Politics devoid of idealism: 'Ill Fares the Land'

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

However we need to be careful about how we assess the benefits of privatisation. A more sensible and holistic appraisal of the costs and benefits of privatisation must be undertaken. We should more carefully consider who really bears the risk associated with these projects if they fail, or are poorly run. We should also be more sceptical about how the risk analysis surrounding these projects feeds into the management fees charged by private operators. I think more and more these things are happening, and the public private partnerships of the future will be better than those of the 80s and 90s thanks largely to experience.

Judt’s analysis of the growing trend towards privatisation paves the way for one of the most telling passages in the book:

If public goods, public services, public spaces, public facilities - are devalued, diminished in the eyes of citizens and replaced by private services available against cash, then we lose the sense that common interests and common needs ought to trump private preferences and individual advantage. And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force.

The case in point being of course the preemptive war in Iraq, but this is just one colossal example of the daily victory of realpolitik, and might against right that takes place in the every day lives of ordinary people. Idealism and altruism are suffering under the foot of self-advancement and self-interest in all walks of life. Numbers wishing to attain a business or legal education are increasing, whereas those seeking to enter the public service or obtain a liberal education have declined. Indeed business schools didn’t really exist anywhere until 20 years ago. No doubt this is aided and abetted by the growing requirement for students to privately finance their own tertiary education. These trends bread cynicism and undermine civic engagement and democracy itself.

Overseas, cynicism concerning politicians and political institutions has been manifested in low voter turnouts and political demobilisation. In Australia it has been manifested in growing claims that neither side of politics can be differentiated from the other, declining civic participation and membership of the traditional conservative and Labor parties. Alarmingly many of the baby boomers that currently dominate political debate “do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of principles or policies … They convey neither conviction nor authority.” We seem trapped in a descending cycle of cynicism, suspicion and mistrust. Convinced that there is little they can achieve, today’s politicians do little and thus the cycle continues unabated. Need we look any further than the current Australian election which appears to be descending into a battle over who can promise least.

According to Judt our current Leaders are “beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher’s children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.” As a young person I can viscerally relate to this criticism. The baby-boomers benefited from full employment, free university education, and high quality public services and now they try to unwind many of these rights for their own private benefit. These are decisions that would have been unthinkable to the great post war generation of liberal statesmen. We seem to have lost touch with that Burkean, yet strangely mutualistic conception of the social contract as a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born.

Judt bemoans the fact that following the fall of communism and the “end of History” politics has lost its idealism. Politics devoid of idealism is reduced to a form of social accounting, management speak and the day to day administration of men and things. While this probably warms the hearts of many conservatives it is toxic to the Left. Need we look any further than Gillard’s election slogan echoing that most managerial and meaningless of phrases “going forward”. I imagine this slogan is profoundly alienating to the base of the Labor Party. How sadly it compares to Ben Chifley’s rousing “light on the hill” speech in which he defined the role of the Labor movement "not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody's pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people”.

If I had to level a criticism against the book it is that economic growth, or growth in nominal income terms appears to be a bit of straw man. Economic growth does not by itself imply the unsustainable exploitation of real resources or the environment, however perhaps as the mantra of free market ideologues it may appear thus. In the developing world kick-starting economic growth will be crucial to reducing global inequality in the coming years. However economic growth without addressing the externalities of climate change and environmental degradation will be disastrous. We can have sustainable economic growth that creates opportunities for future generations and lifts billions out of poverty so long as there are mechanisms within this system that ensure that the real limitations to growth are fully taken into account. Although I concede that this may very well be easier said than done and by no means assured, this is a possibility that Judt may not have grasped.

Overwhelmingly I am sympathetic with Judt’s thesis that much of what is wrong with contemporary politics can be addressed by the classical political language of injustice, unfairness, imprudence, immoderation, inequality and immorality, and to a certain degree social democrats have forgotten how to talk about these issues. However, the current malaise of social democratic politics goes beyond a simple failure of prosecuting the age old arguments forcefully enough.

Ultimately the failure of the speech act has revealed a wavering of belief or confidence in social democracy as a universal “good” in itself. What is needed is a renewed sense of confidence that peace, full employment, and the universal provision of social services are achievable and worth fighting for.

Judt has provided an inspiration for defending the gains of the past, and prosecuting the case for the “incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances” urgently required. I heartily commend this book to those who share his concern about 30 years of neo-liberal dominance of the public policy landscape.