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Social Democracy was Always Going to Die

I count liberal Ruy Teixeira as a good guy. When I read his stuff I respect his point of view. And he’s admitted that his 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority that he co-wrote with John Judis got it wrong. Now he has written a history on Substack of “The Long, Slow Death of Social Democracy.” It’s helpful to me because I think that he gets it wrong. Says he:

For three decades, social democracy was the most successful product of a working-class movement that had long contained both revolutionary and reformist elements.

Wrong! Social democracy was driven by educated intellectuals. And then

The Keynesian economic consensus in Western industrial democracies during this period produced strong economic growth, low unemployment, rapidly rising living standards, and government action to provide protection and security for the average citizen.

Wrong! Keynesian economics just says spend and tax and inflate. But…

as the 1970s dawned, three factors converged and reinforced one another to undermine social democracy—and eventually lead to its death. First, the social democratic economic model lost effectiveness; second, the social democratic base got smaller; and third, the social democratic influence within the Left weakened.

That, I think, is the conventional liberal view of What Went Wrong.

In my view, “the social democratic economic model” was always wrong. It just got lucky in the post-WWII period, probably because World War II had primed the economy with tons of factories that could be turned from churning out jeeps and tanks and bombers to churning out Chevrolets and Fords and airliners.

Take Boeing as an example. They developed swept-wing jet bombers with Pentagon money in the 1940s and then swept-wing jet 707s in the 1950s.

My Narrative is that the economic problems we have today were created by social democracy, right from the start.

• Labor unions. Nothing wrong with the workers forming a union, but plenty wrong when government helps unions boost wages above what the market will bear.

• Social Security. A government-run pension system is not a good idea. We coulda mandated IRAs for all. But FDR was looking for an election winner in 1935 so he pushed the pay-as-you-go gubmint system.

• Employer and government funded health care. If women were talking to each other about the best and cheapest bargains in health care instead of just complaining about the bureaucracy and delays and denials of care, we’d all be better off.

• Government welfare. Net result is that lower class men don’t work much and lower class women don’t marry much.

In my view, “the social democratic base got smaller” because, despite the headwind of government programs, workers graduated into the middle class and didn’t vote Democrat any more. Today, of course, ordinary white Americans experience social democracy as a direct attack on their way of life.

In my view, the reason “the social democratic influence within the Left weakened” was because the Left — meaning the educated credentialed class — went on to bigger and better things like race and gender and climate that curiously funded the members of the educated credentialed class with jobs and grants and political and administrative power, and left the rest of America behind. Which was the name of the game all along, but nobody talked about it.

My Narrative about the last century is that the liberals got lucky, for a season. For one thing, back at the start of the 1930s total government spending leapt from 11 percent GDP to about 20 percent GDP. You could call it buying votes. In the 1950s, when social democracy seemed to be working, government spending was below 30 percent GDP; now it’s 35-40 percent GDP.

Point is that, the higher government spending (and regulation) the more you rigidify the economy, the more that the rulers have decreed “we are going to spend money on this, and regulate that” the less that actors in the economy can wriggle away from government mandates and adapt to changes in science and technology and try new stuff without permission.

The bottom line is that politicians and regulators and academics and activists really don’t have a clue. The more power they have, and the more that the economy is influenced by their passions and mandates, the more likely it is that economic growth and prosperity will be damaged by their mistakes.

But we are all humans. Each of us tends to think that if only they listened to me things would have turned out all right.

And that’s the eternal question unless your name is Elon: how do you know that your idea is the right one?

| Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:09:10 GMT |

How Liberals Have Wrecked Society

What was going on at the track meet, when Karmelo Anthony, of Centennial High School, entered the tent of the Memorial High School track team. It led to an altercation with Austin Metcalf that ended with black guy Anthony stabbing white guy Metcalf with a knife.

What was going on?

I will tell you. This is basic male territorial behavior. Scientists have detected it in the behavior of male chimpanzees as they defend the border of their territory from the troop next door. And they have detected it in the behavior of human hunter-gatherers.

In those societies the males do nothing except sit around sharpening their weapons and looking for trouble with the troop next door.

But with the advent of agriculture human males were domesticated to work and to provide. It developed into the monogamous marriage in which the male provided for the wife and children instead of just letting the women work it out amongst themselves while the guys were out hunting. The principal contribution the male now made was in the heavy labor of plowing. Experts tell us that women tend to suffer miscarriages when doing the heavy work of plowing with horses.

This cultural framework survived the industrial revolution as people moved from the country to the city. A working-class family lived in a single family row house: the husband went out to work and the wife usually stayed at home. But with child labor the wife and children often went out to work.

I say that the welfare state, in particular the Great Society of the 1960s, has broken the mold. As Charles Murray noted in Coming Apart, today in the white lower class the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much. That’s because a woman don’t need a man to keep the groceries coming when she’s pregnant. She looks to the government to support her.

Liberals did it.

As a vile racist, I say that this culture is particularly notable in the black community, where about 70 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers.

And as a racist, I say that young black males are reverting to the culture of the hunter-gatherers, where the males just defend the border or attack the territory of the neighboring high school. Or, according to Google AI:

Mass gatherings of teenagers, commonly known as “teen takeovers,” are surging across U.S. cities. Organized rapidly via social media, hundreds of youths have descended on public spaces like shopping malls, beaches, and transit hubs, occasionally resulting in chaotic brawls, property damage, and gunfire.

Don’t they got no jobs?

It is my belief that 97.2 percent of our current problems are the fault of our liberal overlords that, for the last century or so, have ruled over us on the belief that they know best and that they should have the political power to administer and regulate just about everything.

That’s a problem, I believe, because politics is only good for going to war against the enemy, and 97.2 percent of life involves interacting with people who are not the enemy. In our society almost everything is supervised and regulated by the state, i.e., an apparatus of force rather than cooperation. Society is much more complicated than that, and cooperation is almost always more effective than force — except when killing Nazis.

Our mission, if we accept it, is to unwind the vast apparatus of force and compulsion deployed by the modern state and return most of life back to non-political interaction. For instance:

• The moral, the distinction between good and evil. It works mostly by shaming people that do evil things and celebrating people that do good things.

• The cultural, the distinction between the way we do things and the way we don’t do things. The point here is that cultural norms represent the accumulated knowledge of society about what works. You don’t have to go with the culture, but people will think you are a kook if you don’t/

• The economic, the distinction between the useful and the wasteful. The market economy, of course, is our modern development of how millions of people can do useful things and cooperate through the price system to do things that benefit ourselves and other people. All is not roses, of course. If you don’t do useful things you may go broke.

• The aesthetic, the distinction between beauty and ugly. I think there is probably a deep meaning in the celebration and love of the beautiful. More research is needed.

It’s really not that hard. Politics and government are really good for fighting wars and arresting criminals. For most everything else, there has to be a better way. And we humans have developed all kinds of ways to interact and cooperate without resorting to force.

| Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:56:28 GMT |

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