ABSTRACT
This chapter examines whether the public policy traditionally associated with democratic egalitarian politics remains viable at the level of both the nation-state and regional and international institutions of governance. New orthodoxies, which span the political spectrum, naturalize global economic integration as an inexorable force that render a left politics of social solidarity either undesirable or impossible. As we have seen in prior chapters, some advocates of a “politics of difference” or of “postmodern fragmentation” abjure equality as an homogenizing value. Center-left enthusiasts of corporate globalization, such as Thomas Friedman and Anthony Giddens1 (the main social theorist of the “third way”) celebrate the extension of both industrial and post-industrial production to newly industrializing societies, while admitting that “losers” (largely former industrial workers) in the First World economies need to be supported by a minimal social safety net and job retraining. Yet these analysts ignore how the neo-liberal ideology of deregulation thwarts the capacity of developed democracies to redress social inequality. And while celebrating the rise of the middle class in India and China, Friedman and others often downplay the accentuation of mass rural poverty in areas that are excluded from the modern market economy. In addition, Friedman underestimates the structural inequality produced by the anti-union, “free trade” ideology of globalization, which often leads to the creation of export-oriented industrial production in the developing world that does little to benefit local consumers.
