I’ve finally got back to this feature, in which I write a weekly essay on a word or concept of interest. To help Googlers, I’m making the heading more self explanatory

As I’ve noted, the word ‘democracy’, until recently one of the most fiercely contested in the language is now fairly straightforward. “Social democracy’ by contrast, remains tricky although as with some other hard-to-define concepts you know it when you see it. The basic tenet of social democracy is that major social decisions should be made democratically rather than being determined by tradition or the outcomes of market interactions in which individuals have influence proportional to their endowments of property rights. Most of the broader connotations of the word ‘democratic’ that go beyond strictly political/constitutional meanings are associated with a social-democratic outlook. An example is Furphy’s famous characterisation of his book Such is Life – temper, democratic, bias, offensively Australian.

In practice (and unlike socialism which I’ll discuss another day), social democracy is a fairly well-defined social order. Although it has no perfect exemplar, it has been realised, more or less, in most European countries, to a lesser extent, in Britain and its former colonies and, in to a much lesser degree in the United States. It is a social and economic system which includes a mixed economy with both public and private enterprises and an acceptance that society has a whole has a responsibility for protecting its members against the standard risks of the modern lifecourse (illness, unemployment, old age and so on) and for providing everyone with equal opportunities to develop their potential to the maximum extent possible. An immediate implication is that, while absolute equality of incomes is not necessary, inequality should not be permitted to reach the point where some citizens have massively more power than others, and where their children have a big headstart over other children.

All of these claims are rejected to a greater or lesser extent, by the ideology that dominated political debate in the last quarter of the 20th century, which is most commonly called neoliberalism. The central claim of neoliberalism is that a democratic political order can coexist with radical social inequalities and that democratic government should not intervene to offset such inequalities.

From the crisis of Keynesian social democracy in the early 1970s until the financial crises of the late 1990s, social democracy lost ground fairly steadily. But the neoliberal program has failed in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe and, most recently, in its heartland, the United States. Some form of modernised social democracy looks likely to be the dominant idea of the 21st century, as it was for most of the 20th.