This page is a first introduction to the idea of New Social Democrats. It was written in May, 2008, as a prospectus for a Center for Social Democracy.

By Ed Knudson

The victory of so many Democrats in the 2006 congressional elections caused me to believe that a new era of politics may be possible in this country. Having lived under conservative Republicans and Democrats for four decades had led me to feel nothing else was possible. So this victory came as a pleasant surprise.

However, I also wondered what it was that these Democrats would pursue in terms of the actual content or substance of their program for governance. That is, I had a sense that though individually each candidate could make an argument for why they should be elected in their local areas, the Democratic Party itself and the general intellectual atmosphere among those on the left contained no comprehensive or cohesive political philosophy or policy direction which could provide direction to specific legislative proposals for how to govern the country. In other words, many new Democrats had been elected but there was no obvious understanding of what these Democrats would do when they got to Washington D.C. The public is tired of what conservatives have been offering for the past four decades but in general there is a big void in terms of how Democrats view a future for the nation.

It was then that I thought it may be helpful to do some research on the idea of Social Democracy. So in the past year and a half I have been reading books and watching politics with the aim of determining whether to try to develop a website on Social Democracy and what such a website could mean for the formation of some sort of actual organization. In this paper I want to begin to put together initial thoughts and proposals.

I. Historical Interpretation

My basic intellectual approach may be expressed in the phrase "historical interpretation." I have been doing much reading and reflection on politics for the past four decades. I was actively involved in efforts to elect George McGovern in 1972 as the chairman of a county party organization in northern Minnesota. It turns out that election was a watershed in terms of Democratic political strategy. Since then Democrats have believed that it is impossible to get their candidates elected based on a "liberal" political platform.

The primary fall-back idea for Democrats has been what used to be called "interest group liberalism," that is, that the party consisted of a coalition of various interest groups such as workers, blacks, environmentalists, and liberal women. This is now called identity politics, politics based on personal characteristics. The primary figure associated with this approach was Walter Mondale, and to a certain degree it hearkened back to the New Deal era.

Aware that this is not adequate many party thinkers today are trying to come up with a broader political concept and the idea that seems to be gaining most support is that of the "common good," though there is little actual content to the idea in terms of policy. The most significant influence on the party has come from those who believe that the party must align itself with business interests in order to win elections, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, and reflected in the governing philosophy of Bill Clinton. But that move seriously moved the whole country to the right, leaving no public space at all for alternative understandings of the relation of government and economy.

The party now is seriously divided over differing approaches to economic policy related to free or fair trade, for example. But those pushing for fair trade do not have a significant substantive vision for governance beyond support for old New Deal programs such as Social Security. The left has no consistent reading of history since Franklin Roosevelt, and has been completely on the defensive concerning the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson.

In fact, Democrats have been running away from their past rather than defending it and learning from it. This is a most important truth for Democrats to face. Republicans have been successful by creating an interpretation of history that totally denigrates the 1960s as a time of outrageous excess. Beneath this interpretation, of course, is a hidden racial text, an association of Democrats with black causes. In my own work to think through these years it has become perfectly clear to me that race has been at the center of politics for the past four decades; it is backlash politics, Republicans have been able to cash in politically on resentments and anger of white people, especially, of course, in the white South which turned Republican after the civil and voting rights bills of the 60s.

Since the riots following the killing of Martin Luther King Republicans have been elected on law and order platforms. Conservatives don't want more government unless it is the police and the military. The United States is becoming, many feel, an actual police state. Incredible amounts of tax payer dollars have gone to prisons rather than schools, politics has been based on code words about welfare and social programs which, in the hidden message benefit blacks more than whites. It must be emphasized that the Republican approach has been thoroughly negative, against government, against persons who are painted as evil, against finally everything accomplished by Franklin Roosevelt, including the United Nations.

The negative attack has been so powerful that Democrats have ceased to even be able to call themselves "liberal," a term associated with supporting the cause of racial justice. Democrats have tended to accept the Republican interpretation of history and thus found themselves always on the defensive. The dominate corporate media has thoroughly internalized this interpretation as well; news is defined as that which fits within the frame of the negative conservative views. Even now in the current election issues are defined in relation to the 1960s and the candidates' relation to leaders of that time. A black presidential candidate has been forced to disown his pastor and congregation located on the Southside of Chicago; the rest of society cannot hear an authentic message coming from the black community. The media have so adopted the negative conservative interpretation that it cannot see let alone appreciate the reality of life within black urban communities.

This will not go away until there is another prevailing interpretation of history put forward in the public consciousness. So one of the primary tasks of a Center for Social Democracy would be to assist in the formation of such an alternative interpretation. Take any of the current "issues" which are debated; each one cannot be understood apart from its location in the history of the country.

And this is no small thing. The act of interpretation requires courage because it is never based on complete theoretical or empirical knowledge. Achieving the latter are vain attempts upon which too much scholarly effort today is expended in the various disciplines which divide human experience into so many abstract conceptualizations each one claiming universal efficacy. In fact, the nation today faces such huge issues and crises partly because of the failure of scholarship; academics have run and hidden in their own groups and associations speaking their own esoteric languages rather than dare to risk their thought to the political process as public intellectuals (with many excellent exceptions, of course). One objective of a Center for Social Democracy would be to identify those scholars with the courage to interpret history concretely for the sake of a public future for the people this nation.

One model for this comes from a surprising place, what for many are still holy scriptures, the bible, which primarily consists of interpretations, interpretations of the history of Israel, of the figures of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul (currently of some interest in philosophy), concrete interpretations of real history of real people. Apart from any sort of religious belief, it is only from interpretation of social experience that human beings are able to gain some sense of themselves as individuals or groups, to gain some sense of the meaning of their lives and how they are related to both the past and the future, to gain some sense of what is right and what is wrong in how they should live their lives in relation to others. Normative answers to what should happen in the future cannot be gained by scientific study but only through interpretation of history, our own history, this history of our own times. The fact that our history has become global complicates the picture substantially but also represents a quite exciting call to our generation, a call to engage in interpretation which takes into account, indeed, all the peoples of the world in addition to our own people in the United States. This means the resources for interpretation have become much more than that which is narrowly known as the western tradition.

I have found it helpful to distinquish among three levels of abstraction, three levels of interpretation of experience. Highest is general theory where the focus is on large segments of reality, such as "the economy" or "the people." The history of ideas related to these big chunks of reality is the realm of philosophy and those fields of modern knowledge such as economics, political theory, and the various hard and soft sciences. The issue of the relation between the universal and particular bedevil these divisions.

The second level of abstraction is the institutional dimension, how ideas are actually implemented through real associations and patterns of human activity. Rather than general economics, this level focuses on actual factories and business organizations, for example, and often reveals clashes with abstract theory about how the world is supposed to look according to theory.

Finally, the third level is the life world of the individual person and his/her beliefs and understandings in relation to others. How the three levels interact with one another through time is the stuff of history. Telling the stories of these interactions is how people make sense of their lives and become able to make decisions about what they want to do and how they want to live. Politics can be much defined as contests over what stories constitute the truth of history.

This definition points to a strong subjective factor in politics. It is not just about numbers and abstract theories, though these are, indeed, very important in any current intellectual project. Politics cannot be comprehended as a general system nor through objective methods, though these play a role. Politics is about the views and perspectives of real people in real situations trying to communicate meaningfully with others, creating communities of interpretation within a constantly changing cultural context. The words used to create intersubjective human understanding are absolutely crucial in the political process which itself thereby creates narratives of meaning by which people make choices in a democratic society. This website hopefully will help facilitate a community of interpretation known as New Social Democrats.

II. Why Social Democracy?

The term Social Democracy refers to a particular political history and set of orientations to the fundamental issues of modernity or the modern industrial state. It also refers not inconsequentially to actually-existing governing philosophies, political parties, and states, primarily in the Nordic countries as well as in European nations such as Germany. The United States has taken its primary understanding of language and politics from England and Scotland; it is time for the country to learn from broader civil experience. This is not unprecedented in this country, politicians such as Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Warren Magnussen of the state of Washington both explicitly looked to the social democracies of Nordic countries for inspiration for their political philosophy and policy direction. Magnussen was responsible for the consumer legislation which provides the current widespread protections from corporate abuses which Americans still enjoy. Henry Jackson, also of Washington, drew inspiration for both civil and social rights from his own Scandinavian heritage, though he is remembered for his fierce anti-Communism and the fact that some of his staff members became leading neoconservatives.

Most Americans are social democrats. Much of the work of a Center for Social Democracy would initially be devoted to documenting that statement. Even though President George W. Bush made a very valiant effort, for example, to change the nature of Social Security, he failed. In fact, the Republican attempt to roll back the New Deal programs in general has failed. The conservative political era is coming to an end, the cultural power of backlash politics can no longer work. People want the government to provide basic public goods such as material infrastructure and economic security and community amenities such as parks and social support for those who are disabled or unable to care for themselves. The only reason conservatives have any chance to get elected is that Democrats are not yet able to put forward a clear and compelling substantive vision for the nation based on an alternative interpretation of history. It is difficult to create such a vision out of thin air. Fortunately, there are actually-existing societies in the Nordic countries which can be studied to determine prospects for social democracy in this country.

A key concept to be put forward by a Center for Social Democracy as I envision it is the notion of "civil society." I think of this as a breakthrough political concept. It is not a new concept, but one which if used consistently in political thinking today can make a big difference in how policy is debated and evaluated.

Briefly, politics today tends to be debated with two antagonists, those who support or oppose "governmental" solutions and those who support or oppose "free market" solutions. But there is a third big dimension involved in all politics and economics, that is society itself, that is, the people themselves and the way they live their lives by their own choices. I want to refer to this as a free society. I think both politics and economics should be evaluated based on the degree to which they lead to a free society.

I think of a free society as everything people want to do when they are not working in economy or under management by government. For example, workers during early industrial development fought for unions by which they could create the eight-hour day. They didn't want to have to work all the time. They wanted something else to do with the time of their lives, that something else is what I call free society. Both government and economy have now in our time come to totally dominate society. Many of the articles and materials here will document that fact. Even the internal mental consciousness in individuals and actual physical chemical reactions within the body are now manipulated by the various media, as postmodernists are demonstrating. Can freedom of the individual be something of value when corporate media are given easy access to the internal functioning of the human brain? Only a strong political movement can expose the level of current domination on the part of both governmental and economic institutions over human individuals and communities. Only a strong political process can achieve a free society.

The concept of Social Democracy puts people first, puts society first. If either government or economy damages society then politics is failing the people. Exactly how and when this is true and what can be done about it are questions which would be central to the project here proposed. The breakthrough nature of this concept is that it overcomes the primary division of political thinking and organizing today, that between government and market solutions to problems; the dominant question becomes rather what is good for society.

The idea of civil society may be thought of as a conservative concept. Both socialism and capitalism put the economy first, they believe economic processes are central to everything else. It has been conservatives historically who have said that the society is also important. Current day social conservatives have placed their lot with economic liberalism and have such a reduced vision of the social process, equating support for the family with rejection of abortion and gay rights, that their political orientation can only be called irrational. What we actually need today is a true conservative approach to social experience, one which values what is unique in social experience, one which does not reduce everything down to exchange relations, one which has the full interests of healthy family life at the center of its attention and concern, one which understands that a healthy family life is impossible apart from a thriving local community and apart from the context of a free society. By "family" here we do not mean to hold up any static structure of the past. In fact, one of the most important challenges for the future is the invention of multiple new forms of family and other meaningful small group social life. It cannot be determined in advance what a truly "free society" would be, since it would be the product of actual free persons making their own choices about how to live with others. But, clearly, new forms are necessary in an age of limits, a time when the future demands massive change in use of energy and ways of relating to the physical earth.

Classic liberalism, or contemporary libertarianism, has failed because of what modern social science has demonstrated, the free individual does not just pop into existence as a fully rational choosing self; individuals are the creations of their social experience. If social life is destroyed, as it has been under contemporary emphasis on economics and material gain, then the lives of individuals are decimated, there is no family life, community life, social life to enjoy, choices are limited, the most important matters about which people should have choices are no longer available. What is needed today is new understanding of what sort of governance and economics is necessary to create a civil and free society for all.

III. Target Audiences

The goals of a Center for Social Democracy can be discussed by pointing to four main audiences. Imagine a website which at the top has the name "New Social Democrats." The "new" in the title indicates that the past definitions of what makes a Social Democat are being here re-established based on reflection on the history of this country and on actually-existing Social Democracies. One goal would be, indeed, to invite persons to become involved in a process by which a new definition of Social Democracy for the United States in particuar would be created.

Under this title there would be four major divisions of the website indicated by these words: Citizen Activists, Workers-Professionals, Public Scholars and Elected Officials. The idea is to bring together in one website the concerns and contributions of all four of these audiences in a mutually-supportive way focused on the concept of Social Democracy. The most important of these audiences would be the last one, elected officials. The overall goal of the Center would be to identify, nurture, and elect leaders who are able to move the country in the direction of Social Democracy. Most organizations and websites focus on only one of these target audiences; communication is fragmented, new ideas take a longtime to get around the various groups. By focusing on four related but different audiences, however, new ideas would have instant debate from four different starting points.

One of the themes of the center would be "the primacy of politics." Politics is the way societies get established and sustained. There are no mysterious forces here, nothing functioning behind the veil of human understanding, no hidden hands or mechanical forces of history (neither capitalist nor Marxist), societies are created by decisions of human beings through politics. A democratic society is one where the people themselves make the decisions about their common life together. Such a society is not once made and then exists forever. Rather, a democratic society is one which must be re-created again and again by each generation through political engagement. The greatest danger facing the United States today comes from those who have dominated politics since 1980, those who believe government itself is the enemy of the people. It is only through a politics which is able to use government to protect the people from exploitation and oppression that a free society is possible. Those who turn away from politics, or who use a false politics to teach the people to hate their government, demonstrate thusly that they do not believe in a democratic society. Politics is primary in democracy.

So efforts would be made to enlist persons in the target audiences in projects sponsored by the Center primarily through a website. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of citizen activist groups in the United States. We will make efforts to identify these groups and establish linkages with them rather than compete with them. The idea would be to support and encourage such groups and generate a mailing list of contacts to use on key issues as they may arise. The engagement by activists in various specific causes needs to be sustained through inspiration from the many cultural and philosophical resources in the Social Democratic tradition

The two primary constituencies of currently existing Social Democracies are workers and salaried professionals. These are the groups which have been able to create political parties by which to govern their societies in the Nordic countries. In the United States labor movements have tended to identify with employers or trade associations to such a degree that they have not provided political leadership for the whole society, leaving the field to other forces. But there are now signs of change here as unions have been decimated by conservative policy over the past decades. Workers need more than a narrow vision of their own self interest, they need to realize now that politics must serve not narrow interests of some workers but what is good and necessary for all workers. And the associations of salaried professionals need to begin to declare their solidarity not with employers, who also represent narrow interests, but with other workers of all kinds in creating a politics which does not demean and neutralize those who do the labor which makes life possible for all. It is a disgrace that for the past four decades the incomes for people who do the work to make society possible have not increased while the rewards for financial manipulation have tremendously increased. Politics is one way by which types of work are determined to be for the common good and rules must be re-established by which the rewards for work are more justly determined. This is not "redistribution," it is a matter of basic fairness and justice in the economic system. Conservative politicians have promoted a situation where now there is as much income inequality and concentration of wealth as existed before the Great Depression in the 1930s. The wealthy are taking so much more out of the system than they deserve that their actions now threaten the security of our economic system itself, which will lead to misery for all. The wealthy do not really believe in democracy, they do not want to change a system which benefits the few by the sacrifice of the many. Only if workers and salaried professionals decide to declare their solidarity with and among one another, rather than with the wealthy, will it be possible to create a political process that can lead to a free and civil society for all.

In addition to citizen activists and workers-professionals, the Center for Social Democracy would seek to engage, focus the attention, and promote the careers of public scholars. An example of a public scholar is Paul Krugman, a full-fledged economist well-known in his field, who also writes a column for the New York Times. He tracks scholarly literature and brings the best of it to bear on specific public issues. In a recent book he offers an interpretation of recent economic history; from World War II until about 1980 the policy of the country had been to build up the middle class; from 1980 to today it has been to reward the wealthy with more wealth. He knows economic data well enough to provide the facts and figures. And in his judgment, only strong labor unions can provide for a more equitable distribution of the rewards for work, not only for workers in unions but for all workers since unions create basic standards for wages in the community. Such ideas are really at the center of the concept of social democracy. There need to be many more such public scholars and the Center for Social Democracy would seek to identify and encourage such scholars in many of the different fields.

But, as indicated above, there is a need to develop a more integrated or wholistic perspective from among the various theoretical disciplines so as to see how education and economy are related, to see how cultural activity relates to family life, to understand the way whole communities function in relation to others, to investigate how medical practices concerning drugs affect the psychological/cultural life of individuals in specific social settings, the way politics works in relation to all of these dimensions. There is an immense amount of scholarly work done on all these and other issues, yet it doesn't really adequately get into the public sphere as resources for debate. For example, it is now clear that school choice does not work, even its theoretical proponents are retreating from their earlier promotion of the concept, yet conservative politicians have made such political "hay" from attacking the public schools that the scholarly knowledge now available will probably not influence them. In fact, on this issue as many others conservative ideas have been tested over several decades and found to be wanting, such as privatization of government. This is a time to try to bring public scholars together to demonstrate the degree to which this is true and offer alternative ideas from a perspective of social democracy.

Finally, the fourth audience for a Center for Social Democracy is Elected Officials and the various professional consultants who have become associated with the election process in more recent years. What can be done initially is to simply make some of the electoral campaign resources of past social democrats available to people who are considering elective office. Materials from progressive movements of the past can be collected and made available. Specific "how to" articles can aid candidates in how to create a message, how to build policy ideas, how to build a personal constituency, and so forth. Furthermore, all the products of the above discussions among citizen activists, workers-professionals, and public scholars would be designed as to be most helpful to actual public elected officials and candidates. The idea would be not to just have a think-tank separated from politics, but an ongoing process designed to be relevant within concrete political reality.

The goal would not necessarily be to create a new Social Democratic party, but to be a movement within the Democratic Party. Therefore, one aspect would be also to study the specific organization of Democrats in this country and how to influence those structures. Specific case studies of successful campaigns would be one method to do this.

IV. Website Features

Writing is not a mechanical exercise. A writer cannot write in a vacuum, without an audience, without a community of readers. That community of readers "pulls" the words out of the writer, so to speak. One of the purposes of the website would be to create a space for cogent and compelling writing about social democracy and the political process for each of the four audiences mentioned above. There would be a different section on the website for each of the audiences. Articles and essays and blogs will be written with a particular audience in mind. Although visitors to the website may be interested in more than one of these sections the emphasis on these four audiences should help to keep materials focused rather than being written in such a general way, as in the popular media, that they fail to be helpful to readers who believe in the "primacy of politics." Each item in the website would also be categorized by subject so that easy searches can be done by subject.

A. Blogs. An effort would be made to identify one new writer each week who would write a blog, with at least two entries each week to keep them current and interesting. Blogs would be personal commentary on news of the day or issues raised in other blogs. Blogs would be written with one or more of the four audiences in mind and also categorized by subject. Each blog would have a title. After a year we would have, hopefully, nearly 52 different blog writers. Each blog writer would generate his or her own audience not only to the blog but to the whole site. So this is one way to build the audience of the site as a whole. It would also enlist a number of people who would begin to think more consistantly about social democracy. Over time these would become quite a good resource for conversation and ideas.

B. Platform. One page would present a "platform" of policy ideas for governance at federal, state, and local levels. To begin this page would be limited. But as discussion develops it would be possible to formulate ways and means by which to initiate, debate, and decide on what the platform should include. A platform provides a means of focusing on particular ideas and directions for people to use in practical political settings. Of all the ideas and proposals generated in the process one method of identifying the most compelling new ideas would be this platform page.

C. Projects. On the website "projects" would be particular political organizing efforts to achieve a specific result as soon as possible. These would be new efforts, or supportive of movements already begun. In the choice of projects a criterion would be whether the proposed project is actually achievable with the resources at hand or which could be developed. The site itself would be a place to recruit interested persons to work on a project. For example, in reading the three-volume biography of Martin Luther King by Taylor Branch last summer I became outraged about the massive effort of the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover to spy on Dr. King and systematically influence the news media to discredit King and hinder his movement for civil rights. Hoover is still immortalized by having the FBI building named after him. A specific project could be to get that name changed. Some would say this is a small thing, not worth doing. Yet, small projects such as this can bring people together to accomplish something leading to more organizing around more important projects. And, culturally in terms of the interpretation of history, the names of buildings do make a difference in how the past is understood and evaluated.

D. Campaigns. One goal would be to actually identify electoral candidates who would run for office at the local, state, or federal levels. These candidates could then be supported by the constituency of the website. Some candidates may want to run with explicit endorsement of social democratic ideas, others not. It would be possible to offer political consultation to these candidates. Many of the materials of site would be oriented to helping such candidates win elections. Once groups of social democrats are organized in a local area it would be possible for them to sponsor and work on behalf of candidates. There is a tremendous need to encourage real, substantive candidates to run for office. The low quality of so many current politicians is disheartening for many voters.

This essay has been a first introduction to the idea of establishing this website. It may sound too ambitious. But I myself am personally interested in all these matters and want to spend my time exploring them. I hope there is going to be some other folks who will feel drawn to this project and together it may be that we can make some difference in the public context of our times.