Gideon Strauss has started about the new Left he envisions as a future for Christians in politics. Crooked Timber posted a link to this book review by Tony Judt examing the political divide between Europe and America, with coffee as a central metaphor. A couple of interesting bits:
To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble and the “American way of life” that cannot be sustained. The American pursuit of wealth, size, and abundance ?as material surrogates for happiness ?is aesthetically unpleasing and ecologically catastrophic. The American economy is built on sand (or, more precisely, other people’s money). For many Americans the promise of a better future is a fading hope. Contemporary mass culture in the US is squalid and meretricious. No wonder so many Americans turn to the church for solace.
Yet despite such widely bemoaned bureaucratic and fiscal impediments to output, Europeans appear somehow to manage rather well.[5] And of course the welfare state is not just a value in itself. In the words of the London School of Economics economist Nicholas Barr, it “is an efficiency device against market failure”[6] : a prudential impediment to the social and political risks of excessive inequality. It was Winston Churchill who declared in March 1943 that “there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.” To his self-anointed disciples in contemporary America, however, this reeks of “welfare.” In the US today the richest 1 percent holds 38 percent of the wealth and they are redistributing it ever more to their advantage. Meanwhile one American adult in five is in poverty?compared with one in fifteen in Italy.[7] The benefits don’t even trickle down anymore. To many foreigners today this is a distinctly unappetizing vision: the “American way of life” is at a steep discount. As an economic model the US is not replicable.[8] As a social model it offers few redeeming qualities.
Before you think I’m some sort of socialist (maybe I am, maybe I’m not), Judt doesn’t have all the answers, and neither does Europe. But his criticisms ring true, and they need to be addressed, especially by Christians.
Posted on 24 January 2005