Here’s the meat of Matthew Karnitschnig’s post at Politico EU:
The movement’s founding ideals — a generous welfare state with universal health, education, pensions — have long been realized, helping to lift generations of Europeans out of the proletariat into the middle class. In many countries today, the average social democrat is just as likely to have a white collar as a blue one.
What’s more, technology has forever altered the nature of employment. The days of back-breaking assembly-line work are long gone. And the large industrial labor unions — once social democracy’s core constituency — have faded, leaving the movement’s leaders to chase the prosperous middle class.
As a result, social democracy has lost its raison d’être. In the German campaign, the party struggled to find a central theme, finally settling on the issue of “justice.†To many on the movement’s left, the slogan sounded like mockery.
Like the U. S. political system and its once upon a time thriving egalitarian economy, social democracy in Europe depended on its remaining a sort of island in relative isolation from the rest of the world. Tear down the walls and you tear down the systems that depended on those walls.
