>For New Labour types over here, and I guess 'New Democrats' over there,
>everything since is progress, so the mid-century compromise represents
>everything that is wrong. If you endorse the present set-up, then it
>stands to reason that it is superior to what it replaced.
>
>I see things rather differently.
>
>What has happened since is not that the excluded have been included, but
>that the included white working class has been excluded.
>
>The recessions of the early eighties and the early nineties dislocated
>all the elements of the social consensus. The family wage was
>effectively abolished. The intermediation of the labour movement between
>labour and capital was dismantled. Representation in social democratic
>parties was removed.
Yes, much jawboning went into preparing ideological groundwork for the end of social democracy. The old settlement was attacked as "rigid," "inflexible," "too centralized," "too bureaucratic," etc. Social democratic parties effectively said, "Farewell to the Working Class!" In the process, post-New Left, post-materialist rhetoric of Andre Gorz & New Times varieties got coopted into ideological elements for the new world order.
>It appears that our own times are less discriminatory, and in a sense
>they are. Racial and sexual divisions mean less because the relative
>privilege of the core of the working class has been dismantled.
>
>But that has not been through the elevation of those 'minorities' that
>were excluded, but by the demotion of the white working class.
Polarization among women & racial minorities must be added here (the end of AFDC, the expanding prison-industrial complex, etc.). While a significant number of women & racial minorities entered professions that had been closed to them before, poor women & racial minorities are even poorer than before.
>Nostalgists like Thomas Frank, Cornel West, Kevin Phillips etc have an
>exaggerated view of the advantages of the prior dispensation because
>they are unhappy with the present. However, they do have a point. The
>boundaries of the socially included have been narrowed, not extended.
I take your point, but my main argument is that the Post-World War II settlement brought about its own downfall, due to the success of anticommunist part of the settlement. Relative privileges & material comfort of the white working class of mid-20th century America were bought at the price of loyalty oaths to American imperialism. And the payoff of their loyalty, since it helped to destroy communism & populism abroad, is their relative decline at home (the ruling class said to American workers, "thank you, now fuck you"). Organized labor in America (nor its organic intellectuals) has never admitted this causal relationship, and as long as they evade this truth, they would only go for populist & protectionist politics (as well as "human rights" imperialism), as opposed to real international solidarity.
>Has education improved? No, I suspect not. If Britain is anything to go
>by, the university system has been reduced to a mechanism for reducing
>youth unemployment. The multi-cultural syllabus is as awkwardly
>ideological as the previous one, if not more so.
Access & variety of contents have improved (to the chagrin of the nostalgic Right like Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, etc.), but quality must be about the same, and economic value of college degrees (despite college premiums relative to high-school diplomas) hasn't improved (see excerpts from "Recent Trends in Wages, Incomes, and Wealth in the United States" by John Schmitt, Lawrence Mishel, and Jared Bernstein I posted). Nonetheless, the expansion of education (secondary & tertiary) is a great achievement (even when simply regarded as a form of dole in Britain, as you note) and should be defended as such.
Yoshie