USA: Residual Welfare Society and Libertarian Democracy

Abstract

The theory of social democracy combines normative and empirical elements in distinctive ways. It offers an account of human, civic and social rights that states and transnational organizations ought to embody in their legislation and everyday practices. It analyzes the risks to individual health and well-being for which society should assume collective responsibility. But it also links the achievement of social democratic principles and aims to the future prosperity, stability, and legitimacy of advanced capitalist societies. If a society of this kind should systematically violate fundamental rights and expose its members, unprotected, to risks that could have been avoided or should have been compensated, one might expect that it will face rising social disorder, anomie, and declining legitimacy. Furthermore, without a well-developed and effective public sector, it would fail at the “steering” imperatives that any advanced society must manage successfully: macroeconomic stabilization, infrastructure maintenance, education for high-tech occupations, transnational cooperation, etc. That is why social democratic programs have been adopted in virtually every advanced (post)industrial society, sometimes even by liberal or conservative regimes: “it is impossible to imagine that any capitalist democracy may achieve stability and continuity without systematic—and expanding—uses by the state of the main elements of the social democratic policy agenda.”