Look: In the twentieth century revolutions don't work very well--they put into power people who don't seem very interested in decentralization, or in human liberty. The Rousseauian road to Utopia is shut.
In the twentieth century attempts to create higher and better forms of community via collective effervescence generated by charismatic leadership that create new gods and demons with new values for us to pursue appear to be... mistakes. As Raymond Aron is supposed to have said after watching "Triumph of the Will," Nuremburg is society according to Durkheim... The Weberian and Durkheimian roads to Utopia are shut.
In the twentieth century attempts to eliminate the market economy and replace it with something else don't work very well. The "something else" turns out to be an enormous bureaucracy that is not very interested in the free development of all being the precondition for the free development of each. The Marxist road to Utopia is shut.
Here in California the Freudian road to Utopia is still wide open, but that is not a road that we can travel together.
But meanwhile the market economy is still delivering what Adam Smith thought it would deliver--ample material prosperity, even though accompanied by substantial inequality, by a less-than-fully-humanized existence for the "lower orders," and requiring constant watch by benevolent statesmen to try to keep the masters of capital from confusing their interest with the public interest. And political democracy has still not totally disappointed the hope of Alexis de Tocqueville that it would provide space for individual liberty. A larger and better-furnished cage, if you will.
So I'm casting my lot with Smith and Tocqueville: creeping social democracy (or, more accurately, trying to stem the erosion of social democracy in the hope of being able to creep forward again in a decade or so).
When you find an alternative political strategy that will not lead to Nuremburg or Lubyanka or Tuol Sleng or Tien an Men, let me know. But you haven't found one.
Brad DeLong