The British historian Tony Judt is dying, slowly and painfully, from a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He has written matter-of-factly about his condition — he is now, essentially, a quadriplegic — in The New York Review of Books. At some point he will be able to communicate only by blinking an eye. For now he is dictating his words to assistants.
Best known for his book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), Judt has long been an engaged and unpredictable intellectual of the left, one who is sometimes given to controversial opinions. Judt, who is Jewish, has argued, for example, that Israel is an “anachronism” that should convert “from a Jewish state to a binational one” including Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. His prose tends to be as biting as his ideas.
Judt’s new book, Ill Fares the Land, is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man’s sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book’s bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy
your floors.
But Ill Fares the Land is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the US and UK have meant — and can continue to mean — to their people and to the world.
Ill Fares the Land gets off to a distressing start. Judt tells us, right off the bat, that his book was “written for young people.” Which is something you never want to hear, really. It suggests that we may be in for a graduation speech. And Judt does occasionally serve microwavable brunch-time banalities. (“Young people must not abandon faith in our political institutions,” etc.) But these soggy bits are rare.
Instead he is persuasive about the disillusionment that smart, idealistic young people feel today. They do need a talking-to. “The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s,” he writes. “It is not by chance that historians speak of a ‘lost generation.’” Judt does not talk down to these imagined young people; he talks up to them, and the effect is bracing.
Judt surveys the political and intellectual landscape in Britain and the US since the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, and he worries about an increasing and “uncritical adulation of wealth for its own sake.” What matters, he writes, “is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is,” and he sees growing and destabilizing inequality almost everywhere. He reminds us that the word “public” — in terms of what a government can provide for the majority of its people — “was not always a term of opprobrium in the national lexicon.”
Wistfully, Judt cites some of the achievements of the Democratic-led Congresses of the 1960s, achievements that would be nearly impossible in today’s political climate: “food stamps, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, Medicaid, Head Start, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
Some of these programs are endangered, he writes, thanks to an unhealthy suspicion of our public authorities that has been “elevated to a cult by Know Nothings, States’ Rightists, anti-tax campaigners and — most recently — the radio talk show demagogues of the Republican Right.” About the absurdities of anti-tax campaigners, he observes that the notion that taxes might “be a contribution to the provision of collective goods that individuals could never afford in isolation (roads, firemen, policemen, schools, lamp posts, post offices, not to mention soldiers, warships and weapons) is rarely considered.”
Oddly enough, Judt writes, the left and right have swapped political modes. The right has become radicalized, abandoning the “social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller.” It’s the left that now has something to conserve, “the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of 20th-century reform.”
What caused this dire loss of faith in our government and leaders? Judt spreads the blame around. He criticizes the narcissistic left of the 1960s, which was largely uninterested in social justice. “What united the 60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each,” he writes. He blames that generation’s political leaders too. What the baby-boomer politicians have in common, he notes, is “the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries.”
He surveys an earlier and “superior class of statesmen,” who, regardless of its members’ political leanings, “represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities.” Politically speaking, he declares, “ours is an age of the pygmies.”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West missed an opportunity to reshape the world. “Instead,” Judt writes, “we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace.” Here is his historical judgment: “The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.”
Judt doesn’t spare today’s intellectuals, who “have shown remarkably little informed interest in the nitty-gritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically defined topics where the choices seem clearer.” He fears we will be “further disappointed” by
US President Barack Obama
and other politicians. He is even more concerned that callow politicians like Sarah Palin “can only benefit from rising confusion and anxiety in the face of apparently unmanageable change.”
If Ill Fares the Land sometimes reads like a graduation speech, then it is the Platonic ideal of one — concise, hardheaded, severe in its moral arguments. “We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents’ generation handled comparable challenges and threats,” Judt argues, noting that “social democracy in Europe, the New Deal and the Great Society” were among those rational responses.
It is “incumbent upon us to reconceive the role of government,” Judt admonishes his audience. “If we do not, others will.”
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