Ideas are important, sure, but in the end it wasn’t ideas that overthrew social democracy, and it isn’t just ideas around Tories and Labour are coalescing but shared interests, agendas, institutions, networks.
Agree, but the word “just” in there is important. I did not mean that it was, for example, ideas alone that overthrew democracy in the 70’s (I’m not a Hegalian!), but that the ideas of people like Friedman found common purpose with vested interests like Ford and GM in the US who heavily funded Friedman’s Chicago School, it then found a home in the Whitehouse of Nixon who was happy to overthrow democracy in Chile to clear the way for Friedman’s Chicago Boys to carry out their economic experiment as well as an acquiescent Fed.
In this country Monetarism first found favour in Callaghan’s government and when it failed under Thatcher a compliant Treasury bent over backwards to re jig it to achieve the same ends by lowering wages instead of creating massive unemployment.
So yes, I absolutely agree that the Tories, Labour, vested interests, institutions and agendas have coalesced to present us with what we have today, but the common purpose around which they have coalesced is the idea that government spending is bad for the economy, just as those same actors coalesced around the idea that spending was good for the economy when it was politically expedient after the War.
My own view is that the coalescing around so called Keynesianism was thought necessary because of social unrest and the fear of revolution which was very real in the imagination after revolutions in Russia and Germany. Whereas after Thatcher’s decisive victory over the Miners, such concerns were overcome and the natural instincts of the ruling elites who are opposed to the ideas and objectives of social democracy, found first an opposing idea in neoliberalism and common ground with big business, institutional compliance and acceptance from both political parties.
Democracy itself is an idea first and foremost, but only found expression in this country at the beginning of the 20th century because that coalition of interests thought it expedient. The ideas, objectives and achievements of social democracy are being undone by an alternative idea about government spending has been successfully promoted by a range of different actors for over half a century and spending on public services is no longer expedient.
This has found expression recently when the very principles of parliamentary democracy have been overturned and voters described as extremeists.
