Both Andrew Norton and John Quiggin, though from rather different perspectives, have made the case that far from being a (neo)liberal government, Howard’s governing practice, if not his rhetoric, is social democracy with a conservative twinge. In Andrew Norton’s case, he’s somewhat critical of Howard’s redistributive spending as an actual liberal, but also (I think it’s fair to say) tends to bolster the case made on the basis of research like that of Ann Harding of NATSEM that Howard hasn’t governed just for the rich. This is a defence Howard himself has made. John Quiggin, by contrast, is critical of Howard’s misdirection of the spending, and of the Government’s fiscal and (lack of) macroeconomic policy generally.
It’s an interesting point, particularly since I spent part of the weekend reading Columbia political scientist Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Berman, at one level, is arguing there’s been some severe telescoping involved in the narrative of the end of history which sees the Twentieth Century as a battle between Marxism and fascism on one hand and liberalism on the other. What’s ignored, she suggests, is that liberalism and Marxism were both exhausted ideologically at the start of the century, and that social democracy and fascism arose, almost dialectically, to supplant them. At the level of the battle of ideas, the post-war decades were dominated by social democratic thinking, even if ostensibly conservative or Christian Democrat parties were actually governing. On the other hand, she contends (influenced here by Karl Polanyi) that the resurgence of liberalism will itself lead to a reaction, and she believes that a more libertarian and less statist social democracy will arise (the sort of thing I’ve long been arguing for, incidentally). It’s an interesting argument, and she makes both the historical case and the case for seeing social democracy as a force in its own right (rather than some sort of inbetween position) well.
Let’s throw Kevin Rudd into the mix.
There’s been a fair bit of attention paid recently to whether Rudd got Hayek right in his recent articles for The Monthly. It may well be that it was unfortunate, as Jason Soon argued, that he based his reading on David McKnight’s book Beyond Left and Right, which has previously attracted some criticism here at LP. In some ways, this is an interesting debate, but in others, it’s not central to Rudd’s actual position. Politicians aren’t really “public intellectuals”. If Rudd was indeed pouring through Hayek’s tomes and databases of Hayekian scholarship, he wouldn’t be doing the job he’s paid to do. What’s more interesting politically is the position Rudd stakes out.
In her argument about the distinctiveness of social democracy, Berman contends that social democracy is a distinctly modernist ideology. That is to say – unlike both fascism and Marxism – it doesn’t involve a violent movement towards an end point where both civil society and politics per se are elided by a utopian social stasis. Such utopias, as those who know their history of the Long Twentieth Century will surely agree, are in fact violent and exclusivist dystopias. Rather, social democracy seeks to revive and construct community and sociability continually while embedding markets as modes of production and distribution as epiphenomenal to social goals rather than as the goal of a Liberal utopia. There are other values which can be collectively enunciated, she argues, and their formation and stimulation is as much an exercise of freedom as the sorts of freedoms that are expressed in market transactions. She is keenly aware of the contradictions that do arise between liberal rights and economic liberalism, as well as those which arise between private goods and the social good.
It’s really an expression of the fact that social democracy is a carrier of Enlightenment rationality, but of that aspect which does not seek to impose an end state, but rather to promote rational and public deliberation. That also involves an anti-foundationalist aspect which couldn’t be further from Tony Blair style communitarian authoritarianism on one hand or the theocratic dreaming of latter day anti-secular saints on the other. Freedom in the choice of values and projects then, is best expressed through a negotiation of individual values rather than the imposition of some authoritative value set. Similarly, social goals can best be met through mechanisms which both harness the innovation and dynamism which markets can stimulate but which remember that markets are made for society not the converse.
So, I’d argue for a social democracy which exemplifies the libertarian and egalitarian aspects of Enlightenment thought, but which does so through constant negotiation and movement rather than through some sort of vision of a telos, whose imposition will always be violent in one way or another.
Those last two paragraphs are really my view on social democracy, using Berman’s argument as a jumping off point. It’s intriguing to note some commonality, though, in Rudd’s thinking:
Neo-liberals speak of the self-regarding values of security, liberty and property. To these, social democrats would add the other-regarding values of equity, solidarity and sustainability. For social democrats, these additional values are seen as mutually reinforcing because the allocation of resources in pursuit of equity (particularly through education), solidarity and sustainability assist in creating the human, social and environmental capital necessary to make a market economy function effectively.
Working within a comprehensive social-democratic framework of self-regarding and other-regarding values gives social democrats a rich policy terrain in which to define a role for the state. This concept of the state had its origins in the view that markets are designed for human beings, not vice versa, and this remains the fundamental premise that separates social democrats from neo-liberals.
Where Rudd needs to go further, in my view, is through a greater emphasis of both aspects of the democracy in social democracy that Berman identifies. Berman (rightly) points out that democracy – as actually attained in most European nations – was something that resulted from struggles led by the left. Contra Fukuyama, it’s not necessarily or historically linked to a capitalist economy. But Berman goes further and celebrates the traditions of self-administration and voluntarism that were the (non)statist elements of classical social democratic thought. What social democracy for the new millennium needs to avoid is the blanket presumption that any social problem requires a bureaucracy, and that solutions can’t be found through genuine consultation and co-operation.
That sort of voluntarism was as much a part of the Methodist or Christian Socialist strain of Labour movement thought which Rudd in his recent articles hearkens back to as any particular “faith-based values”. It was seen in municipal administration, and in co-operative friendly and building societies, as well as in classic trade unionism. It was anathema to the Fabian elitists whose preferred practice ended up forming the statist model for actually existing social democracy in the Anglosphere. But it deserves a revival for all those who believe, as I do, that social democracy is as much about liberty as about equality.
Where does this leave John Howard? I think – particularly in a society which has traditionally been so statist as Australia – all we’re seeing is the old politics – in this case of a sort of dirigiste conservatism. In Australia, it seems, even liberalism is incorporated into state thinktanks and regulatory bodies – such as the Productivity Commission and the ACCC. There were precious few free markets around in Menzies’ Australia, but there’s precious few around now, when government is a sort of unstable mix of big business corporatism and social engineering via distributive spending. Not to mention the urge to ideological conformity (and mediocrity) which defines the culture wars.
Labor could usefully point this out, as well as make the case for a revivified social democracy. Rudd has made a start. Berman’s work is instructive – what we need in this country is a liberation from dirigisme of all stripes and a dynamic social democracy which remembers the meaning of both terms, and doesn’t forget that the second is tied up with liberty.
Nice to see an old-fashioned Mark post back at LP.
Good article Mark. I enjoyed reading it.
mark says:
So would I. The dialect of history is more of a see-saw than a tunnel. Still, the see-saw does not have to have a large amplitude of elevation. And, to mix metaphors, the worm has certainly turned recently.
I have been banging on for the better part of this decade that Australia’s major parties are converging to a moderate form of conservative social democracy. This great convergence is underway in both AUS, UK and USA.
Fukuyama’s End of History thesis is a much more egergious example of intellectual over-reach. He argued that the end of the Cold War siginified the end of both mega-ideological struggles that dominated the past century. The Class War over the amount of equality within the economy (capitalist propriety v socialist equity) and the “Constitutional War” over the amount of liberty in the polity (democratic autonomy v autocratic authority) has been more or less settled in the high IQ societies of the developed Northern hemisphere.
This is true as far as it goes but it hardly settles all questions. The Culture War over the identity of society (global diversity v national integrity) remains an unresolved conflict in many developed countries. This is less the Platonic question of “What kind of rules are best” and more the Machiavellian question of “Whose gang makes the rules”.
This question can never be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties given the inevitability of stratified hierarchy in human societies. It may be that the only way to ameliorate some kinds of ethnic conflict it is to geographically segregate societies with radically divergent identities.
Thus we have the association of nations, a global social system defined by horizontal segmentation rather than vertical stratification. National entities have enjoyed a resurgence since the end of the Cold War, contrary to expectations of Borderless Worlders in both the New Right and New Left.
In this nation Howard’s luke warm brand of cultural conservatism has prevailed in the Culture War for the moment. The brazen lunacy of the past generation’s cultural constructivism is all but dead and buried with its many “die young and stay pretty” victims. Every one but the cultural constructivist cheer leaders who litter the Fairfax op-ed pages has woken up to this brute fact.
This is by and large a good thing. The conservative social democratic form of politics that goes back to the birth place of modern European democracy – Bismark’s Germany. It got interrupted by Communism and Nazism but is becoming the reigning consensus in the USE. The Europeans will come accross to Howard’s way soon enough. Certainly the French, British and Danish have had a recent unpleasant wake up call on this issue.
More generally, Fukuyama’s post-Enlightenment dreams have failed to come true throughout many of the lower IQ societies in the Southern Hemisphere. The recent irruption of sectarian identity politics in Arabian, African and American jurisdictions has somewhat pooped the post-Cold War party. This is a sort of globalization of the Culture War accross modernising societies in the throes of identity crises.
These kinds of things put a dark tint on rosy-futured spectacles. One hopes that the Flynn Effect would get a move on in the rest of “down under”.
Capitalism can and does exist without democracy, but there is no useful, lasting example of the reverse. It may be fair to say that leftism needed capitalism to struggle against in order to produce democracy, but democracy cannot and does not take root in non-capitalist economies.
This sounds rather similar to the radical democracy of Laclau and Mouffe, who also assert that there is no more radical principle of social organisation than the Enlightenment ideals of the liberty and equality of all citizens, yet who reject the notion of a once-and-for-all imposition of a utopia nominally based on these values via a Jacobin “foundational moment”, in favour of continuous reform informed by a radical democratic critique of extant social reality.
Democracy lasts as long as powerful groups believe that they have a chance of winning by playing by the rules of democracy.
Social democracy will last as long as groups who are the net payers in cross subsidisation schemes imposed by the State believe they are getting something of value for the economic cost of their compliance.
There is no basis for asserting that these tensions are less important or less enduring than those alluded to in Strocchi’s darkly pessimistic schema of human society:
The social democracies of the world today are mostly beneficiaries of geographic division of labour. The US trades its giant capacity to consume for access to cheap foreign finance to underpin a consumer lifestyle sustained by borrowing. Western Europe is an entrepot for finance capitalism and a producer of high-end luxury goods with cache throughout the world. Australia and Canada fund their small social democracies with the proceeds from exporting fossil fuel.
These relationships with the non-social democratic world are dynamic, and, I would argue, in important aspects, unsustainable.
Social democracy is therefore a product of larger forces beyond the control of social democracies.
And I would go further: social democracies produce the seeds of the destruction of social democracy.
1. There is a limit beyond which citizens and regimes outside the charmed circle will not tolerate subsidising social democracies that cannot or refuse to pay their own way. This sentiment lay behind the two oil shocks experienced so far and continues to drive anti-western sentment in the oil-rich Middle East. Such folk don’t take kindly to the suggestion that they shouldbe quarantined from the rest of the world for the good of the rest of the world.
2. Multi-national corporations pay only lip service to national origins. When it is convenient they remove their operations from high-cost, social democratic countries to low cost ones. This has the effect of hollowing out the middle classes in social democracies.
3. China. The impact of the rise of China is already huge and it has only just begun. Anyone who claims to know what sort of world China will build is a fool. But I can be reasonably confident it won’t be a social democracy.
Social democracy the end of history? No.
Katz on 7 November 2006 at 9:39 am
For universal social democracy to become the End of History the world over it requires both liberality and egality in the political-economy. THere need to be free and fair movement both up/down the sociological hierarchy and accross ethnological boundaries. This is a big ask.
We don’t live in this kind of world. There are vertical and horizontal barriers arising everywhere you go, from astronomical education costs to high security border protection. The first kind of barrier is economic stratification – the Class War. The second kind of barrier is ethnic segmentation – the Culture War.
I wish that this were not so. But I don’t see much alternative to a more compartmentalised world. Right now I am in NYC and the vertical and horizontal barriers are very obvious.
Even in free and fair Open Societies the prevalence of high powered globalizing institutional agencies tends to overpower individual agency. Corporations care nothing for ethical ideals. They are dedicated to the bottom line and will probably end up being run by robots. The next generations constitution of liberty will only be ratified if it can be pasted onto Excel.
Katz says:
To make social democracy work you need to reconcile ethnic identities with economic equity. Without a basal level of social homogeneity we will find that Open Society institutions in a very diverse society will tend to generate some form of caste structure ie social groups of a certain economic class and ethnic identity will get stuck in entrenched strata.
To overcome ethnic clan conflict one has to develop a society based on ethical norm consensus. This was the achievement of the USA, which has tried to make the transition from an (ethnic) position nation to (ethical) proposition nation.
For this to work one needs a fairly homogenous society, one where a statistically significant sample of individuals picked at random will tend to distribute themselves in a SES curve that is isomorphic to the general societies distribution of SES. Thus isomorphy leads to isonomy.
This project obviously has had some difficulties in the USA.
The catastrophic failure of democracy-promotion in Iraq caused me to question the universality of (end of history-style) social democracy. For sure one can blame Bush’s ineptitude for some of the problems in trying to build a civilised nation state in Iraq.
But it seems likely that the Iraqis themselves were the greater problem. These kind of people do not make good material for a civil polity that is the foundation of social democracy.
Iraqis are fairly in-bred clannish types. So they cannot form a proper provincial, let alone national, government. In the absence of a national strong man we find sectarian theocrats tend to fill up the power vacum.
The extreme concentration of wealth and power engendered by oil monopoly economies also tends to encourage winner-take-all economic conflict. This sort of thing was beaten back by Teddy Rooseveldt whose progressive politics knocked down the robber barons.
But anyone who expects a Teddy Rooseveldt to emerge out of the sadistic cess-pool of Iraqi politics needs their head read.
Interesting piece Mark.
I think, though, that there’s a limit to how far you can explain politics as a ‘clash of ideas’. Which is not to downplay the importance of ideas, but to argue that it’s not that useful to see politics as a battle between (e.g.) ’social democracy’ and ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘conservatism’. For the most part governments inherit institutions and conditions they can unusally only manipulate around the edges. It’s especially not useful to see this in terms of ’statists’ vs. ‘marketeers’ because of the complexity of the relationship between state and market.
The Howard government’s redistributive spending is better explained as a result of the lucky bounty of its fiscal harvests, combined with a vote-catching motivation, than it is by an ideological shift.
Since it’s the topic of the day, and a good example, where does monetary policy fit into all of this? When the Commonwealth Bank first got peacetime central banking powers over private bank reserves at the end of WWII, for banks and many conservatives it was socialism, and it was fought tooth and nail until the end of the 1950s. Twenty years on, a strong central bank was a key institution underpinning the ‘free market’. Now, of course, the Reserve Bank is independent of direct government control, and the two major parties compete over which can best appease it.
Is this the state managing the market or the market managing the state? Is a strong central bank conservative or social democratic? It’s better explained by the need for capitalist governments to sustain a capitalist economy.
I concur with Kim and Cam. Good stuff.
Mike B on 7 November 2006 at 10:57 am
There is much truth in this. Normal politics is mainly about muddling through, and is driven by events. Not vice-versa. So the notion of a politics as a Hegelian clash of Platonic ideals through History should be treated with caution.
But the fact that the default political reality is social democratic policy only tends to reinforce the tendency of the system to be self-stabilising. We have party convergence because we have popular consensus.
This was only achieved after a century of militant political clashes eg Class Wars, Cold Wars, Culture Wars. These clashes were by and large fuelled by ideological considerations that we would now consider to be absurd bordering on insane.
But billions of intelligent citizens took Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro’s ideological positions seriously enough to concur with their implementation. Nowadays we can only laugh or cry at such folly. But it was real enough then.
Even now, the nuttier ideas of the New Right (borderless world) and New Left (political correctness) are still listened to in respectful silence amongst civilized company.
Mike B says:
No one would deny that Howard is an opportunistic politician. But that only goes to show that policy is still driven by populist politics in democratic polities.
Howard is a populist by ideological committment. The fact is that the majority of the people, and even the majority of the Coalitions rusted on supporters, prefer some kind of big government. This is mainly because health, education and income support are superior goods which tend to rise as a proportion of budget with the growth of affluence. Howard’s recent affirmation of the need for state run community services and public infrastructure is a belated acknowledgement of this reality.
In addition Howard still bears some of the remnants of Menzies ideological legacy of Liberal Nationalism. This is an ideology of national development which favoured schemes like the Snowy River hydro. Howard favours such schemes, eg the Darwin to Alice railway.
I agree with Mike B’s astute characterisation of “politics as usual”.
I also agree with Strocchi’s warning that the perception that consensus and convergence toward a social democratic norm is possibly illusory. For reasons outlined in my first post, I believe that it is quite likely that the world will experience again that Strocchi calls “a century of militant political clashes eg Class Wars, Cold Wars, Culture Wars…”
I think that Howard’s first preference would to be a neoliberal. However, two forces undermine his ideological purity:
1. The exigencies of political survival. Howard has been the master of the clever pork barrel.
2. The sheer fun of dirigisme. Being PM is like owning the biggest model train set in the world. Howard has succumbed to the temptation of being the fat Controller.
Jack,
I agree with your Hegel point. But I don’t agree with your implication that we can take the ‘popular will’, or divisions within it, as the driving force of politics:
1. It leaves unexplained why some popular political beliefs are more successful than others when it comes to being put into political practice. (Interest rate hikes, for example – unpopular but sometimes made. Or WorkChoices – unpopular and risky for the government, but still implemented.)
2. More importantly, it assumes the causation goes from people’s political beliefs –> political reality. The opposite is just as important. People’s political beliefs are strongly influenced by what is seen to be possible, which is a result of existing institutions, material economic and political dynamics, and of course understandings of such things as shaped by the media, social contacts, etc.
There are definitely similarities between the developmentalism of the Menzies government and that of the present. But also big differences: Under Menzies and Treasurer Fadden, all these projects, including the ambitious immigration program, were pursued against the advice of the macroeconomically-minded Keynesians in the central bank and Treasury. That would be much less likely to happen now, and development is consequently scaled down. It’s also worth remembering that Menzies nearly lost an election because unemployment reached crisis proportions of 2 per cent, whereas today we are constantly reminded that our current unemployment rate of 4.8 per cent is the best for a generation.
I’ll come back to the comments later, but I want to clarify that I’m not arguing that social democracy is the end of history (hence the question mark). I’m partly alluding to Berman’s argument – which really suggests that social democracy had the field to itself in Europe and most bits of the Anglosphere, but again that its contradictions and failures led to a renaissance of (neo)liberalism. So, she argues, Fukuyama was doubly wrong – the “Golden Years” from the late 40s to early 70s saw less ideological contestation than we have seen since, and that there never will be a “victory” for any ideology.
Just clarifyin…
Social democracy is the pleasant balance between might and right. It is achieved under the conditions of prosperity, social harmony and in the absence of external threats.
It is a plateau. We may soon enough dip back into the more frightening and statistically likely terrain of sectarian bigotry, material mal-distribution and foreign competition.
Social democracy is not the product of ideas. It is the condition that obtains when you are doing well. The reasons we are doing well are the combination of abundant material riches which we flog off in exchange for the products of cheap labour and the political institutions we brought with us from Europe which were forged out of centuries of class and cultural conflict.
It is not Edmund Burke or Adam Smith we need to thank. Our luck is due to the overseas customers of our primary and natural resources. We live in comfort and thus can afford to observe the ideals of decency. When times of scarcity and hard graft return, we will revert to the brutish human norm.
Marxism and Fascism were both responses to economic hardship. Islamism likewise. Social democracy is not an ideology, it is simply the absence of an ‘ism borne of desparation. We is fat and happy. If the paydirt runs out, we won’t look up Edmund Burke or Adam Smith – we might easily revert some way back to nepotism and the gun.
The only liberty worth talking about is the freedom from hunger and fear.
“I think that Howard’s first preference would to be a neoliberal. However, two forces undermine his ideological purity:”
I think this is a *big* mischaracterisation of Howard’s position. His rhetoric has been consistently conservative – going back to long before he was PM – on many issues, and this has been backed up with big $$ on family support. By contrast, his support for markets has been pragmatic rather than ideological – both in his statements and his policies. Even policies like WorkChoices contain heavily bureaucratic elements that no ‘neoliberal’ would support, but which fit into the long battle between the Liberal Party and the union movement.
Au contraire.
During the Fraser years Howard was by far the driest Treasurer Australia ever had. He and Fraser fell out bigtime over Fraser’s unwillingess to use his huge majority to ram through major structural reform.
When Keating stole much of Howard’s financial thunder and the Small-L Liberals crowded Howard on the Left, Howard began dabbling in Menzian rhetoric.
Thus, in a temporal sense, neoliberalism was Howard’s first preference. By now he is so compromised by countervailing priorities, I doubt somewhat whether Howard would be prepared to justify his policies on any consistent grounds at all.
This is interesting, Mark:
Does Berman mean charitable institutions, in the tradition of church poor-boxes and Rotarianism, or semi-capitalist co-ops, like Starr-Bowkett societies, or genuine mutual co-operative and worker-democratic institutions? I’ve conflicting feelings about the kind of self-organised projects that Chesterton (and lately Race Mathews) put forward for the future of democracy and capitalism. They’re so very very easily co-opted.
The Bendigo bank, for instance, sells itself as a ‘community’ alternative to big banking, franchised to smaller towns, suburbs and localities, especially ones whose banks have shut up shop, and seemingly under community/local control. What actually happens though is that communities that get a bank this way, through petition and local fundraising, is that they end up paying more, through expense of effort, for identical financial services those of us who live in cities take for granted.
On the other hand, I’m all for the kinds of actions that see workers taking over factories when their owners bankrupt, as in Argentina in the 1990s.
That’s what she’s on about, Liam, I think, but more generally she’s countering the notion of the working class as passive and “economistic” and needing to be led by a Leninist vanguard (or in much 19th century liberal and conservative thought as a “mob” to be feared or placated).
Interesting also is the Mondragon tradition of co-operative ownership of enterprises in the Basque country.
Berman:
Which, when I think back to my more youthful and radical days in Brisbane in the late 80’s, is why we were so scornful of social democrats. We who leaned heavily towards anarchy and social ecology… And who now worry that we may have become social democrats ourselves.
The horror!
Maybe we’re social ecologists in disguise though, Angharad?
Vale Murray Bookchin
Ah well one likes to think one is secretly subversive under the cloak of respectability.
An interesting post and subsequent discussion Mark. Thanks.
No probs, Angharad.
What I was meaning to say was that my interest in more libertarian forms of social democracy is certainly related to an earlier interest/idenfitication with anarchism.
Aahh – I see now what you mean. Well we probably have an overlapping back story there.
Yes! Yes!
If only the freakish hordes populating the blog universe spuriously calling themselves libertarians, and claiming some new insight therein, could look back into their deep, dark history and find their inner syndicalist.
One big union, kids. One big strike.
Oh but Liam – I was never a syndicalist. They wore red and black shirts! A different beast indeed.
Have there even be syndicalists in Oz in the last few decades?
We may indeed, Angharad.
Anyway, I’m off to watch an sbs doco on the sex lives of East Germans!
Its interesting how this kind of social-democratic advocacy mirrors, to a certain extent, the neoliberal critique of the State. I do, however, agree that the Statist road to socialism/social democracy has been discredited, or is on the retreat. My only issue with this is the extent to which a non-Statist solution would require a kind of voluntarism and a consequent shift in social consciousness that (in Australia at least) is sorely underdeveloped. You suggest as much with this next quote:
Australia has indeed been statist on both sides of the ideological coin. Or perhaps what this demonstrates is that, contrary to the models and ideas of liberals, the modern State will always be implicated in fostering and implementing a particular social and economic model. The division between State and Civil society in all countries (especially Australia) is conceptually neat, but collapses in reality. I think John Howard, with both his conservative and neoliberal hats on, understands the extent to which modern states constitute civil society by its command of legislation, regulation and finances. There is a contradiction in his thinking of course, that will inevitably lead to him favouring State intervention of a certain kind; even if he deregulates the economy on genuinely liberal lines… his conservatism will lead him to intervene elsewhere to ameliorate and hold back the social effects of unfettered capitalism.
On the other hand… his neoliberal dirigisme in economic policy (eg workchoices) is perhaps a validation of Mark’s thesis that social-democracy can spring autonomously from civil society… Howards active policy of using the State to put down Unions is certainly a reflection that in Australia at least, Unions represent an independent force in society. Or at least used to.
However, at any rate, I believe that a grassroots social-democratic movement will require some State action for it to flourish. Not to mention drastic cultural change.
I’ve been slow on this, but I’ve just posted a piece on Berman, with a trackback here
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/11/10/social-democracy-triumphant/
This is almost exactly wrong. Social democracy has certainly prevailed over the Old Left “marxist” egalitarian socialism and New Right “monetarist” libertarian capitalism. But it has done so by rejecting utopian ideologies and embracing moderate culturally conservativsm form.
Blair, Howard (and even a reluctant Bush) mostly accord with this tendency, which arises from deep instincts in human nature. Constructivist social democrats will have to like it policy-wise or lump it politically, since the populus are becoming ,pre conservative. So social democrats will have to embrace nationalism or lose elections.
Also, it is likely that social democracy will become more, not less, statist. This follows from secular demographic and economic tendencies which increase the public demand for community services (health, education and income support) as risks and rewards increase. The nation state is the most efficient provider of most of these services.
The nation state is still the foundation of social democracy. So as reconstructed social democracy prevails as a politico-economic model it will be more, not less, nationalist. And more, not less, statist.
The challenge for social democrats is twofold
1. To reconcile these authoritarian tendencies with the post-Enlightenment (Kantian/Millian) ethic that largely informs the social democratic temper.
2. To incarnate these ideological tensions into accountable social institutions.