a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

This blog has been created by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and it will consist of  commentaries on current affairs and reflections on contemporary political issues and questions. Occasionally, invited guests will contribute as well.

My blog comes unabashedly from a position that in much of the world would require no explanation: social democracy. But in America, “socialism” is hate speech, and any species variation within the evolution of socialism is covered by the prevailing prejudice against “socialism.” Few know much about the history or meaning of social democracy because our public discourse simply does not allow discussion of it, not even under the designations “left” or “left liberal,” which are almost meaningless.

Early in the 20^th century the Europeans who allied under the banner of socialism split into two camps: those who followed Marx and called for a worker’s revolution against capitalism, and those who called for a reform of capitalism that would gradually bring about socialism.  The second group, called democratic socialists, emerged victorious after the nations that followed the Marxist line devolved into horrifying authoritarian and totalitarian states in which political life almost disappeared. But, in the years after the Second World War, the democratic socialists themselves divided, and a variant known as social democracy emerged in the devasted nations of Europe and in many nations around the world. The goal of the social democrats was not socialism (in the old definition emphasizing worker ownership of the means of production), but democratic states that might achieve some goals that socialists had articulated, particularly state regulation of capitalist enterprises and state sponsored services that would provide all citizens with provision when they could not provide for themselves, protection from exploitation and abuse and from threats to health and safety, and participation as citizens in decision-making.

In the wake of the Great Depression and then the Second World War, the ideals of social democracy were embraced in the Western European nations, in the nations emerging from  European colonial domination or becoming more independent within the British Commonwealth, in much of Latin America, and even in America, which had moved in the social democratic direction with the New Deal. But the vast majority of Americans accepted the New Deal only as a cluster of emergency measures, and in the anti-Communist 1950s boom years, the measures no longer seemed necessary, much less worth fighting for.  Particularly after Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and its Great Society social democratic initiatives, the majority of Americans moved into criticism of “big government” welfare, of universal healthcare, even of public education, which had been an ideal since the late 19^th century curtailment of child labor and the establishment of public schools. “The Sixties” became an emblem both of anarchy among the young (and assault on “family values”) and of too much “tax and spend” government.

America’s defeat in Vietnam ushered in a period of conservativism or anti-social democracy so pervaded with calls for getting government out of the people’s families and finances, out of the corporations’ and their increasingly global reach, that “the left” virtually disappeared into a large center region of the political spectrum. When Reagan’s Republican Party swept into power in 1980, most of the stalwarts of liberalism old enough to have lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War departed the Congress and the Supreme Court began its tilt rightward. The system of checks and balances so brilliantly laid out in our Constitution began to become clogged. Since then, political reformers, like Bill Clinton and now like Barack Obama, have been reformers from and in the congested and confused center.  Very few of the young voters who so idealistically worked for Obama have any idea what the term “social democracy” means, although most actually embrace its ideals of social justice and its promise of reigning in the excesses of corporate expansionism that have landed the whole world in an economic crisis that warrants comparison with the Great Depression.

The post-War American history that I have just sketched is the history of my generation’s defining struggle, from the time when “the Baby Boomers” populated the anti-war student movement until today, when so many of them populate the enterprises and offices from which their youthful  ideals of social democracy have disappeared. At the age of sixty-four, I bring to this blog more than forty years of concern for this political story, which  in the pre-blog era I have expressed publicly in articles and books –a dozen books, beginning in 1982 with a biography of my teacher and mentor Hannah Arendt, who had died in 1975.  My commitment to social democracy is Arendtian.  That is, it is grounded in the history of the European social democratic tradition, which Arendt, as a Jewish émigré from Germany, knew well and worked within, both as a continuer and as a critic.

But Hannah Arendt would never have announced herself as “a leftist,” because she thought that the old designations left and right, dating from the French Revolution, were obsolete by the end of the Second World War, and also that they had become an inhibition upon independent thinking. To think “out of the box” as she did, one needed to avoid these right/left boxes. I agree with that evaluation. But living in an American moment in which “the right” has undergone a series of profound redefinitions of itself and come to a very dangerous retrenchment, I find it necessary to state my opposition as from  “the left.” If this were the early 1950’s, it would be sufficient to take a critical stand as an “anti-McCarthyite,” for the threat Joseph McCarthy and his ilk posed to the country was specific and had many historical precedents among petty despots and conspiracy theorists. If this were the late 1960s, one might have opposed both the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and his successor the Republican Richard Nixon by aligning with the coalition called “anti-war.” (Although that focus had the unfortunate consequence that it was difficult to continue to support Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social democratic initiatives while opposing his prosecution of the war in Vietnam.) Now, there is no specific person or series of events to be “anti” to.  It is not even useful to be anti-Republican Party. The problem of our fractured political life is everywhere. We are having a national nervous breakdown.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, America has become a multiple personality disorder of a country, a country of many selves and groups that do not communicate and have in common only that they silence the social democratic “self”—to the amazement of the rest of the  world. And in this mélange, this chaos, I think it is crucial to take a stance in the terms that the general public is not allowed to hear and to say “I come from the social democratic left.” But then go on to say, as clearly as possible, what that means and what it implies; what one stands for and what one hopes to see developing in the future.  To say what has happened, and what is to be done. To make a diagnosis and propose a therapy.

On this blog,  questions about what happened to social democracy will be raised from many angles. Why was America in the 20^th century so resistant to the reasonable and constructive and egalitarian elements of the social democratic tradition?  Why did the reasonable rejection of Communism and of the authoritarian forms of socialism extend to anything that was associated with socialism –a guilt by association?  Why did the revolutionary tradition in America –dating from our founding revolution and the adoption of our Constitution—erode so deeply in the 19^th century and on into the 20^thcentury, to the point where it is now lost in a mythologized past? What ideas and what conditions allowed the Western European countries to rediscover a social democratic heritage after the Second World War and go forward –haltingly, with many struggles and regressions—to the establishment of the European Union? Why has America asserted its national sovereignty in a way that has undermined every constructive convention emanating from the United Nations?

Since the 1990s, I have worked as a psychoanalyst in addition to writing in the political theoretical arena that my Ph.D under Arendt’s supervision prepared me for. This blog will draw on both of my trainings, as I hope to be what might be called “historically clinical” in my approach to the “what is to be done?  questions that move me and the others who will contribute to this blog. Also, for the last few years, I have been living in Canada, and I will also bring to this blog the experience of living in a social democracy (although one fighting to preserve that identity), looking on my country from a place where, for example, universal healthcare is available and functioning well.

In my psychoanalytic work, there is the daily discipline of the fifty-minute hour and “the frame” (the accumulated wisdom in the field about how to conduct the therapeutic work for greatest effect). Here, too, I will discipline my work; and the first discipline will be that each session of this blog will have a limit of  two thousand words, so that I will be succinct and you will be able to concentrate, focus, topic by topic, while we build up a bigger picture, constructing an embracing narrative as the sessions accumulate.