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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "The Truth is in the Middle" - The Liberal Ideal in an Era of Nationalism
 
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Dreddout
Oct 1, 2015

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Jack Gladney posted:

What caused the world to abandon Keynes and capitalism with a robust safety net? I keep hearing about stagflation and oil crises as the prods that rose neoliberalism out of the muck, but were those crises inevitable?

This is a really naive question, but was postwar capitalism always doomed to collapse, with Milton Friedman and his pack of ghouls simply giving the system a few more years by crushing its victims to feed the top? Or could we still be living in a less racist 1963 with a big middle class and lots of work for all of the welfare state hadn't been disassembled?

I know that's a dumb question, but I'm inarticulate.

My understanding is a lot of it has to do with the fall of the Warsaw Pact. After all, Social Democracy was an ideology created to provide an alternative to a socialist revolution. During the cold war it was used as a salve for wartorn Europe who had to contend with the expansionist eastern bloc. After things had stabilized in Europe the welfare programs were gradually stripped away, and with the fall of communism the liberal powers didn't have any reason to keep them around.

Basically Social Democracy only works when there is a real threat of a Workers Uprising.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "The Truth is in the Middle" - The Liberal Ideal in an Era of Nationalism