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At the end of the 20th century, while socialism remained a vibrant force in European society, a culture of individualism and consumption all but squeezed the welfare state out of existence. This text looks at the course of social reform and Western politics after Communism

Here, Birnbaum traces the decline and fall of social reform in Europe and America. He shows, for example, that William Howard Taft railed against socialism, by which he meant anything restricting the market.

AbstractThe rest of the world worries about Trump's bellicosity, ignorance, and patronising arrogance. In the US he presents a clear and present danger to civility and democracy. His xenophobia and racism, his deep resentment of our educated elites and his ignorance of and contempt for much of our history mark his politics. He has found a supportive public, perhaps about 40 per cent of the electorate, in what the experts politely termed 'low information voters'. Many are white working‐class citizens who think themselves left behind by the economy (rightly) and suffering disadvantages as compared to allegedly favoured immigrants, Afro‐Americans and Latinos. A large charge of anger at the independence of women accompanies this complex. Trump, schooled in the most vulgar aspects of television, keeps attention on his antics whilst a piratical gang of ideologues and political operatives staff his government. They are proceeding with systematic intensity to the destruction of our regulatory state and the eventual destruction of our welfare state. Perhaps the special prosecutor will bring down Trump; perhaps we face a severe constitutional crisis as he defies the juridical system. Trumpism will not disappear with Trump. He has brought to the centre of our politics the entire spectrum of our social pathologies, has seized the Republican party and neutralised a Democratic party which cannot quite escape nostalgia for its better day and is, above all, incapable of presenting solutions to the twenty‐first century problems of the nation.

At first glance, Germany appears, economically, to be quite unusually successful. Despite the budgetary and financial crises affecting the other nations of the European Union, the German unem-ployment rate is declining. It has a positive export balance, and its own budgetary deficit is shrinking due to increases in national income and tax revenues. Indeed, the other European nations expect a relatively prosperous Germany to take more financial responsibility for the Union as a whole—a view not supported by a German majority. That majority thinks that the German welfare state, with health insurance and retirement pensions and considerable investment in culture and education as well as material infrastructure, is exclusively a national achievement. Having recently spent billions on domes-tic income transfers (from West to East after reunification in 1990), the German citizenry prefers to keep its money in German pockets. Disdain for Eastern and Southern Europeans serves as a solvent, washing away attention to internal differences in income and life chances that might otherwise move to the center of German politics. A truly yellow national popular press, television commentators as clueless as those we know here, and rigid professors of economics insist on austerity as the one true path to economic salvation. Austerity is prescribed not only for other Europeans, but for those Germans so improvident as not to belong to the upper income groups.