The great forgetting: The past, present and future of Social Democracy and the Welfare State

Introduction

Today, more Americans are unhappy than in any previous era for which we have measures. Americans, and increasingly the British, are much more unequal than they have been for eight decades. Millions have lost their homes, their jobs, their health, and their futures. Today, Americans are unhappier than their European counterparts who are supposed to be ‘suffering’ from the burdens of excessive government regulation and high taxation. Europeans do not agree. They have the best health systems in the world, affordable and decent public housing, efficient and inexpensive mass transit, pension systems that preserve a decent standard of living in retirement, job protection, and retraining programs for those who are displaced by economies in transition. When Americans wonder why they do not have these same benefits, they are told the price is too high: intrusive government, over-regulation, high taxes, and the loss of individual liberty.

What Americans are not told, and what they have forgotten, is that it does not have to be this way. The Great Recession that began in 2008 and which still lingers into 2014, is the direct result of neo-liberal policies which preached deregulation, privatization, low taxes, and free trade, transforming everything from finance and banking to energy, education, housing, defense, and even welfare programs, into a market where profits could be made. George Bush famously wanted to privatize Social Security and the penal system of the state of Texas. The thesis of neo-liberalism was elegant and simple: markets are efficient, so why not privatize and deregulate everything. Competition in the private sector would eliminate the least efficient producers and providers. It would also save us from bloated and inefficient governments. Many on both sides of the Atlantic pressed – and still press – this efficient-market thesis. When it is objected that economic recession and collapse were the direct result of the deregulation of the financial markets, they reply that it was excessive government regulation that caused the Great Recession. Their basic message is to keep the government out of human affairs and allow the rationality of the market to solve all our social and economic problems.

This thesis has been preached before, always with the usual outcome: governments retreating from the kinds of responsibilities that people have a right to expect. Deregulation in the 1920s helped lead to the Great Depression, destabilizing virtually all the economies in the West, and leading to the inevitable conclusion that societies putting the right to private accumulation ahead of the well-being of the vast majority of a population, would experience social polarization and ideological ugliness. In the case of the 1920s, a decade peculiarly like our own, the results were fascism, and soon national socialism and world war. Then, as today, the US in particular achieved the kind of social inequality and super-concentration of wealth that inevitably fueled market speculation, produced a bubble, and eventually exploded in a market crash. Then as today, deregulation was preached as the way to create a great engine of growth. And then as today, too many people were excluded from the goods that growth was supposed to create.

Having forgotten all these lessons, and the kind of social contract that emerged after World War II to help prevent future catastrophes, we are reliving the past once again. We still have preachers in both UK and the US who believe that the market economy is a kind of rational engine that cannot be wrong. These true believers defend the values of materialism and private gain as though they are going to benefit many if not all of us. Selfishness is raised to the level of virtue, as though self-gain for some is the only way for the rest of us to prosper. Thus, it is possible to advocate selfishness and to see society as a kind of super-efficient machine; and to assume that those of us who accumulate wealth must have the kinds of skills that make our society competitive, create wealth, and ultimately generate jobs. In this cosmos all planning is rejected as a kind of irrational deviation because governments cannot and should not do what the market does best.

What is absent from this calculus of self-interest is what is happening to many and perhaps most of us. The unleashing of the mortgage market, and the failure to adequately regulate it, resulted in the loss of almost three million homes in the US in the year 2010 alone. Millions more homes have been lost since and will continue to be lost. The unleashing of investment banks and the refusal, or inability, of the Obama administration, and previously the Bush administration, to rein in the kind of bets that banks make with other people’s money have led to the kind of rampant speculation that once produced the Great Depression, and recently the Great Recession. The results have led to exactly what the great purveyors of the free market say they are against: governments having to intervene into the market once again – in traditional Keynesian fashion – because the market has proved to be anything but rational. To date, and still counting, the American and British governments combined have had to bail out a number of financial institutions because they are ‘too big to fail’. The same bankers who have demonstrated such contempt for people who have not accumulated wealth now have had to stand in line to lobby the governments, and the taxpayer, for bailout funds. Thus, banks are bailed out while everybody else has to pay the bills for bankers’ failed speculations.

To be sure we cannot afford to continue living like this. We cannot continue to support the upper 1 percent, which today in America controls more than 42 percent of residual American financial wealth. The UK has not quite reached this level of wealth concentration, but it has severely compromised the kind of social contract that emerged in Britain after World War II: today the UK stands almost bankrupted by its own financial elite with the complicity of many of its politicians.

Many Americans believed that they had a kind of populist president when they elected Barack Obama: he would stand up for the majority and help protect their health, homes, and jobs. Instead, they have been severely disappointed by a president who has not fought for them, but who has sought as an ally the same bankers on Wall Street that helped to produce the crisis we are in today. Today millions are unemployed. Though the official rate of unemployment stands roughly at 6.5 percent, many economists claim the real figure is closer to 17 percent. This is because workers of all kinds in America, and in the UK, have lost their only allies: governments which used to be responsive to them, and labor unions which almost uniquely stood up for their interests. In both countries, political parties have become more responsive to big money, while labor unions have been under systematic assault since the 1980s. The result – the loss of jobs, of homes, and the ongoing destruction of families, particularly in the US – has led to the predicament we are all in today.

To some extent George Orwell’s 1984 has come alive in our contemporary world, not in some faraway Stalinist incubus, but right here in the heartland of democracy. We are living today with double-think to the extent that many of the victims of today’s social inequality, long fed on a diet of celebrities, fantasies, and the mythology that we are all better off if we are on our own, have begun to think that the super-rich really deserve the great wealth and power they have concentrated in their own hands. Social Darwinism has once again come back to haunt us.

The British have at least preserved their National Health Service. But Americans have taken another route, loudly acclaimed by politicians, but in reality another form of self-deception. Prior to the health-care reform of President Barack Obama, there were more than forty-one million Americans without health insurance. Now, in theory, there are almost none who are not covered by one form of health care or another. But everything depends on how the accounting is done. We have learned to be suspicious of reform legislation that even the health insurance companies have favored, and with good reason. That is because health reform in America, which mandates that everybody must take out health insurance, actually will add, potentially, some forty-one million clients for the insurance industry. This partially explains why health insurance companies fought desperately against the public option, characterizing it as ‘unfair’ to them. But it would have been more than fair for everybody else. It would have provided universal health care that was affordable by creating a non-profit health-care system that put the health of the population ahead of the profit of shareholders. The public generally understood this and many, if not most, were for the public option. But government, under pressure from the health-care industry, decided to make concessions to the health industry, compromising on decent and affordable health care for the nation.

The result is that today Americans pay twice as much for health care as most European countries, and they get far less for their money. Those Americans who genuinely cannot afford insurance will have to pass a means test to be eligible for government Medicaid, while many others will be forced to pay premiums they cannot afford, or be out of pocket to cover deductibles they cannot easily pay.

The result of the ideology of the efficient market is that more Americans are out of work than have been in decades, or working in jobs for which they are over-qualified, unable to retire if they have reached what used to be called retirement age, fearful that their children will have less than they do. Many Americans fear that the government(s) they have elected are not going to be there to help them get jobs, or to get the health care they need and want. More and more Americans, and citizens of the UK, are coming to know that they are on their own, even when they say they want more government, not less: and no matter how loudly they protest, they are always told they do not really want what they say they want. Citizens of the US and the UK are told they are better off doing things on their own; they can only be free if they get the government off their backs.

But Americans do not agree, and there are more of them now who express their unhappiness than before. They want better and more affordable health care. They want better pensions and a higher standard of living in retirement than they now are getting from Social Security. They want day care, longer vacations, more affordable housing, dental and eye care included in health care, job training – or retraining – and they want their jobs protected much more than they are today. But when they are told that the social democracies and welfare states in Europe already have all these benefits and more, Americans, long suffering from media that are indifferent to many of them, say that Europeans are socialists who prefer giveaways to working hard: which explains why, they will say, Europeans are less productive and less efficient. They have given up the engines of growth that depend on competition because they prefer social security and well-being!

Which is precisely the point! Europeans prefer their collective well-being to the hypothetical utopia of free market growth: and they are much happier for it. And Europeans also know that it is a myth that America is more productive or more efficient: in 2008, a number of European countries caught up with America in per capita GDP. But Europeans know they have to modify their societies, they have to retire at an older age, they cannot sustain the kind of retirement income they now receive, and they will have to find a way to meet the growing social obligations which are the result of an aging population. Still, Europeans refuse to give up their social democracies, and the states which protect people from cradle to grave, which provide universal social protection, and which guarantee that everybody will be protected because of a social contract which embraces all of them. The alternative is to compete for the right of private accumulation, to not insist on the right to have a decent job, and to abandon a society based on social solidarity and shared responsibility which entails collective effort for a common good.

Once upon a time liberals too believed in the welfare state, in the programs of the New Deal which spent money to train and educate people and to develop jobs that put them back to work: because liberals knew that the social programs of Roosevelt and later of President Johnson worked. Liberal Americans believed that government had an obligation to help people when they could not help themselves.

But today we hear another message, which also reflects the loss of historical memory and a kind of collective amnesia. Tax reductions for the rich, we are told in countless political propaganda and media as well, will create jobs for the rest of us. And this we hear when taxes on the rich are lower than ever before, though this has hardly generated jobs. It has, on the contrary, helped concentrate wealth to the point of obscenity. Moreover, tax reductions must be paid for by somebody. That is because governments will not disappear, they do not shrink even when conservative governments are in power. So who pays for tax reductions for the rich? The middle class and those who can afford it least: after all, governments must still raise revenues. But we now know that tax breaks for the top 1 percent will not generate jobs, especially during a period of recession when there is less incentive to invest; and we also know that those companies and individuals who do invest will often do so abroad, which will hardly generate jobs at home.

At the same time we know that Europe has had its own love affair with the free market. The French government participated in this frenzy, with its privatization plans. But such ideas – Nicolas Sarkozy hoped to sack the French system of shared responsibility and collective well-being, in the name of the modernization of France – were rejected at the polls, and the installation of a socialist president, François Hollande, followed. In England it was much the same: Tony Blair and New Labour were committed to the private sector and the London financial markets. But none of this invigorated the UK; on the contrary, a banking collapse occurred there with almost as much vehemence as in the US.

The banking collapse in Europe, especially in the southern periphery – and the virtual national bankruptcies which have threatened the same periphery – has led to yet another turnaround by governments, central banks, and even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as they have reversed themselves in order to dispense public money to avert the kind of disaster not seen since 1929. Even so, the European Central Bank (ECB) has rejected John Maynard Keynes and the massive use of public monies to do the kinds of things that government used to do for decades following World War II: spending during slumps.

And in countries which have resorted to ‘spending’ as the UK did in bailing out some of its banks, this was at best a tactical retreat rather than a genuine commitment to social democracy, or even the welfare state. Even the Scandinavian social democracies, which have scaled back on benefits as their populations have aged, have lost some of their self-confidence, though much of the social democratic structure still remains. On the other hand, the collapse of the banking systems and the Great Recession in Anglo-America have deflated confidence in the Anglo-American model. Unfortunately, this has not led to an intellectual revolution to reinvigorate the essence of social democracy. Despite the meltdown in Anglo-America following massive deregulation and privatization, governments are not committed to intervene on the public’s behalf using public resources any more than they were before.

But there is an even larger problem than this: the Left, which articulated the programs that stabilized Europe after 1945, and which built viable, fair societies that embraced universal well-being and defined shared goals and ways of achieving them, that insisted on universal inclusion and collective responsibility, and that articulated social collectivism, has now lost its voice.

This was an outcome of 1989: the evisceration of the Left gave license to the Right everywhere because it no longer had to cover its flank. The alternative, the notion that the future could be transformative, no longer had to be faced by the political Right. The way was open to tout the ideology of the free market, which was celebrated as the end of history. The free market, unhindered competition, an economy unshackled by the state, the rich unburdened by taxes, were now to create a global cornucopia in which corporations would produce the goods, while the rest of us would benefit from the new wealth and jobs they were creating. Except that all this failed, and it has left many of us with new burdens but no new remedies.

What we are left with are social, cultural, and economic dead ends, sustained recession, political division, and moral collapse, especially in the way that we discuss politics. And that is why today we must not only rethink what we want the state to do – and to be – but also insist that the proper role of the state should frame our entire political agenda. The fact that nobody is seriously rethinking this agenda – it is quite the reverse in the US and in the UK, where rhetoric and ideology have overtaken good sense and fairness – and that conservatives continue to insist on shackling the state while unburdening the rich even further, is testament to how politically bankrupt our modern era has become. We live in an age when economic crisis is actually caused by politicians who want to remove as many obstacles as possible to the realization of greed, though this is couched in ideological language that reassures us that the excess of the few will benefit the vast majority of us.

Today there are too few voices reminding us of what we have forgotten: that only government can help us and that we can depend only on it. In the US the Depression was ended only with massive government spending, and also because government invested directly in people. This time around government has invested in banks, or financial institutions, without directly creating jobs and putting money in the hands of people who need it the most. The US has rescued Wall Street, and the UK has rescued the City, England’s Wall Street: but both countries have neglected Main Street and the people who live there.

There are ample grounds today for the Left to rediscover its voice. Growing inequalities are gnawing away at the fabric of democracy; when people are told that inequality is good for everybody because it puts more money in the hands of job creators, they tend to disbelieve such rhetoric. Where, they wonder, are the jobs? How will a few more billionaires restore their homes? How will enlarging the military budget while shrinking Medicare improve their health? Anglo-Americans today feel increasingly shut out by elites, who are less and less accountable to them. Today, economic exploitation at home and abroad has crept insidiously into the arteries of commerce: Americans and the British feel that they have been deserted by their governments. And everywhere in Anglo-America, political success is defined by money and by those who use it for private advantage. There is something amiss with this system, but there are no forthcoming answers: it is not enough to identify the weaknesses, the omissions, and the inequities.

But the Left, which has historically offered a way out from unprincipled – or undemocratic – capitalism, cannot serve the same tired ideological diet of the past. It cannot rehearse the same rhetorical battles that produced a kind of ideological Cold War that ended only in its bankruptcy. There are already signs that the open democratic society, which has been so ardently defended in the past, is being challenged and disrupted by crises ranging from global warming, to job dislocation, to large-scale immigration, to challenging demographics, and even modern class struggle. The result is that we will all need the state more than ever to protect us against these crises. To secure protection, many will be ready to sacrifice their liberties for greater security. And that is why our choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two kinds of state: the authoritarian state to protect us against all the threats of modernity, at the expense of freedom; and the democratic state, which will make us more secure by making us more equal, and protect us by preserving our jobs, our health, our homes, and the kind of social entitlements which enable us to live better and to trust each other on the basis of shared values and goals.¹

Chapter outline of the book

Chapter 1 begins with the reaffirmation that post-2008 Anglo-America has seen the greatest concentration of wealth since the Depression, some nine decades earlier. This is no accident, but the result of political policies adopted since the 1970s: the deregulation of financial markets, taxation favoring the rich, and privatization. The result is that Americans and the British are now among the least happy of nations because of social and economic inequality. Chapter 1 also challenges the now dominant ideology that wealth ‘creators’ deserve their wealth. And it reveals that Anglo-Americans want more help from their governments, not less, even if that means more regulation.

Chapter 2 reviews the thought of classical liberals like Adam Smith, democratic theorists like Alexis De Tocqueville and Matthew Arnold, and early social democrats like John Stuart Mill and Beatrice Webb. What they all shared in common was the belief that democracy and social equality must be combined. Each was convinced that human happiness, and the happiness of nations, depended on the building of community, mutual regard, and common purpose, and that this was possible only if members of society lived as ‘equals’ and embraced social solidarity.

The purpose of Chapter 3 is to outline the reasons for the development of and need for social democracy and the welfare state. In the aftermath of the Depression, Scandinavian social democracies, continental European welfare states, and Anglo-American liberal welfare systems had in common the desire to manage the economy to provide universal social protection and in some cases to promote social solidarity. The consensus in much of Europe and America at that time was that the free market had failed and that, following John Maynard Keynes’ insight, capitalism and liberalism (welfarism) had necessarily to coexist. The state was now needed more than ever to secure employment, to pursue egalitarian aims, to protect people’s health, and to help those who had lost everything through no fault of their own.

Chapter 4 details the reasons for the derailing of the welfare state. The ideological challenge was led by Milton Friedman. He believed that the state should be auctioned off and there should be no limits to the free market, which, he argued, was not responsible for the creation of social inequalities. His ideas about the free market were institutionalized by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, both of whom dismantled the welfare state, or as much of it as possible. Chapter 4 challenges Friedman’s ideology. The free market never was ‘free’, but it did create enormous social inequalities because of deregulation, privatization, and the abdication of the state from comprehensive commitments to social protection. The result was not greater freedom or the right to choose, but deindustrialization, unsustainable inequality, the shrinking of the welfare state, and the Great Recession of 2008, all of which occurred to excess in Anglo-America. Chapter 4 also explains that the new global architecture that emerged in the 1970s, entailing the collapse of Bretton Woods and fixed exchange rates, the unleashing of capital and the ending of capital exchange controls, was a system ideally suited to benefit corporate elites, often at the expense of everybody else.

Chapter 5 is about the collapse of the Grand Narrative of the Left in the 1980s and 1990s, and how this led to the ‘great forgetting’ in Anglo-America, and to a lesser extent in continental European social democracies and welfare states as well. This chapter studies how and why the principles and values of social democracies were compromised unnecessarily as big business in Anglo-America abandoned the welfare state. Chapter 5 also examines Sweden and Germany and how and why each made unnecessary concessions to the neo-liberal, deregulating, privatizing ideology of Anglo-America, though both still defended, in principle, generous social benefits. This chapter concludes by arguing that when liberal Democrats in the US and New Labour in the UK increasingly abandoned progressive tax structures, high quality public education, jobs programs and social benefits for workers and the middle class, while passively indulging the deregulation of the financial industry, they helped to produce unprecedented social inequality, inadvertently but inevitably setting off the Great Recession.

Chapter 6 argues that ‘forgetting’ the past success of social democracy has been costly. Restraining the government but not the market has helped lead to the catastrophe of the Great Recession and its lingering effects. This chapter asserts that there are many things the state does well that the market cannot do. It challenges the rhetoric of the Right that corporate interest equates with public interest, and that the poor and the middle class are better off when the government spends less (on them) while continuing tax breaks for the affluent. It states that the governments of neo-liberal Anglo-America have built nothing less than communism for the rich: bailing out wealthy banks while standing by as families who bought artificially overpriced houses are evicted. Chapter 6 concludes that much of the new wealth in Anglo-America goes straight to the top, that social democratic countries are no less efficient than Anglo-America despite much greater social benefits, and that much of the new growth is actually deceptive because it takes place in the speculative world of high finance, not in the real economy where most of us live.

Chapter 7 argues that globalization does not explain unemployment in Anglo-America; nor is globalization the cause of inequality in either the US or the UK. Nor does globalization mean the end of social democracy and the welfare state as we have known them. Nor have American or British workers lost their jobs to workers in China or Vietnam or anywhere else. On the contrary, as noted in Chapter 7, American and British workers have not been competing with workers in Asia, but rather with their former – and current – employers. In the name of the so-called free market, and by discrediting John Maynard Keynes, the latter have pursued the freedom to avoid taxes, to ignore trade unions, and to bypass environmental standards, by shifting production abroad while keeping domestic markets open for their imports. Chapter 7 points out that corporate and political elites could easily reverse adverse trends if they wanted to create a more competitive – not to mention fairer – Anglo-America by investing more in research at home, and by supporting renewable energy and world-class education. This chapter concludes by noting that a new moral compass is needed to provide a reminder that the purpose of economy is to serve the needs of everybody.

Chapter 8 compares Anglo-America’s social model directly to the European social model of the welfare and social democratic states of continental Europe. It makes the case that even with the high unemployment rates of the EU, most of Europe is still as economically efficient as the US and the UK, and much more equal. The US, with far greater inequality, is growing no faster than much of Europe. America also has a high unemployment rate, much higher than it generally acknowledges. In conclusion, Chapter 8 insists that it is not the European social model that is limiting economic growth, or contributing to rising debt, or hindering investment and innovation, or causing high unemployment, but the ECB and the Maastricht Accords, which have preached and mandated austerity. This has led to slower growth, higher unemployment, lower state revenues, and even the threat of deflation: it is the European banking elites that have caused the current crisis, not the European social model.

Notes

1  See Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 9.

1

Where are we today? And how happy are we now that we are here?

Today we live in an age of doubt and suspicion of the state; many prefer the ‘market’ and call that liberty. We live in an age of uncertainty, an age of bankrupt cities, endemic unemployment and underemployment, an age of failing and closing schools, an age of the underinsured and uninsured, of massive foreclosures, of personal and business bankruptcies, of broken highways and collapsing bridges, of gross inequality and failed health systems. These social pathologies are pervasive and threaten to become enduring. More than ever, uncertainty reigns over our politics, our economy, our finances, and even our personal health. We are fighting invisible wars that we try not to think about and that are fought by people we rarely if ever meet. Yet we are hardly able to discuss what is happening to us; we cannot even imagine the alternatives, for they too have become invisible. We live unaware that we did not always live like this, that life in the present is not life eternal, and that most of what we have today dates only from the 1980s: the decade when incessant materialism, the privatization of industry, and the spread of social inequalities between rich and poor became endemic.¹

History did not end: it was forgotten

Because we have forgotten the past we can no longer imagine the future; if we do, we do not see life improving. The last century, even the recent past, is largely invisible; it exists without context, memorialized in fragments in museums, theme parks, and heritage sites. It is enshrined in official memory as nostalgic triumphalism, such as Francis Fukuyama’s infamous declaration praising the end of history and the victory of Western idealism and liberal democracy. The twentieth century as a whole is dismissed as a chamber of horrors – from world wars to Auschwitz, from the slaughter of Armenians to the genocide in Bosnia – not to be forgotten because of its crimes and its victims; we prefer to think that was then, and this is now; we want to believe that we are better than that past which we prefer to inter in official remembrance. We want to think that we will be better yet. Worse still, says Tony Judt, we encourage citizens and students to see the past – and its lessons – through the particular of their own suffering (or that of their ancestors).² We no longer have a shared understanding of the past, or even a common narrative that we can call the past. Instead, we fragment history into particular ethnicities defined by victimhood. The result is that past and present become inverted; rather than the past helping to explain how we got here, we parse out that piece of the past we wish to preserve as a record of suffering, or as a memory piece helping us to commemorate something in the present. We memorialize, but we do not remember.

What we end up with is the impression that the world of today has no provenance in the past, that modernity is its own creation. Modernization and globalization help that illusion along by wiping out many remnants of the past in the name of progress. Instead of tradition, which was vaunted by the generation of my grandparents, and was still observed – making it possible not only to have a past but also to continue a shared and common narrative which we could embrace through observance and remembrance – we have disconnected fragments of a past whose meaning is increasingly lost to us. Moreover, what has been true of individuals is also true of nations and societies.

Francis Fukuyama’s narrative proclaiming the end of history in The End of History and the Last Man had an ironic twist to it. For just as he proclaimed the end of the past, and heralded the outcome of the victory of the ‘West’, many people were forgetting the lessons of the past whose end he was now proclaiming. To be sure, some things needed to end: Communism, in its Stalinist and Maoist versions and the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe, along with the incredible heaviness of being that they created. What needed to end also was the illusion that these regimes had in any sense fulfilled the utopian visions that had accompanied their birth. What had once been heralded as paradise had long ago sunk into the abyss of the gulag: the invasion of Hungary in 1956, the repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968; and before that the show trials, the infamy of the disappeared. And yet, precisely because of the disillusionment which preceded the collapse of the Soviet regime, and the ideological baggage that went with it, it was also forgotten that there had been good reasons for dreaming about utopia: revolution had been bred by hope and the perpetual desire to transform earlier regimes into imagined communities of publicly shared good.

Unfortunately, and almost imperceptibly, other things were compromised in 1989, brought down by the memories of the gulag and the demons of history: the Left, socialism, even social democracy, at least in the US and UK, were tainted by their association with the authoritarian regimes in the East. The very idea of utopia seemed to vanish from historical memory, and with it vanished the memory of why so many had wrestled with the idea of achieving social and political harmony in a utopianized future. Two hundred years of experimentation in creating the good society based on a defined collective purpose and a collective social good as the foundation of human happiness, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, disappeared from public consciousness.

The implication of the end of history, the glib surmise of Fukuyama, was that there had been two fundamental choices: either we could have liberty, or we could have equality. We could not have both. Put another way, we had to choose between either the state or the market. This was a reaction to the imperious authoritarian regimes of the East, and it was also a reaction to the welfare states in the West, especially the social democracies of Scandinavia. Fukuyama’s assumption that liberal democracy was the final end of history, and therefore there was no need to define our common social purposes, was also a kind of endism and utopianism.³

What Fukuyama neglected to say, or refused to believe,