Again, I think this is the very myth I’m talking about. “Did not do a very good job” in relation to what? In relation to what was possible at the time, with the state of education and technology at the time, or in relation to an arbitrary ideal set up in hindsight specifically in order to … make liberalism look bad in comparison to the touted ideal of what hypothetically successful socialism would be like?
If you have to lament that unions became too powerful and broke the system it’s because your system is flawed.
Unions didn’t “break the system” but they were hijacked by alien, Marxist agents, who saw them as a ready-made practical realization of their theoretical “vanguard of the revolution” ideal, instead of the liberal spontaneously self-organized collective self-help institutions they originally were. Essentially, what happened in the 19th century was that working class people were in fact self-organizing their own response to the downsides of capitalism, in terms of welfare, education and medical care, on multiple fronts. But the welfare spontaneous order got fucked by Marxism, and the education/medical care spontaneous order got fucked (mainly) by the Right (intention of creating docile cannon fodder) taking education (and later medical care) into state control.
And then the First World War happened, and a huge chunk of the young men who had been engaged in the previous processes was killed (e.g. when we think of the war poets, we think of the famous middle-class ones, but the most notable thing was the vast outpouring of writing by working class people, both men and women). By that time, what with the war itself necessitating a great deal of centralization, and the general idea of State Good taking over the intelligentsia on purely theoretical (NOT PRACTICAL) grounds, civilization entered a period of state dirigisme.
You see, the tail is wagging the dog in all of this: it was the theoretical idea that the state could do better than what private means was already doing, that started to take over, not some great found failure in the private provision. What actual failure of private provision there was, was inflated in order to make the theory attractive.
If you want to know the real historical roots of the problem, it’s actually Bismarck’s Right-wing proto-“social-democratic” reforms. Capitalism created a bunch of working class people who were finding themselves with some leisure time to think, to self-educate, to find their own forms of entertainment, etc. The politics they were tending towards was mostly liberal (think of the Manchester Guardian’s origins), but somewhat to the Left. And they were self-organizing. This put the fear of God into the Right, who, having lost the battle for kingship and privilege in the great liberal/democratic revolutions, wished to bring the situation under control again. They tried to pre-empt liberal and socialist demands by instituting carefully controlled socialist measures that would take the bite out of working class self-organization by getting the kindly State to provide those elements of welfare and education that the working classes were starting to organize for themselves. Bismarck’s reforms were the most thoroughly consistent and became the model for the modern state, but all the main European countries (and inspired by them, the US too, eventually) experimented in a similar way. Bad money drives out good, and the rest is history.
The bathetic irony is that some socialists, and later social democrats, approved of, and took further the very same type of basically organicist, Right-wing organization of society via the State, and called it “socialist” ;)
Of course it turned out the private sector would never even come close to providing what was needed,
Evidence? Remember, the liberal idea was never just to “rely on charity”, it was to free the energies of the working classes to individually and collectively help themselves. Consider education. There’s quite a major “tell” here. In the case of the UK, if you look really closely into this, you will find that, as someone who did look into it (E. G. West) said, “almost universal schooling and literacy before the 1870 Act allowed the state to ‘jump into the saddle’ of a horse that was already galloping”. When the state first took over education in the UK towards the end of the 19th century, ostensibly to “plug in gaps”, all it did was take over a bunch of schools that had already been built and already existed. It didn’t build many new schools for quite some time, in fact. And lots of those schools, which had been privately built, privately funded (by philanthropists, religious groups, or working men’s associations and the like) still stand today; as do many of the hospitals that had been created at roundabout the same time, in the same way.
Now the question of whether this “came close” to providing “what was needed” may be arguable. What I would argue at a minimum would be that if you look into it for yourself critically, rather than relying on what people you already agree with say, you will find the “gap” to be narrower than you supposed.
Again, this is mind-virus stuff - and in these cases (particularly education and medicine), it’s as much about the syndrome of the Right trying to regain control of the situation as it is about the Left hareing off after its own ideals. IOW, many of these reforms were paternalistic (and many of the reformers patrician), not the result of a careful analysis of facts by nascent modern-style liberals of the day, finding fault with their former classical liberal ideals.
Irony here too: nowadays, it’s the Left that’s bamboozling the Right into taking on its own terms of discourse (some of the stuff I’ve been complaining about). In those days, it was the Right that won the memetic war, by co-opting liberal ideas, injecting them with organicist Right-wing metaphors, and transforming Left-leaning liberalism into the socialism - in the American case, liberalism - of central control. I’m hoping this may be ringing a bell in the dim, distant recesses of your mind ;)
Now let’s be clear on something; I am absolutely a liberal and a humanist. I think that it has been empirically demonstrated that universal medicare and universal education are vital to the success of modern society. It has been empirically demonstrated that people should not have the right to discriminate against their fellows. It has been empirically demonstrated that minimum wage laws and government run welfare is vital to protect labour against the excesses of private enterprise. These are above all, practicalities that recognize the way the world actually is compared to how you wish it were.
(Apart from the question of discrimination, which of course I agree with) you may believe this has all been empirically demonstrated, but it actually hasn’t. The debate is still live - partly of course because it’s extremely difficult, but partly also, because there are elements of persuasion and hypnosis threading through it all that make it difficult to avoid cognitive bias. Even with history, it can often be tendentious rather than objective.
We won’t see eye to eye on this, but can I just gently remind you that your own “side” isn’t necessarily free from cognitive bias either? ;)
Rejecting reality because you would like to adhere blindly to a 19th century ideology is stupid whether you are a classical liberal or a communist. Ideas are either good or bad and should be decided so on their merits as it pertains to society today, not because you are dogmatically following or opposing one or another 19th century political theorist.
Agreed.
