Newell, W. R. “Social Democracy:The Atlantic Connection” 
The New Federation 2.1 (1990): 6-9.

Social Democracy:The Atlantic Connection
By Waller R. Newell

Observers of the political scene were struck by the lacklustre quality of the New Democratic Party’s leadership race, which the brief excitement of the convention did little to dispel. Where should a social democratic party go in the 1990s after reaganomics and perestroika? It is instructive to compare the NDP’s current malaise with the prospects of two other major social democratic parties: the U.K.’s Labour Party and France’s Socialists.
Not long ago, Labour’s fortunes seemed as low as the NDP’s now. A recent poll shows, however, that if an election were held today in the U.K., Labour would win a majority as large as 100 seats. This has something to do with the tribulations of Margaret Thatcher. But it is also the reward of Neil Kinnock’s determined effort to revamp his party and heal the haemorrhage that led its moderates into the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The Labourites have relaxed their policies on nationalization and economic planning and – psychologically most important – abandoned their policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Meanwhile, socialist Francois Mitterand’s stature grows daily as a leader of European efforts to fashion a common response to the astonishing changes in the Warsaw Pact countries. While the NDP intransigently opposed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, reaching such heights of partisan rhetoric that they were unable to engage in formulating alternative versions of it, France’s socialist government is a leading player in the ever more successful economic integration of Europe. Under Mitterand’s socialists, France’s own economic performance has been impressive: inflation and economic growth both around 3%, investment up by 12.2% in 1988, unit labour costs declining faster than West Germany’s. There are, of course, major structural differences between the NDP’s situation and that of British and French socialism. The Labour Party, with its long history of experience in governing, is the only viable alterative to the Conservatives. Not only is Mitterand a pragmatist by disposition, but his party’s legislative minority since 1986 has forced it to trim its nationalizing sails and achieve what social goals it can within a largely market-driven economy.
The NDP, by contrast, finds itself banished to the left pole of a centrist party system. For decades, the Liberal Party aggregated interests, secured Quebec, and banished the left and right to the peripheries. The NDP found itself in the frustrating position of a “ginger group” for the Liberals, its policies borrowed occasionally, and watered down, but doomed to a perpetual 15 to 20% of the vote.
Canada’s unique brand of federalism has also contributed to keeping the NDP from credibly running as a prospective government. Our federal system is a blend of unitary parliamentary state and provincial autonomy. Its tensions are further enlivened by the original agreement by the two founding peoples to disagree over the meaning of Confederation.
Canada’s systemic fragmentation repeatedly frustrates the kind of universal, class-based politics that NDP theoreticians see as correct for Canada’s evolution, and which might make them a credible in-or-out party, like Labour in the U.K.
But the NDP faces a host of newer problems, some of them, paradoxically, tied up with the success of its last leader, Mr. Broadbent. Like other industrial democracies, Canada in the last 20 years has been devolving its labour-intensive industries onto developing nations, becoming more service and information-oriented, converting to what Robert Reich described as an economy led by “symbolic analysts.” The gradual disappearance of the NDP’s old class base – organized labour in primary production – prompted Mr. Broadbent to try to modernize the Party’s message, scaling back the old class rhetoric and appealing to the mixed bag of issues that concerns today’s hybrid white-collar proletarian: social services such as daycare, the environment, quality education, the rights of minorities and women, the arms race.
Straddling the remnants of sixties True Believers and efforts to reach the increasingly bourgeoisified workers with their resentment of rising taxes, and their disinterest in nationalization or government programs to help the disadvantaged, Broadbent took the middle of the road as often as he could. He tried to rid the Party of its remaining ideological hostility to a mixed economy that is largely market-driven, while enhancing the Party’s commitment to relatively cost-free social issues such as feminism and minority rights. He retained the NDP’s strong commitment to Canadian nationalism. But he purged it of its original Waffle-bureaucratic-socialist coloration (a kind of Sweden of North America), and brought it closer to the more pragmatic Walter Gordon approach: regulating the grosser incursions of American ownership, protecting our existing welfare state, and a vague patriotic boosterism.
Perhaps most significantly, Broadbent was determined that the NDP would join the Conservatives and Liberals in supporting national bilingualism and some sort of special status for Quebec within Confederation. Working vigorously to dampen dissatisfaction in the Western wing of the Party, knowing the electoral gains in Quebec would be at best cosmetic, he was determined that the NDP would assume the mantle of maturity – as this is perceived in Toronto and Ottawa. It would show itself ready to respect the arcana imperium of Canadian politics: the securing of Quebec as the key to a parliamentary majority, combined with the Central Canadian notion of our nationhood as a pact between Upper and Lower Canada whose need for delicate compromise must always override the carping of the distant Prairies or Maritimes.
These reforms earned Mr. Broadbent considerable popularity, and increased his party’s Parliamentary seats to an all-time high of forty-three. And yet the very success of these reforms seemed to confirm in the end the Party’s irrelevance, leaving the taste of ashes that still prevails. For the NDP’s dramatic see-saws of popularity and stalemate under Mr. Broadbent stem from the same causes: if the NDP moves too close to the centre, they render themselves extraneous (as Bob White complains) in the presence of two centrist parties with long histories of brokering power; if they return to the purity of the left, they recover their soul but lose all prospect of reaching the majority of voters. (Even in unions formally affiliated with the NDP, only about one-third of the rank-and-file vote for the party federally.)
Despite the dissatisfaction of Bob White, Audrey McLaughlin and Stephen Langdon over Mr. Broadbent’s handling of the Free Trade deal, Mr. Broadbent could hardly have been more energetic in decrying it. There is little he could have done to capture this issue from the Liberals because, owing to the dynamics of Canadian federalism, the most Broadbent could do was rouse people on this issue to the point where the Liberals would take it over and present it in the “national” perspective that people are accustomed to from its long history as our ruling party. At the end of the day, in other words, Broadbent functioned in the classic manner as the leader of a “ginger group” for the Liberals.
The consensus that Broadbent tried to build fragmented into the positions represented by the candidates for Party leadership. Bill Barrett emerged as the candidate of the West, but also of what remains of the NDP’s working class base – the bourgeoisified workers who are not overly thrilled at the Party’s increasing identification with single-issue advocacy groups. These groups, especially the environmentalists and feminists, went to Audrey McLaughlin, along with the Ontario mandarins and Party brass. The tension between these two versions of the Party was reflected by the close vote, and especially by the disarray in the labour contingent – which emerged from the convention more fragmented than ever. Bob White was booed by CAW rank-and-file when he endorsed McLaughlin. The CLC’s Shirley Carr bolted to Barrett, remarking tellingly, “He is the one who is close to us in the Labour Movement. He understands the people of Canada very well.”
These tensions will continue to haunt the NDP. As Mr. Barrett has observed, a collision is unavoidable on certain issues – like the desire to dismantle polluting industries versus the jobs people have in them. To some extent, the tensions reflect changes in the country as a whole. Mr. Barrett almost won on a regionalist platform, and regionalism is a trend all three federal parties must cope with today. It stems from dissatisfaction with Meech Lake, but also from Meech Lake itself, which represent the see-saw, usual in Canadian history, back to an assertion of provincial autonomy after the enhancement of the unitary aspect of the Canadian federal system through the Charter of Rights. (Indeed, it is striking how little the Western opponents of Quebec’s claim to special status recognize that their own capacity to express their autonomy through the structure of Canadian federalism is, to a large degree, the result of Quebec’s constant refusal to allow Canada to become a purely unitary parliamentary state.)
At its convention, the NDP stopped just short of letting this contradiction explode. To the horror of Ontarians like Stephen Lewis and Bob Rae, Mr. Broadbent made an eleventh-hour volte face on Meech Lake, endorsing tougher language that appears to make its approval subject to a “parallel accord.” But, by electing Audrey McLaughlin, the NDP in the end provided a fig leaf for Mr. Broadbent’s Ontario-centric version of political maturity. Although both Barrett and McLaughlin criticized Meech, he was more bare-fisted, while she explicitly supports the “distinct society” formula and Quebec’s five conditions for signing the 1982 Constitution.
The almost-victorious Barrett represents an intriguing possibility, the NDP’s temptation to a Faustian pact: to give up, if only slowly and by degrees, Broadbent’s insistence on taking the respectable Central Canadian vision of Canadian nationhood and, instead, tap some of the nationalistic and populistic energies of the West. Combined with Barrett’s mild (but within the NDP, significant) tendency to be against doctrinaire Yankee-bashing and more interested in the bread-and-butter issues of working people, the NDP could become not only a regional party but also a party of blue collar and low income white-collar discontent. Politically, this course has a certain logic, but psychologically it would be traumatic, especially for the Ontario mandarins who have become comfortable with the Party’s role, under Broadbent, of standing for The Right Things without rocking the boat electorally. By narrowly electing Audrey McLaughlin, the NDP opted for continuing pretty much as before.
Nevertheless, there will be new possibilities for the NDP in the 1990s, as there will be for social democratic parties in the U.K. and Europe. There will be no return to the agenda of the sixties. But there will be – it is already beginning – a rejection of the conservatism of the eighties as represented by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. The NDP will be in a position to gain from these shifts if the Party gives up maundering about the sixties and accepts what has happened in the last twenty years. For in its heart, the NDP has never accepted these decades. It was like a bad dream they hoped would just go away.
In order to be ready for the nineties, the NDP will have to accept the minimal political realities of the eighties. There will be no dramatic increase in the rate of taxes sufficient to finance new programs of universal social insurance. Hence, there is unlikely to be an all-out, state-initiated, war on comparative poverty, as Mr. Broadbent called for in his swan-song speech to the House of Commons. The global trend towards reduced trade barriers among nations, and privatization of government services within them, will continue. So will the conversion of the western democracies into service-oriented and information processing economies, with the consequent continuing decline of class distinctions based on the means of primary production.
At the same time, there is clearly a straw in the wind about the supply-side economics of the eighties. After patiently co-operating to keep wages and inflation down, people of average and low income are now waking up to the enormous profits made in the money markets and through the sell-off of productive assets abroad. They now want a compensating larger piece of this pie in the form of wage hikes, and, as the discontent over the GST indicates, they do not believe that they can make any further sacrifices to maintain essential social services. The NDP could appeal to these broad-based dissatisfactions. But not through a return to a frontal assault on capitalism or “the multi-national corporate welfare bums.”
There was no greater sign of the Party’s desperation during the last election than Broadbent’s last-minute trundling out of such hoary slogans, his references to “Bay Street” in an era when this symbol has little meaning, especially for people under thirty-five. The Party must develop policies to address new demands for moderate-priced housing, daycare, protection of the environment, pay equity for women, encouragement of private-sector investment in education and technological research, and so on. But it must do so through a mixture of imaginative regulation, decentralization, and tax and investment incentives, like the new housing policy developed by the Peterson government in Ontario. Electorates are growing tired of trickle-down economics, but even less do they want a return to the tax-and-spend statist liberalism of the sixties. As the Democrats are finding out in the U.S., the key is to reach out to the middle class on issues that, while “progressive,” have no class baggage and are not part of some larger social blueprint; that is, reforms that are progressive and at the same time bread-and-butter.
Finally, the dramatic change in the international situation in the last five years will also create new possibilities for social democratic parties, here and elsewhere.
There can be little doubt that the NDP’s policy on unilateral withdrawal from NATO has been irresponsible and a political error. Mr. Broadbent never displayed the vigour to get rid of this policy that he did in removing other holdovers of the Waffle group or fighting down opposition to Meech Lake. He lacked the vision of the U.K.’s Kinnock, who was willing to tough it out against Labour’s hard left over unilateral disarmament, winning the reward of increased respectability and support for his party. The NDP’s policy of unilateral withdrawal from NATO, retained during the height of the neo-Stalinist regime of Brezhnev, with its repression of dissidents at home and its unprecedented arms build-up and aggression in Afghanistan, the Horn of African and Central America, was a sad departure from the moderate mainstream of social democratic foreign policy. The NDP’s NATO policy stems from the programmatic anti-Americanism that was introduced into the Party in the sixties, and from which it cannot or will not fully recover. Mr. Broadbent’s discomfiture with the NATO policy led him to be evasive about it in public, and he was deservedly nailed to the wall for his lack of candour by John Turner in the 1988 leaders’ television debate.
To be sure, perestroika will cause some further short-term discomfiture for the NDP. Conservatives and moderate Liberals will rightly be able to say that the NDP was wrong all along about arms control: that (as the late Andrei Sakharov said) no progress in arms control would have been possible without the firmness displayed by NATO and the U.S., and that (as Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze recently admitted) the Soviets violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty by building a massive radar facility designed to speed their development of a defensive weapons system. In general terms, there is no unflattering characterization of the Soviet Union made in the seventies and eighties by moderates and conservatives in the West that has not been amply confirmed in recent years by the highest echelons of the Soviet leadership. These will be embarrassing truths for the NDP to deal with. At the same time, if dismantling Marxist-Leninist regimes in Eastern Europe means that liberal capitalism has indeed triumphed everywhere, then social democratic parties will be at a loss to hold up, by contrast, a competing ideal of humane socialism, avoiding the excesses of capitalism and Marxism. If capitalism alone is triumphant, they will all have to move further to the centre.
But the picture is not all bleak. Indeed, perestroika may, on balance, work to the advantage of the Labourites, French socialists and, to some degree, our own NDP. Since there is seldom a very exacting standard of justice in political life, especially over intellectual sins, the hard left within social democratic parties will gradually gain the boldness to claim that the changes effected by NATO, Gorbachev and Reagan prove that their unilateralist and neutralist policies were right all along. Because the policies pursued during the eighties by moderate and conservative governments  – intransigently opposed by the hard left – have helped bring about conditions whereby the hard left’s views now more closely approximate reality, it is not too much to expect that they will try to claim the credit and reap the political advantages. The decline of the Cold War and, consequently, of defence spending will appear to vindicate them, though these changes are coming about because of policies precisely the opposite of the ones they urged throughout the seventies and eighties. 
In general, the NDP will have less to worry about in the future from the implication that it is “soft” on foreign policy – a charge that its opponents always bring out at some point in elections. Even as recently as the last American presidential election, George Bush was able to hurt Michael Dukakis’ image mightily by playing on the remains of the Brezhnev era relationship between the superpowers. The changes of perestroika have been so rapid that, with the Republican president now considering huge cuts in defence spending, someone like Dukakis might do considerably better in an election held today. Margaret Thatcher’s inability to continue plausibly pointing to the Cold War threat may also help Neil Kinnock slide into power.
Finally, given the pronouncements not only of remaining Communist Party leaders but also of genuine popular leaders like Lech Walesa, Eastern Europe is not likely to pursue pure American-style liberal capitalism. It will aim for a mixture of market forces and statism more closely akin to Western Europe. After all, dismantling the spurious socialism imposed on it by Stalin will hardly prevent Eastern Europe, as it rejoins the continent, from developing the genuine social democracy that is a deep historical current there. As we know from Louis Hartz and Karl Polanyi, social democracy is Europe’s special contribution to mitigating the excesses of the free market – the re-institutionalization of Europe’s pre-modern concern with the common good on the basis of modern rights and economic productivity. After their glow of admiration fades, Americans will find that the Eastern Europeans still want to go the European way. This could make the socialist parties of France and the U.K. look more appealing, more like the trend of the future, not less. And to the extent that Canada is – as Hartzeans would argue – affected by this “tory touch” of European concern with common good, the NDP may also share in these somewhat shinier prospects for social democracy. 

Waller R. Newell teaches in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa.