We will attempt to delve in detail into the origins and implications of these changes in po liti cal cleavage structures and voting patterns after 1970. The story is complex, and one can analyze the relevant po liti cal changes as either a cause or a consequence of rising in equality. To deal with this in a totally satis
factory way would require drawing on a wider range of documents and re
search than I have been able to do in this book. On the one hand, one might argue that in equality increased because of the conservative revolution of the 1980s and the social and financial deregulation that followed, with a signifi
cant assist from the failure of social democratic parties to devote sufficient
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thought to alternative ways of organ izing the global economy and transcending the nation state. As a result, the existing social democratic parties and co
ali tions gradually abandoned any real ambition to reduce in equality and redistribute wealth. Indeed, they themselves helped to promote greater fiscal competition and free movement of goods and capital in exchange for which they received nothing in the way of fiscal justice or greater social ben
efits. As a result, they forfeited the support of the least well off voters and began to focus more and more on the better educated, the primary beneficiaries of globalization.
On the other hand, however, one might also argue that deep racial and ethno religious divisions developed within the working class, first in the United States in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and later in Eu
rope, as issues connected with immigration and postcolonialism gained prom
inence in the 1980s. Ultimately, these divisions led to the breakup of the egali
tarian co ali tion that had prevailed from 1950 until 1980, as the white native born working class succumbed to nativist xenophobia. In short, the first argument holds that the social democratic parties abandoned the working class, while the second holds that it was the other way around.
Both arguments are partly correct, but if we compare many diff er ent na
tional histories, we find that both can be subsumed in a more general argument, namely that the egalitarian social democratic co ali tion of the postwar era proved incapable of revising and renewing its program and ideology. Instead of blaming either liberal globalization (which did not fall from the sky) or working class racism (which is no more inevitable than elitist racism), we would do better to explore the ideological failures of the egalitarian co ali tion.
Prominent among those ideological failures was the inability to conceptu
alize or or ga nize progressive taxation and re distribution at the transnational level. During the period of successful re distribution at the national level, social demo crats largely avoided this issue. To date they have never really grappled with it even at the level of the Eu ro pean Union, much less globally.
They also failed to grapple with the issue of ethnic diversity as it relates to re distribution—an issue that did not really arise prior to 1960, because people of diff er ent national, racial, or ethno religious backgrounds seldom came into contact within national borders except in the context of colonial rule or con
flict between states. Both ideological failures point to the same fundamental question: What defines the bound aries of the human community in terms of which collective life is or ga nized, especially when it comes to reducing in equality and establishing norms of equality acceptable to a majority? As technological
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of the world into closer contact, the frame within which po liti cal action is imagined must be permanently rethought. The context of social justice must be explic itly global and transnational.
Furthermore, social demo crats never really reconsidered the issue of just owner ship after the collapse of communism. The postwar social democratic compromise was built in haste, and issues such as progressive taxation, tempo
rary owner ship, circulation of owner ship (for example, by means of a universal capital grant financed by a progressive tax on property and inheritances), power sharing in firms (via co management or self management), demo cratic bud
geting, and public owner ship were never explored as fully or systematically as they might have been.
When higher education ceased to be limited to a tiny elite, moreover, new issues of educational justice arose. Progressive educational policy was simple when it involved nothing more than allocating the resources necessary to en
sure that all students would receive first primary and later secondary schooling.
Expanding access to higher education then raised new prob lems. An ide
ology said to be based on equal opportunity quickly emerged, but its real purpose was to glorify the winners of the educational sweepstakes, with the result that educational resources were allocated in a particularly unequal and hypocritical fashion (Fig. I.8). The inability of social demo crats to persuade the less well off that they cared not only about elite institutions for their own children but also about schools for the rest helps to explain why social
democratic parties became parties of the educated elite. In view of the failure to develop a just and transparent set of educational policies, none of this is surprising.
In the final part of this book, I reflect on how we might use the lessons of history to achieve greater justice in owner ship, education, and immigration.
My conclusions should be taken for what they are: incomplete, tentative, and provisional. Together they point toward a form of participatory socialism and social federalism. One of the most impor tant lessons of this book is the fol
lowing: ideas and ideologies count in history, but unless they are set against the logic of events, with due attention to historical experimentation and con
crete institutional practices (to say nothing of potentially violent crises), they are useless. One thing is certain: given the profound transformation of po liti cal cleavage structures and voting patterns since 1980, a new egalitarian co ali tion is unlikely to emerge in the absence of a radical redefinition of its intellectual, ideological and programmatic basis.
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