by DYLAN RILEY
4. SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?
The fragility of Judt’s attempted synthesis in Postwar was most evident in its rapid breakdown. By the time of his last book, Ill Fares the Land, he had undergone another conversion in political outlook. The book originated as a valedictory lecture at nyu in 2009, given after Judt had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A transcription of the lecture had been published in the nyrb, bringing a ‘chorus of demands for its expansion into a little book’. The resulting political testament struck a declamatory note: ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’—‘and yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives’. [70]Ill Fares the Land sought to provide one, in the form of a rehabilitated social democracy. Alas for his admirers, the results contradicted or flatly reversed many of Judt’s most confident pronouncements on the welfare state and social democracy in Postwar. The resulting confusion was amply demonstrated in his attempts to grapple with four key questions.
(i) The welfare state—who created it?
Judt wanted to maintain once again that the welfare state was both the product of a cross-party ‘Keynesian consensus’ and a historic social-democratic achievement. But whereas Postwar had celebrated the superiority of Europe’s social model, Ill Fares the Land played down any such contrast, arguing instead that Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society were in practice the American version of social democracy. [71] The ‘longing for normality’ after World War Two that had explained Europeans’ special predilection for state-administered welfare in Postwar now apparently applied to Americans as well. A continual slippage in Judt’s use of the term ‘social democracy’ sometimes allowed it to suggest a form of Hegelian historical reason, an ‘objective’ purpose that escapes the ‘subjective’ intentions of those involved. Thus anyone who supported post-war Keynesian demand management gets promoted to the rank of ‘objective’ social democrat—and larded with praise—whatever his or her party label:
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