. The collapse of the Wall seemed to be hastened by the rigorous discipline of such trickle down policies, and provided post hoc justification for continuing them. To this day Social Democratic initiatives - such as the Affordable Care Act - are besieged by trickle down attacks. And the new US tax plan is the height of trickle down policy, yet Social Democratic arguments against redistributing wealth now to the 1% in hopes of yielding trickle down benefits in the future are discredited. Social Democrats need to regroup and reassert their essential positive values. They need to adapt to 21st century realities and summon the will to promote and enact policies that will make Social Democracy a force for good in the future.
58
When the competition collapsed, our own elite went hog-wild with their own power to take it all. They'd been held in check by the needs of competition.
They called that the fruits of victory, but it was only for them, only for the few.
24
You are confusing neo-liberalism with social democracy and they aren't the same thing. Neo-liberalism includes economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society -- all which are hallmarks of the Republican Party, not the Democrats.
1
And their Victory party has been going on for 30 years and we keep picking up the check just to keep the kitchen open.
2
The "convenient answer" (are you reading, Richard?) is the party's failure--in fact a global failure of all national parties--at two levels: first and most obvious, Germany's Social Democrats/America's Democrats failed dismally to forge a multi-national movement by building stronger ties to the emerging non-aligned states, the world's largest bloc of nations, by underestimating the energy and agenda of the 1955 Bandung Conference, which even Malcolm X referenced in his speeches. Poor, many new to self-governance, this bloc of nations seized democratic ideals, which Germany, Europe, and America thought were sufficient for a future fusion of shared growth.
This assumption made two big mistakes--or in Marx's and the author's terms of analysis, it missed the need to anticipate and resolve two major contradictions: one cultural, the other tied to political economy.
The first, the cultural contradiction, is still being worked out by Western nations. Many non-aligned nations were former European colonies and territories (the white man's burden). Towards them, the West exhibited a paternalism and bias, a fond nostalgia-tinted racism--a belief that the dependency of colonialism would remain and even be embraced in a formula of idyllic progress. (Southern Africa, the outlier, embraced its own form of "blood and soil.")
(Part 2 below.)
1
(Part 2)
In the second contradiction, capitalism focused not on markets but workers (exploited labor, as Marx predicted!). Western parties did not regulate the exploitation of both their home economies or those of under-developed nations. They had no political will to corral transnational balance sheets.
The West also under-estimated corruption, put too much hope in finance (IMF/World Bank), and did not check the myriad evils of corporate capitalism that generated wealth by generating waste (the ironclad truth of diminishing returns).
Mature Western economies turn a blind eye to new paths of growth. Western growth is slowing; safety nets and public provisions are fully vested. The former activism for social nets has been replaced by balance sheet activism. The contradictions of culture and political economy flipped.
Capitalism's unchecked flaws are framed as cultural. Displaced workers fuel fights over immigration, open borders, the struggle of mature economies with slow growth. Culture (ethnicity) frames and heightens fear and bigotry. The global right capitalizes on capitalism's conflicts by diverting focus from its inherent contradictions (China tries to avoid these), and shifts its blame narratives to populations of religion and color, drawing from a deep well of stereotypes and smears for Pavlovian political responses.
Democratic parties, fearful of restructuring capitalism, are left to ghosts and the mercy of xenophobic vanities.
Questions, discussion?
5
In this same paper there is an article on Sweden -- a country that is surviving the uprising of the dispossessed workers by making it a central priority that while workers may lose their current jobs to automation, they will not lose their employment to automation. Germany is suffering its defection of the working class to the right because they saw how the State cares more about bankers, and in the case of Germany, takes in a million refugees while letting their rust belt continue to rust (Note: it makes no economic or environmental sense to reopen the coal mines of the Ruhrgebiet.) The answer, in my opinion, is more state intervention and confrontation with the capitalists, not less. We can and should tax the bankers and the wealth of the rich to provide a decent living for all based on the new wealth that automation is creating. At present, this is only creating new wealth for the elite that own the machines. That is what needs to change. When it changes most workers will accept that it is OK to lose a job to 'progress', as long as there is a job to move to, even when that job is a 'government job' that makes the community a better place to live in.
169
@ jason ithaca ny - jason I appreciate your comment but must note that Sweden took in more asylum seekers per 100,000 population than did Germany although perhaps the important part of your sentence is the part about letting the German rust belt continue to rust. Have to check also on that line about re-opening coal mines.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Dual citizen US SE
2
The key issue, Larry, is the economic insecurity being suffered by those in the German rust belt. Make those displaced economically secure and I suspect that much of the animus against immigrants will dissipate.
Outstanding comment.
I like your formulation of being guaranteed a job, even if it is not your current job.
The easy answer to Jochen’s question is that the party got old – not all of the people, as German Social Democrats still embrace the middle-aged and young, as well, but the party itself. A lot like the Tories, Liberals and Labour in Blighty and Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. This is a general phenomenon throughout the West. We’re all in a transitional state between 20th Century verities that no longer really apply and new, 21st Century priorities that seek to more forthrightly address the challenges that have emerged. The old parties try to bend emerging challenges into old talking-points and worldviews … and they’re failing, rather miserably. But they’re beginning to redefine themselves; and we don’t yet know whether or not they’ll be successful – as defined by their electoral survival – or even what they’ll look like when fully-evolved to these new set-points.
I’d like to focus on the impact to America of this general phenomenon, but Germany isn’t Cameroon and certainly is important enough to the strategic viability of Europe to remain strictly on-topic.
The problem with Germany, other than aging traditional parties and verities far less relevant than they were when a shattered nation was seeking to come back from the shattering, may be the parliamentary form of government that usually requires formal coalitions to effectively govern.
16
The coalition parties, in this increasingly more ideologically polarized West, are fast making that process near-impossible because of the difference in their worldviews. We may be seeing the Italianization of all major West European nations, with governments unable to function and evolve their governance for their inability to stabilize for the necessary lifespans.
And, so, we come back to America despite the resolve to stay with Germany. Ours is a basically unique form of government, but one that affords a stability that other democracies always lacked whenever there was great variety in ideological convictions. We form our real coalitions during political primary fights, not really in legislative chambers, we tolerate fewer parties and, as a consequence, our legislatures can be more effective when even bare majorities dominate them. We moved forward under undivided Democratic government 2009-2010, even with much of the country vehemently opposed to the direction. We are moving forward again under undivided Republican government, even though much of the country is vehemently opposed to the direction.
Germany, indeed all of Europe, might profitably look at the architecture of their governance. What also could benefit Germany, as well as all Western nations, including us, is for major parties to develop far more expansive centers, where compromise is possible at less divisive levels of confrontation.
12
Very apt.
The operational "grass roots" uniqueness of the American structure of government needs to be noted more often.
Here, politics originate at the local level and move up the ladder vetted at every stage by political considerations, contradictions and acrimony.
While our system can result in wide swings in power between left and right, and even a bit of demagoguery, the frequency of elections forces politicians to be attuned to and respond to the sensibilities of their constituencies.
The recent Virginia and Alabama elections suggest that the 2018 Congressional elections will likely to result in a significant adjustment of the dynamic on Capitol Hill as well as in State Legislatures around the country.
8
The recent Virginia and Alabama elections remind us that the politicians don't actually listen very well as "politics originate at the local level and move up."
They hear what they are paid to hear, or want to hear. Sometimes that gets them a smack down. Sometimes they blame that on the voters and just keep on doing the same thing that got smacked down.
They expect the other guy will get smacked next time. Maybe. But refusing to hear the problem that got smacked down is not a likely way to ensure that.
8
Spot on, Mr. Bittner. Your thesis about traditional labor parties, I think, could be transposed to the current configuration of nation states as well. The independence drives in Catalonia and Scotland demonstrate strong support for the notion that the current national governments do not adequately address regional interests either at home or on the global scale. It is worth noting also that in both Catalonia and Scotland there is strong support for the EU. It seems that parties are not the only political structures due for reformation.
50
Although neither Catalonia nor Scotland received reciprocal support from the EU. In fact they were explicitly discouraged by Brussels, highlighting a major challenge facing/posed by these newer nationalisms.
The Scotlands believe their future lies in "glocal EU" and the nation state, while the EU is set in the opposite direction, towards limiting the power (& number?) of individual members (it's easy to imagine two-tier Europe effectively excluding countries like Poland & its aggressive nationalism, and hard to see how the EU can reconcile itself to even the more benign forms being argued by Catalonia et al.)
I'm English and instinctively opposed to nationalism, but in a distinctly new form I could yet be persuaded of its virtue. If Scotland and Catalonia can successfully create the conditions for political innovation in Europe they could show us a way of managing the tension between the welfare state, democracy and global labour and capital, and make robust social-democratic politics possible.
1