Discomfort of Strangers
The Guardian published David Goodhart’s Prospect essay Discomfort of Strangers yesterday. In it he discusses what he believes to be the ‘progressive dilemma’: that solidarity and diversity conflict.
While I think there may be some truth in this, the welfare state literature certainly hints at some important weaknesses in his argument. In particular, he could learn much from a closer reading of Swedish history. Much of his argument rests on an ‘America v Sweden’ claim: diversity and minimal government or homogeneity and solidaristic social democratic government. As he puts it: ‘You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogenous society with intensely shared values’.
While it is true that Sweden is an ethnically homogenous society it is a gross oversimplification of its history to therefore suggest its generous welfare state results from ‘intensely shared values’. Indeed, as Peter Baldwin has demonstrated the Swedish welfare state didn’t emerge from a ‘oh - we are all the same, let’s be nice to each other and share our wealth’ altruism - could politics ever be so other than in a childish imagination? - but from the same intense political bargaining and conflict found in the USA or, for that matter, anywhere else. Working class were pitted against middle class, urban against rural, industrialists againsts trade unionists, employed against self-employed.
Where Sweden differed from countries like the USA & UK - as Esping-Andersen has argued - was in the way its political institutions favoured comprise and consensus politics over adversarial winner takes all politics. A proportional voting system and a strong parliamentary system of government have allowed the progessive core to dominate the political system and produced the gradual move towards a socialist system of which the Fabians would have been proud.
Goodhart says it was Conservative MP David Willetts who first drew his attention to the progessive dilemma. If the UK had a more progessive constitutional settlement the chances are Willetts and Co would be talking of a different progressive dilemma: how to break the Lib Dem-Labour coalition’s stranglehold on power given the fact that some 2/3 of the UK electorate persistently back progessive parties at elections.
