Is it true that the only feasible agenda in politics today is a right-wing agenda? Twenty years ago, the question would have been ridiculous. Every liberal democracy courted a left agenda, in the government or in the mainstream opposition.
To be on the left meant, at a minimum, embracing three commitments which those on the right rejected. First, a macro- economic policy which aimed to achieve full employment. Second, universal health care and education, funded by public money, underwritten by the state and available to all. Finally, an acceptance that those who fail to find a place in the formal economy be given access to the bare rudiments of human well- being.
Today, the first commitment is all but a museum piece. The last country reckless enough to attempt to mop up unemployment through state expenditure – Sweden, in 1990 – was punished by the international bond market. A run on its currency, followed by a hike in interest rates, tore the heart from Sweden’s social- democratic consensus.
In 1997, Lionel Jospin threatened to awaken the old Keynsian ghost when he announced a battery of public-works programmes as the first of a range of measures to tackle endemic youth unemployment in France. But the project was in the end as illusory as its announcement was surprising. In its efforts to meet the fiscal criteria for joining the new European currency, Jospin’s employment agenda was all but abandoned.
The second and third commitments are also in decline. In Britain, under New Labour, relief for the poor is shifting from its customary form – unemployment benefits – to tax credits for low-paid work. Britain is approaching the United States regime in which unemployment benefits amount to short-term retrenchment packages.
In the US, President Bill Clinton’s first project after coming to power in 1992 was to nudge at the ancient American prejudice against collective risk sharing. He failed spectacularly. His modest attempt to lay the ground for universal health care sparked an unprecedented run against the Democrats and triggered the rise of a new generation of free-market fundamentalists led by Republican Newt Gingrich. Since then, Clinton has clung tightly to the centre right.
Was this spectacular implosion of the left necessary or inevitable? The answers to this question are as speculative as they are divergent. The type of economy which sustained the left’s post-war agenda no longer exists, but the reason for its decline remain obscure.
Nobody knows for sure why the growth of per capita income in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries suddenly slowed to a snail’s pace in the early Seventies. Nor is it clear why spiralling inflation began to engulf full- employment economies.
And even if these changes did put a great deal of pressure on the left’s agenda, it would be foolish to moot that they alone have effected its downfall.
But for some, the conundrum of the left’s decline is not that mysterious: it is simply no longer fashionable to be nice. There is some profundity hidden beneath the crude exterior of this argument.
The public institutions which the left has built this century grew from collective responses to national catastrophes. Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal arose from the Great Depression, an era in which everybody shared the prospect of sudden poverty, and the idea of a universal contribution to a universal safety net made sense.
Britain’s Beveridge reforms, which built that country’s welfare state, came in the wake of World War II, when shared and collective mourning, as well as recent memories of the prospect of invasion and occupation, built a formidable British nationalism.
Could it be that the left has died because half a century of peace and stability in the West has dampened empathy? Is this the era foreseen in the theatre of Arthur Miller, in which families become tribes and turn a hostile shoulder to the outside world?
If so, the sad truth is that it will take another catastrophe to re-awaken the left. Only the weight of a major recession or a war will topple Anglo-Saxon economic orthodoxy.
The idea that private firms are responsible only to their shareholders and bear no responsibility for the social costs of doing business would lose the aura of common sense it now enjoys. Paying for health care on the returns from equity investment would look like a reckless and crazy exercise. The old idea of the state as an underwriter of human well- being would once again look very attractive.
And what of South Africa? Does a rise of a culture of self- absorption in the First World mean that we too are wedded to centre-right orthodoxies? The answer is yes. A modest centre-left programme in South Africa right now would probably spell disaster. We live in an era in which developing countries set their own economic agendas at their peril.
When the Nationalists came to power in 1948, growth was financed largely by domestic savings, shored up in financial institutions which were themselves the creations of Afrikaner nationalism. The government used public-sector expansion to tackle white unemployment, and underwrote a rigid white labour market behind protective tariffs.
The world in which African nationalism has come to power could not be more different. Industry produces for world markets in which controls on the social costs of doing business are whittled away. The government is dependent on an international bond market which punishes deviation from the orthodoxies of labour market flexibility and fiscal austerity. The price of raising just one modest instrument of social democratic government is probably too costly to pay.
South Africa is small-fry in this world, and incapable of setting trends. The old left-wing adage which insists that mobilising the poor will change things is not true in this instance. Even if the poor were politically powerful right now, rebellion against centre-right government, whether successful or contained, would make paid employment in this country even more scarce that it is now.
The sad truth is that this is the way the world will work until the rich countries of the North change their ways. And they will do so only in the wake of massive and lasting mutations in their own national cultures. These mutations will come. The current system will not last for ever. But when it will end, and whether its substitute will be more benign, nobody knows.
In the meantime, there are better and worse ways to play the centre-right game. In the here and now, it is the fate of our poor that they are commodities whose well-being is traded on global markets. If the government can’t underwrite their welfare, its task is to be their eyes and ears.
The government must have intimate knowledge of each economic region of this country. In the case of large-scale retrenchments, its staff must be close enough to the coalface of the economy to spearhead a project of redeployment.
And the government must insist that business plays its part in cushioning the blow of market fluctuations. Geographic regions and economic sectors must play an active role in redeploying those who are retrenched.
But the government will only play this role under a great deal of pressure. And there is little doubt that if the poor do not demand it, nobody will. Indeed, the most fruitful thinking in this direction has come from a declining trade union presiding over the slow death of South Africa’s oldest industry.
The social plan Act, first mooted by the National Union of Mineworkers at the beginning of this decade, is the most creative response to endemic uncertainty we have seen in the Nineties.
Let’s hope that our government has the moral strength to make it a precedent.