On Germany as the new Messiah - Pankaj Mishra in LRB:

“‘The abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis.”

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“Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and trace programme, is reinstating its Kurzarbeit (‘short-work’) scheme, which was first used in the early 20th century but proved particularly valuable after the 2008 financial crisis. South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people – a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort. Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus. China managed to curb its spread and has since dispatched medics and medical supplies around the world.
Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. Nevertheless, the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in history still comes as a shock to some. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve almost exclusively for government: healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1986, ‘the most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’”

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“Hailing globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George W. Bush managed to create a political and journalistic consensus around the notion that ‘the global expansion of democracy is the ultimate force in rolling back terrorism and tyranny.’ In the New York Times magazine, Niall Ferguson urged Americans to re-establish with ‘military force’ the British empire of ‘free trade’ and ‘balanced budgets’. In a cover story, the Atlantic described torture as a ‘necessary evil’. Andrew Sullivan called for the ‘extermination of the enemy in all its forms – relentlessly, constantly, insistently’. Time, Newsweek and the Spectator, as well as the Murdoch-owned media, fervently promoted fantasies of Anglo-American supremacism. In retrospect, this ideological synergy of bumptious men was a case of catastrophic success, which guaranteed maximal shock and bewilderment in its aftermath. In recent years, civil wars in Iraq and Libya, the financial crisis, Brexit and Trump’s election have made it clear that democracy cannot be implanted by military force; that humanitarian war creates forces such as IS in the ruins of destroyed states; and that while state economic controls can make a ‘communist’ country central to global capitalism, Anglo-American free marketeering results in intolerable inequity.”

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“Few narratives are more edifying, as economies tank and mass unemployment looms, than the account of the ‘social state’ that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. ‘The state must take the matter into its own hands,’ Bismarck announced in the 1880s as he introduced insurance programmes for accident, sickness, disability and old age. German liberals, a tiny but influential minority, made the usual objections: Bismarck was opening the door to communism, imposing a ‘centralised state bureaucracy’, a ‘state insurance juggernaut’ and a ‘system of state pension’ for idlers and parasites. German socialists saw that their Machiavellian persecutor was determined to drive a wedge between them and the working class. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s social insurance system wasn’t only retained and expanded in Germany as it moved through two world wars, several economic catastrophes and Nazi rule; it also became a model for much of the world. Japan was Germany’s most assiduous pupil, and the Japanese, in turn, inspired China’s first generation of modern leaders, many of whom spent years in Tokyo and Osaka. Despite the defeat and devastation of the Second World War and the US occupation, Japan has continued to influence East Asia’s other late-developing nation-states: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.”

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“Buffeted by socio-economic changes and rising inequality, Germany faced early on what Japan and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a matter of life or death. Military and economic rivalry with Britain was a daunting enough prospect for their fledgling state. But, as disaffection increased among the classes uprooted and exploited by industrial capitalism – a political party representing the interests of the working classes emerged in Germany decades before it did in Britain – the fear of socialist revolution also preyed on the minds of German leaders.
They could not set about removing impediments to individual freedom in the way their counterparts in laissez-faire Britain were then doing, nor could they entrust economic affairs to the invisible hand of the market. As the deliberations of the influential Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) between 1872 and 1882 reveal, unfettered economic liberalism was seen as a threat to institutions and to a still fragile national unity. The safest way to defuse the volatile social question, the association decided, was to ensure state-guaranteed protection for citizens exposed to extreme socio-economic tumult and radical insecurity – what Bismarck, seeking to outmanoeuvre his socialist opponents, described as ‘moderate, reasonable state socialism’.”

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“However, after the most radical upheaval of our times, even the bleakest account of the German-invented social state seems a more useful guide to the world to come than moist-eyed histories of Anglo-America’s engines of universal progress. Screeching ideological U-turns have recently taken place in both countries. Adopting a German-style wage-subsidy scheme, and channelling FDR rather than Churchill, Boris Johnson now claims that ‘there is such a thing as society’ and promises a ‘New Deal’ for Britain. Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto. In anticipation of his victory in November, the Democratic Party belatedly plans to forge a minimal social state in the US through robust worker-protection laws, expanded government-backed health insurance, if not single-payer healthcare, and colossal investment in public-health jobs and childcare programmes. Businesses pledge greater representation for minorities; and book and magazine publishers seek out testimonies of minorities’ suffering while purging unreconstructed colleagues.
Such tardy wokeness, unaccompanied by major economic and cultural shifts, invites scepticism – black lives, after all, have increasingly mattered to corporate balance sheets. The removal of memorials to slave-traders is likely only to deepen the culture wars if it is not accompanied by an extensive rewriting of the Anglo-American history and economics curriculum. Certainly, the new-fangled welfarism of Britain and the USwill remain precarious without a full reckoning with the slavery, imperialism and racial capitalism that made some people in Britain and America uniquely wealthy and powerful, and plunged the great majority of the world’s population into a brutal struggle against scarcity and indignity.
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin outlined the necessity of such a moral and intellectual revolution in the starkest terms, arguing that ‘in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves,’ to ‘discard nearly all the assumptions’ used to ‘justify’ their ‘crimes’. The fire Baldwin imagined in 1962 is now raging across the US, and is being met with frantic appeals to white survivalism. ‘You must dominate,’ Trump told state governors on 1 June, threatening to unleash ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’ on his political enemies. Understandably, people exalted for so long by the luck of birth, class and nation will find it difficult, even impossible, to discard their assumptions about themselves and the world. But success in this harsh self-education is imperative if the prime movers of modern civilisation are to prevent themselves from sliding helplessly into the abyss of history.”

Read the article here.

Indeed, the abyss of history is fairly deep. And yes, Rhine capitalism or social capitalism might be more resilient than the American i.e. Anglo-Saxon tradition of treating government as an eternal enemy.

Pankaj Mishra fails to mention that the founding fathers of West Germany did understand that the state could become an enemy of the people, at least of many people. That’s why Germany is highly decentralized and Rhine capitalism is built on the belief that citizens should be prevented from falling into the abyss of poverty, first and foremost because these citizens tend to vote for political parties that will ruin and destroy the state.

Also, the minimum wage was only recently introduced in Germany. Rhine capitalism in other words is still very much capitalism.

Also, for the sake of convenience the Hartz concept, reforms of the German labor market, introduced by the Schröder government, is not mentioned in this article.
Fair enough, the German Messiah is not a perfect Messiah, but we cannot afford to wait for the perfect Messiah.

All this is not a problem for me, but I’m wondering if the German model is good enough for the revolutionaries of today.

And I’m willing to credit Bismarck for laying the foundations of Rhine capitalism, but who should we blame for the catastrophes in the 20th century? The Kaiser?

The German model appears to be working quite well, actually I’m (I cannot repeat this often enough) all in favor of it. But who is going to tell the Americans that they should become more German? If you want to become more German you have to accept defeat first, and I’m not seeing many Americans willing to do that.
Carter tried to talk about American defeats, then Reagan came.
But who knows, miracles exist, maybe in ten years or so my fellow Americans will have decent and not overly expensive medical insurance.