Here’s my second column for Project Syndicate, a very lively and ecumenical publication headquartered—if that is even possible these digitally de-centered days—in Prague, where Jonathan Stein runs the ship. PS publishes writers like Joseph Stiglitz, Slavoj Zizek, Nouriel Roubini, and, uh, yours truly, then distributes their columns to newspapers throughout Europe (and to a lesser extent over here). When I say ecumenical, I mean it. PS publishes conservative writers from the American Enterprise Institute like Michael Strain as well as liberals and socialists like me. It makes for a sobering read on Sundays, when the op-eds proliferate in every venue. Check it out.
Meanwhile, the evidence of a social-democratic turn in mainstream policy-relevant thinking keeps mounting—without much notice from the Left, lots of commotion from the Right, and steady attention from publications like The Economist, where the staff is accustomed to treating socialism as a humdrum reality, just another dimension of everyday life, not something that suddenly arrives on the political scene at the point of a gun. There’s a link in my PS piece (below) to an article from the magazine that demonstrates the point. Here’s a more recent example:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/10/27/joe-biden-attempts-the-biggest-overhaul-of-americas-economy-in-decades?utm_content=article-link-2&etear=nl_today_2&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=10/27/2022&utm_id=1370072
We might also notice that steady attention to the immediate reality of policy-relevant social democracy in an unlikely place—and that would be in “the markets,” the bond market and the tabloids, which have registered the brain death of Anglo-American neoliberalism (Thatcherite of Reaganesque) by picturing its pathetic avatar, Liz Truss, as a vegetative state of mind. The Republican leadership in the US hasn’t shown its hand like the Tories did, mainly because the Democrats haven’t forced it to, but if and when the Republicans unveil their insane plans to abolish what’s left of the welfare state, the response of “the markets” is likely to be similar. Why? Because capitalism cannot last in the absence of socialism. Neither can the planet. It’s that simple.
Here’s my piece from Project Syndicate (which holds the copyright). Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing it. I’m sure I can fix it.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/republican-hayek-fear-of-socialism-justified-by-james-livingston-2022-10