A New Day for the New Deal: Tony Judt diagnoses America’s decline

[marmar]

from In These Times:



A New Day for the New Deal
Tony Judt diagnoses America’s decline.

By Melvyn Dubofsky


Does anyone still read Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, a staple of my undergraduate education, or John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, a staple of my early years teaching undergraduates modern U.S. history? Or are they relics of my depression-era cohort, the farthest thing from the minds of today’s young people to whom Tony Judt directs Ill Fares the Land (Penguin), his jeremiad about the state of contemporary Anglo-American societies?

I ask those questions because reading Judt’s succinct book harkened back to ideas that I first encountered reading Fromm’s and Galbraith’s erudite yet clearly written indictments of the conventional wisdom as pronounced by advocates of the free market and the minimal state. Judt, one of our most distinguished historians of modern Europe, like Fromm and Galbraith, was born and bred outside the United States. Unlike the latter two who lived long and healthy lives, Judt is a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), an untreatable and fatal illness. His ongoing physical deterioration has rendered him unable to write and type, yet it has seemed to sharpen his mind and prose, as anyone who has read his recent essays in the New York Review of Books has discovered.

Like Fromm and Galbraith, Judt disdains a society in which wealth alone is the measure of a person, individualism reigns supreme and the policemen’s baton represents the state’s primary purpose. Like Fromm but unlike Galbraith, Judt knows his Marx, de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke and the real Adam Smith, a philosopher of moral sentiments as well as an imaginary marketplace.

He writes from an unabashedly social democratic perspective, one that might be defined as conservative, for Judt lauds the policies and programs favored by social democrats that made the years from 1945 to 1973 the most secure, prosperous, and egalitarian in the history of Western nations. His social democrats encompass an array of politicians and thinkers from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the British, New Zealand, and Australian Labour parties, the Scandinavian and Continental European social democrats, and economist John Maynard Keynes. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5986/a_new_day_for_the_new_deal