1. I welcome the argument about fascism being social democracy’s dark twin. It’s been made numerous times in Italy (by Domenico Settembrini in 1979, by Renzo De Felice, Francesco Perfetti and others). It’s a rich, revealing, and, I see, for some provocative argument, but needs to be handled carefully. I’m not sure how much mileage it yields outside Italy, for example.

2. If Berman thinks the Swedish form of social democracy is the ideal type, I also welcome that argument. But Sweden is a small country. What can we say about an ideal type of policy that comes to fruition in a small country? How relevant is that ideal type for interpreting developments in bigger countries or Europe-wide?

3. While Berman’s book may be an outstanding example of the history of political ideas, I have trouble making the link to it being also an outstanding account of current policy and a recommendation for the future, as in “how to save Europe”.

4. I question whether debates of the interwar years are terribly relevant for anything after 1970 except in a purely intellectual sense, and in the sense that many policymakers who came to prominence after 1970 were followers, pupils, or friends of those who conducted the interwar debates.

5. One reason is this. In the interwar years and indeed for some time after 1945, social democracy (understood as ideology plus policymaking plus mass mobilization plus government) took place in a context where (1) the typical worker was a production worker in the private sector and (2) the public sector didn’t exceed 20 per cent of the economy. Today, the typical worker is in the service sector and, in Scandinavia, in the public service sector, and government exceeds half the economy. With such fundamental parameters changed beyond recognition, what is the relevance of social democratic ideas and practices evolved in an entirely different context?

6. I am (in most areas relevant for this debate) a classical liberal. However, I have vast sympathy for the social democrats, not least those of Germany and Scandinavia. Yet I think, and what I read about Berman confirms it, that this is pure nostalgia. Europe is structurally so different from the Europe in which social democracy came to prominence that recounting and resurrecting ancient arguments may be wonderful intellectual history, but irrelevant for policy debates today.

7. So as far as making prognoses for European societies and economies is concerned, I’m with Tyler Cowen. Prosperity and growth won’t be saved by using social democratic recipes invented in an age where the private mass-production sector flourished and government was small. Paradoxically, looking back, Europe until 1970 was a liberal paradise, and indeed I would claim that it was the growth permitted by an essentially liberal structure (with social democratic political coloring) that permitted the social democratic redistribution in the first place. So, no, I don’t agree with the fundamental notion of the primacy of politics, at least in Berman’s sense.

8. Just one example to substantiate this last claim. In Italy a major focus of the unions (esp. the communist-controlled ones) until 1980 was the idea that wages are an independent variable, that is, should not be determined by the profitability of the individual company. An analogous policy was followed even more consistently in Sweden, where it was used to drive “unprofitable” businesses out of business. However, economics always wins in the end, and the result of the campaign for raising wages independently of whether the employer could in fact pay them resulted in the destruction of many of Italy’s largest employers. From a public choice point of view the independent-variable-argument was a clear case of insiders exploiting their power to extort rents at the expense of all others.

There really are no free lunches, no matter how much social democrats might decree that there should be. The result is always negative.

“The result was often an unhappy halfway house, as in the German SPD, which participated in elections in the Weimar Republic, but refused to fully embrace it.”

One could argue that the SPD was too institutionalised a part of Weimar to initiate any real resistance when 1920s push came to 1930s shove.

I think that is true of the actual party apparatus, but the problem was that the base of the party, the intellectual arguments, the rhetoric, the emotional commitment, was to democratic socialism, not social democracy.

What they really wanted was to achieve a majority mandate, then abolish capitalism. Anything less was a tactical necessity at best, a betrayal at worst.

Their failure was a failure to realise that not only was that impossible, but that better things were possible.

That failure to align rhetoric with actions cost them both popular support, and political allies.

Consequently they lost, and there is no worse political judgement.

Yugoslavia under Tito is an example of non-democratic socialism. Clearly a strongman was necessary to suppress internal nationalist tensions there. Same is – arguably – true about other places, like Mubarak’s Egypt. And in Israel we have decades of democratic fascism: two most popular politicians at the moment are Liberman and Netanyahu, both are classic … well, let’s say classic yahoos.

Democracy is neither sufficient nor required for socialism. It’s a secondary feature.

The Social Democrats also succeeded in holding on to most of their electoral support in the early 1930s elections. On the other hand, support for the conservative and right-liberal parties collapsed as support for the NSDAP rose. The NSDAP quite clearly took over the right wing vote. The idea that it had some sort of special appeal to working class voters has also been exposed as a myth.

I can’t think of any prominent Social Democrat who joined or worked with the NSDAP. After Hitler took power, their leaders either were sent into exile or were sent to concentration camps. By the way, the Communists succeeded in maintaining an undergroup resistancce movement for several years after the Nazis took power.

There were a few former socialists in other countries, such as Mussolini, who embraced fascism, but so what? Politicians move around the ideological spectrum more than most people remember. There were also former socialists who joined or were co-opted by the non-fascist right (Millerand, McDonald), also some politicians who moved leftward during their career (Haldane). You have Churchill, who moved from ultra-imperialist Toryism to welfare state Liberalism, then back, before he became Prime Minister.

The only part of the argument that has some basis in reality is that both fascists and social democrats gained support after World War I and during the Depression, for the obvious reason that both events discredited the pre-World War I liberal consenus. But the movements were opposite, social democrats being, after all, democrats and also tending to support pacific foreign policies, income redistribution downward, trade unions, and welfare states that don’t make demands on the recipients. The vaunted fascist support for welfare measures is more of the “we will give you a job in the arms factory and you will take it and like it, and also enjoy your vacations at the resort owned by the same company” variety. You can’t get farther removed from the spirit of socialism.

There existed during the post war period significant ideological distance between the Christian Democratic and the Social Democratic particularly in their respective conceptions of the welfare state. Largely this has to do with the Christian Democratic rejection of class which stem from Catholic social doctrine. During the post-war period both political ideologies sought the construction of national political economies that would ameliorate the market failures associated with the great depression. However, unlike their opposition Catholic parties, who had since Rerun Novarum been wary of laissez faire capitalism, did not seek to accomplish this through a diminution of class difference. Rather, in many cases they constructed welfare states that protected existing class structures. Their “Middle Path” capitalism was remarkably similar in tone and rhetoric to that of Schroeder and Blair’s “Third Way.”

See Irving 1979, Weiss 1988, Van Kerspergen 1995, and Esping Andersen 1999 for a better discussion.

But I am OT.

There was a tremendous battle about this at The Valve, and I doubt that I convinced anyone.

It’s a really sharp book, and quite short and well-written for all the ground it covers. So people should read it and see for themselves what they think. Guaranteed to make you see some stuff in a different light…

lc

It’s like the RGB color model – you can create millions of colors by combining the basic three – red, green, and blue. Same here: liberalism, egalitarianism, and nationalism; mix them any way you like.

Militarism, authoritarianism, witch hunts for internal enemies, and secret deals with capital at the expense of labor would be the distinguishing differences.

It’s not original to describe fascism as an ersatz and degraded form of socialism / syndicalism. I don’t know if Berman says more than that.

I also think that in many respects social democracy is an ameliorated form of liberalism, rather than a sharp alternative. It’s still a capitalist class society, but the market is buffered.

Other than a very probable idiosyncratic bent (coming from a family of three generations of social democrats), I don’t think it’s convincing either.

Fascism, with its strong emphasis on authoritarianism, tradition, warrior ethos, myths, and exclusive, aggressive nationalism is simply a different species altogether. Much closer to conservatism, with its militarism and authoritarian state, portraying itself as the legitimate representative of god, nation and people.

Did I pick up a wrong book?