HIGH TAXES DO NOT SOCIAL DEMOCRACY MAKE
I share Jacob's skepticism about this argument, for an entirely different reason. We don't need to look as far as the US to talk about the destruction of the social democratic welfare state. Granted, the welfare state was always a racist and exclusionary machine, but Australia's policy of dumping undocumented immigrants and refugees in internment camps in Nauru looks more like the militarized borders of Pat Buchanan's America, Joerg Haider's Austria, or John Ashcroft's Guantanamo Bay. While I'd hardly call myself a social democrat in any sense - I'm firmly aligned with the extraparliamentary direct action crowd - i don't really think this is what Eduoard Bernstein had in mind, and it strikes me that if anything, this is democracy of the herrenvolk sort.
Actually I'm not sure I buy the dichotomy you present between "social democratic welfare state" and "racist state." Who ever said that social democracy couldn't be racist? Surely you could have a social democracy that was completely walled off to outsiders, no?
ReplyDeleteI don't think I do make that dichotomy, Jacob. I note that "the welfare state was always a racist and exclusionary machine" largely because i think "Europe's modernization" and the history of the social democratic state is one of racialized understandings of progress and privilege. But i also think that Australia resembles its fellow product of british settler colonialism far more than it does the neoliberalizing nation states of western Europe.
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