We need to be bolder in attacking the ideology of the right.

In a brilliant piece entitled ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?’, published in the New York Review of Books this month, the British historian Tony Judt of New York University argues that the main shortcoming of the democratic left in the US and in Europe is a lack of language – a language with which to praise and lay claim to past achievements of social-democratic movements; to confront and attack the right’s universalist ambition to equate the ‘good’ with what is economically efficient; and to stand up, be counted and assert alternative collective values. In short, we should be much angrier than we are.

Most citizens of modern western economies, from all walks of life, today believe that inflation rates of above 2 to 3 per cent are ‘bad’, that public spending is a recipe for future disaster, and that ‘private’ is better than ‘public’ – even if only because ‘public’ is even worse than ‘private’. None of this comes anywhere near the facts, or has any scientific or historical grounding: in fact, ever since monetarism took over, with its anti-inflation obsession, the majority of people have been worse off. Take your pick of any set of income distribution statistics. It is the public, not the private, sector that creates more jobs in many western economies. The profit motive has had nothing good to offer to the delivery of public services: the state sells its assets cheap, and the public end up paying more for the services they need, and having to compensate for badly-run services by oligopolies or regional monopolies that have no incentive to provide a top-level service.

In the face of such blatant right-wing ideological hegemony it is not enough to talk about ‘building bridges’, or ‘demand-led perspectives’, or a ‘better, fairer and more open world’. To be sure, all these ideas, and the sophisticated thoughts associated with them, are perfectly valid; they contain much needed innovative and challenging ideas. Thinking about the ‘Good Society’ and what we mean by it is a paramount task.

But we also need to find a clear voice with which to tackle the ‘economism’ of the right head-on. There is no shortage of resources to draw for this. For example, in ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (1930), Keynes, envisaging the world a hundred years hence, wrote: ‘We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues … The love of money as possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.’

We need specific answers on the question of how to defend social welfare states in a global economy that is ruled by the relentless dictates of capital mobility and international competition. We need to build alliances between trade unions and employers in industrial sectors, to face up to the money-managers that harm both. We have to win the battle over public debt and expansionary economic policy in the next few years. But we will not have the ideological space to do so – and thus to eventually approximate to Keynes’s idea of a ‘good society’ – unless we find our voice, assertively, aggressively and decidedly.

Tony Judt argues that ‘if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear’. What he means by this, in an analogous argument to Judith Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’, is that our first task as social democrats is to minimise the fall-out that has resulted from conservative hegemony. Just as constitutional democracy is flawed but is still our best defence against abuse by the powerful, so social democracy as we know it may well be flawed but it is still our best ticket to a better future. For now, let’s defend its achievements, work with it, and stand up for its principles. Facing up to conservative ideological hegemony is not done by taking it upon ourselves to solve all the problems of the world before we have any right to raise our voice. And it is not done by listing the facts and data that already back our case for anyone who so wishes to see. Neither is it done by adopting a new language of bright-eyed optimism. It is done by knowing and teaching history, arguing about principle and, eventually, delivering results again.

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