Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Europe moving right

From today's New York Times:

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

As America moves towards European-style socialism, that very system is failing in Europe, where voters are electing more conservative governments and moving back towards capitalism:

Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”

European Socialists need “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can’t do in the 21st century,” he said.

Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”

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