British intellectual David Goodhart is worrying that left-liberal commitment to a large, distributive welfare state is threatened by cultural and ethnic diversity. He’s responding to David Willetts’ acute insight that the current Euro-left is pinned on a bit of a contradiction:
It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: “The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”
That’s why welfare reform actually helped the American welfare state. And why affirmative action is such a corrosive feature on our society: it’s what happens when big government merges with group rights in a society that is too heterogeneous to find real common ground. Maybe the marriage debate is a part of this as well. Our society is now astonishingly diverse in terms of different kinds of families. From two-income childless yuppies to arranged Muslim marriages to lesbians with kids to seniors on their second marriage to suburban single dads and more traditional nuclear families: can we feel a bond to each of these arrangements as if they were our own? My own view is that radical cultural diversity can only be managed in the long run by ratcheting back what the government can do, by limiting its moral authority, by restricting its distributive take. (So marriage becomes less explicitly religious as a social institution and more explicitly civil. At least that’s the limited government argument of “Virtually Normal.”) But we are currently expanding government and demanding a more coherent “politics of meaning,” even while cultural and moral diversity explodes. Something has gotta give.
The Dish 