The Tyee has published my article You're Not Wrong to Want to Be Swedish, a review of Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land and a Canadian documentary, Poor No More. Excerpt:
Ironically, the middle-class war babies and early boomers got into university in the 1960s, in numbers never seen before, and immediately rejected the system that had put them there. Social democrats had built the postwar world as a way to protect whole countries. Their kids took that for granted, and clamoured for individual rights and freedoms. Individualism led to the "Me Decade" of the 1970s, and then to the Thatcherism/Reaganism of the 1980s.
In hindsight, the 30 years between 1945 and 1975 were a golden age, when a single worker could support a family, buy a house, look forward to a good pension and send the kids to a free or very cheap post-secondary education. In most industrial countries, the income gap narrowed. In the U.S., Democratic and Republican administrations from Truman to Nixon promoted a stable employment market, education opportunities and social programs.
But as Judt also notes, the social-democratic state could make horrendous mistakes: public-housing projects that became instant ghettoes, and schools that didn't teach.
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