People Like Me: In the English-speaking world the Welfare State was born out of two vast historic events, the Great Depression and World War II. The sense of social solidarity engendered by these all-embracing experiences extended the definition of "community" to include everyone who had lived through them - right up to the British Royal Family.
IS IT POSSIBLE to renew our social contract without a sense
of community?
Heather McGhee, who heads up the Washington Office of the
UK-based research and advocacy group, Demos, calls it “the great question of
our time”.
According to the 33-year-old graduate of Yale and the
Berkeley Law School, this is because “if you look at all this hostility and
anxiety around public solutions, at its root is the anxiety about who the public is. And I think that’s
happened because of the real explosion in diversity.”
McGhee is not alone in identifying diversity as one of the
most potent solvents of the social contract that underpins our Welfare State.
But, as a young African-American, she has a better appreciation than most of
how all those “hostilities and anxieties” play out in a non-academic context.
Because no matter how earnestly we are encouraged (by people
like Ms McGhee) to think otherwise, the ordinary person’s understanding of
“community” is generally reducible to just three words: “people like me”.
In the English-speaking countries the welfare state was born
out of two world-shattering events: Economic Depression and Total War. In both
situations it proved virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to remain
unaffected by the great happenings in which they found themselves entangled,
and these common experiences fostered powerful feelings of social solidarity.
Everyone could see they were “all in this together” and relying upon one
another to make it through to the “broad sunlit uplands” promised by Winston
Churchill in the finest hour of that darkest of years – 1940.
So pervasive was the impact of the Great Depression that the
experiences of poverty and marginalisation began to lose much of their social
stigma. Working-class and middle-class citizens alike were winnowed by the near
collapse of the capitalist order, and even those whose material well-being
remained unaffected – like the Prince of Wales – could see that “something must
be done”.
And later, when the bombs were falling, that sense of
solidarity only grew stronger. In spite of pleas to remove themselves to safety
in Canada, the Royal Family refused to leave the capital. When Buckingham
Palace was hit during the Blitz, Queen Elizabeth told the press: “Now, at
least, I can look the East End in the eye.”
On the battlefields, where men of every rank and station
quite literally rubbed shoulders, the essential equality of all human-beings
was daily demonstrated. The roughest working-class battler could prove himself
a bloody hero and the bloodlines of a thousand years produce nothing more than
a craven coward. Nobility came not from class or money but from character. In
war, only deeds mattered.
This, then, was the historical forge in which the welfare
state was fashioned. When people used the word ‘community’; when they thought
of people like themselves; the picture included everyone from the King and
Queen to the local “night-soil” collector. Everyone who had been through the
fire together – and come out the other side.
To live for longer than that single generation, however, the
social contract that had been fashioned in “blood, toil, tears and sweat” would
need to be sent to the forge again. A new generation would need to feel the
hammer blows of history.
Some did.
On union picket-lines. Registering voters in the Deep South.
Opposing the obscenity of war. Demanding entry for all those who were not “like
me”. Envisioning a more diverse and democratic definition of ‘community’.
A More Diverse Definition of Community: America answers Amerika. The Pentagon, 21 October 1967.
Too few.
The moment the social contract was deemed to include people
with darker skins and different gods; the moment people’s taxes were doled out
to those whose behaviour flouted the values and conventions of the ‘community’;
that was when the solidarities born of depression and war began to fade and
wither. The mental picture of who was – and was not – “people like me” narrowed
radically. Class and money regained their lost prestige and all the old stigmas
attached to poverty and marginalisation returned.
A social contract is never for “people like them”.
This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The
Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru
Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 March 2014.
