> On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Doug Henwood crossposted from Michael Lind:
>
> > [from Michael Lind's review of James Galbraith's Created Unequal, Washingon
> > Monthly, November 1998]
> > The most egalitarian countries in the world are
> > the nation-states of Northwestern Europe and East Asia -- countries that
> > are racially and culturally homogeneous and also have low rates of
> > immigration.
>
> Not anymore they don't. One in ten Swedes is officially an immigrant; in
> fact, all the social democracies experienced tremendous inflows of
> immigration starting in the mid-Seventies. And there are millions of East
> Asians living in Japan. Still, they haven't gone the US/UK route of
> hideous polarization, thanks to something Lind completely fails to mention
> -- strong unions, Left parties and socialist cultures.
Quite so. But you forgot to question what in the WORLD Lind means by calling the nation-states of East Asia egalitarian. Several hundred million women (bare minimum) would surely not agree....
> > Nor is it a coincidence that the Civil Rights
> > revolution drove most of the former constituents of the New Deal Democratic
> > coalition into the Republican party, where they now vote against government
> > programs identified with "others" -blacks and immigrants.
>
> Oh, *yuck*. This is unutterably vile, the sort of ressentiment-filled spew
> you'd get from a mid-level staffer of the DNC, who slobbers over
> Clinton's compassion (it's there, you just have to look hard enough) and
> insists that everything went to hell after Kennedy was shot (they say
> Oswald, but they mean Castro). I can't believe anyone could argue that the
> Civil Rights movement was responsible for the death of the Great Society.
> This is like arguing the democratic activists of the Weimar Republic were
> responsible for Auschwitz -- but perfectly consistent with the politics of
> Clintonism.
Yes, but one cool it down and can simply note, as Pivens and Cloward have on numerous occassions, that the white working class was already deserting the Democrats in the 1950s BEFORE the dreaded 60s came along, and that the New Deal depended upon the exclusion of blacks for the support of the Solid South which made passage of the programs possible.
(No other advanced industrial nation ended up with such a weak, insufficient and administratively fragmented welfare state subject to the political shenanigans of thousands of state and local administrations who were political enemies of those a true welfare state would do the most to directly serve. But all that is just a weeee bit too complicated for Mr. Lind.)
Thus, Lind falls into the oh-so-common habit of starting the film at the point which serves his purpose and just CAN'T IMAGINE how the rest of us could be so stupid...
And what do you know? He does it the same way that all the lamentors of post-60s politics do.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"