Opinion: Joe Biden And The Social Democratic Moment
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, July 18, 2021.
We are living in a new social democratic moment.
It’s true that parties calling themselves by that name are having, at best, mixed success in the polls and at ballot boxes. But President Biden is such a soothing figure that it’s easy to miss how much he and his policies reflect this fundamental transformation of politics. Sweeping change should not come as a surprise given the traumas the world has confronted since 2016. The rise of right-wing authoritarian parties, and especially of Donald Trump, brought on a crisis of democracy.
Political systems had barely absorbed that shock when the covid-19 outbreak required sudden, large-scale government action to combat the coronavirus’s spread and prevent economic collapse. By placing a premium on competent public administration and traditional forms of expertise, the pandemic undermined upstart ultranationalist parties before they had a chance to consolidate their gains. Voters faced with life-or-death questions have been reluctant to entrust their fate to demagogues more skilled at stoking resentments than solving problems.
But the far-right surge also worked in tandem with the pandemic’s challenges to bring to a close the era of austerity and unconstrained globalized capitalism. The way opened for a new wave of government activism. Unprecedented, redistributive government spending across the wealthy countries prevented the pandemic downturn from becoming another Great Depression. At the same time, the seething social resentments that right-wing populists brought to the fore forced even the complacent to recognize the dislocations and injustices bred by rising inequality over the last half-century.
This shift toward interventionism has been reinforced by a climate crisis whose dangers are increasingly obvious to large majorities across the democratic world. All this has led to a resurgence of social democracy’s core idea: that market economies can thrive only when governments underwrite them with strong systems of social insurance, new paths to opportunity for those cast aside by capitalism’s “creative destruction,” and updated rules to advance social goods that include family life, education, public health — and the planet itself...
More,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/18/joe-biden-social-democratic-moment/
= new reply since forum marked as read
to derange the health/order of
Report of Investigation of Public Relief in the District of Columbia.
Social Service Review
Volume 13, Number 4
Dec., 1939
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/632767
Bierce, of course, is best known for his superb short story
along with
The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/10/25/best-bits-devils-dictionary/
In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?”
“X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might as well not have. I was nineteen. Anyone today who had just read the back cover of a copy of Utopia would, in a knowledge contest, smoke me like a cheap cigar. About the book’s narrative I remember … well, nothing.
Wait. They didn’t think gold was valuable. I forget why. Their toilets were gold. Or the chains that they loaded prisoners with. Or something. Not toilets; chamberpots. And the narrator had some cross-eyed name like Holofernes Hwum-buppa-zipplebibble or something.
However! Suppose that I (prompted by shame) decided to engineer a little ol’ Utopia project. I pore over the book for a week and think, Huh—this is full of good stuff! At that point I would say to my neighbours, Hey, when’s last time you looked in on More’s Utopia—?
We’re like this in my village. Humane. We know very well that to read a book is not to have read it. Forgetting and noncomprehension must be given their due. And more than their due.
You’re about to reread The Mayor of Casterbridge. That’s excellent. Then you can remind me what happens in it. You just opened Paradise Lost to a random page and found something surprising? Do tell. I promise to be equally surprised. It’s been quite a while since I looked in on it.
All of which is to say it is especially frustrating to people from my village when critics or theorists write about literature with the assumption that the typical reader remembers everything. Or worse: that we not only remember everything but that we know where all the good stuff is in it.
When’s last you looked in on W. H. Auden’s preface to Shakespeare’s sonnets? Here’s a vexing bit:
On going through the hundred and fifty-four of them, I find forty-nine which seem to me excellent throughout, a good number of the rest have one or two memorable lines, but there are also several which I can only read out of a sense of duty.
Every time I think of this passage, I GET SO ANGRY. I’m like, Why, why, and why-why-why do you mention having picked out the forty-nine best, and then not tell us which ones you mean? What, you think I’m going to go through all 154 of those jumping-jack-doing, nine-dimension hieroglyphs, on the outside chance I can spontaneously regenerate your list?
To quote Gloucester in King Lear: “Give me the letter, Sir!”
❧
I am about to come to the point. Auden had “done the work” on the sonnets, and then withheld the results. This was evil, but … that was a different time. The point is, I’m not going to do that to you. Get ready for this. I, unlike you, have read every word of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)—and read it recently. And it gets better. I, at the cost of an ocean of labour, have cherry-picked the seventy-four best bits out of the approximately three thousand billion trillion entries, and I am going to give you those seventy-four: yours, free of charge, to judge and find wanting.
I wish to note, before the presentation, that in assembling this set I looked at no other. I would have looked, if H. L. Mencken, who was a great admirer of Bierce, had made one. But as far as I can see, he did not. Also, it bears mentioning that my original selection contained around 250 entries, was winnowed to 100, and then further winnowed to 74.
So what do you think, Subhuti? When’s last you looked in on The Devil’s Dictionary—? Here, allow me, like a good neighbour, to refresh you.
snip
