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• Friday, November 21, 2008 03:54 PM

  How About "Social Democrats"

  There are too reasons I don't like "liberal" as a description of pro-new deal, mildly redistributionist, humanist and strongly anti-war politics. But I don't like "progressive" much better.

  First ,we Americans (of all political stripes) insist on using "Liberal" to mean almost exactly the OPPOSITE of what it means in the rest of the world: radically pro-market, pro- unregulated trade, supportive of authoritarian regimes if they open themselves to international investment, and indifferent to how those regimes treat their own people.

  Second, all of us who came of age in opposition to the Vietnam War are aware that it was started and waged by liberal democratic presidents. Our anger at that, because we expected more from liberals, exacerbated our distrust of America. For some this laid the ground for naive, unquestioning and even harmful support of all of America's enemies. The majority of the anti-war movement never went that far, but for all of us "liberal" was tarnished.

  I somewhat agree with Lind that the problem with "progressive" is its acceptance of the Enlightenment idea that history has a direction. (Its the same idea that makes even the most scientific of biologists talk as if Evolution is a conscious agent trying to produce higher, or even just fitter, species.)

  This notion of progress underlies both the conservatives worship of economic progressive as well as are view of an increasingly democratic and just society. "History is on our side" may have once been rhetorically powerful, but it fails as an explanation of reality.

  So what I think we are is Social Democrats. We want a market economy as an engine of the economy, but not an unregulated one. As a European leader of a Social Democratic party once put it: "Yes to a market economy; no to a market society." Social Democracy is about the government actively promoting fair wages, strong unions, social freedoms, international harmony - along with world-wide trade - but only with strong protection for worker's human rights, indigenous peoples' rights and environmental restoration.

  What's wrong with that?

  —seeconnections Read seeconnections's other letters
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