NYT: Centre-Left in Retreat, Davos Elite 'Deluded' Over Welfare Statism and Globalism

In a scathing condemnation of the attitudes of the “Davos elite”, the political editor for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper haspenned an article for the New York Times blasting the “two built-in contradictions” of social democracy.

Jochen Bittner, who writes once a month for the NYT, begins by dissecting the electoral irrelevance of Germany’s Social Democrat party, led by former European Parliament president Martin Schulz. He diagnoses social democracy’s decline by outlining two major “contradictions”.

Firstly, that you can broaden the domestic welfare state and its crony capitalist underpinning while shifting policy-making to larger, transnational institutions like the European Union. Secondly, that this same welfare state can exist in a world of “open borders” or open migration.

“Instead of at last addressing this contradiction, prominent Social Democrats appear intent on solving the dilemma of internationalism by making it bigger. Martin Schulz, the party’s leader, has just proposed a “United States of Europe” by 2025 — and to expel European Union member states that won’t join in his flight of fancy,” he writes of the first problem.

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