Did Social Democracy Ever Escape the Conservative Work Ethic?

The goal of the progressive work ethic is to create a society in which "all workers must be honored and paid decently, regardless of their occupation" (252) and a dignified life is that not dependent on market performance. However, the mechanism Anderson describes runs in the opposite direction when she explains how social democracy actually maintained itself. Benefits had to be rated according to earnings, and the middle class had to find the system appealing on their terms. The only way to achieve decommodification was to commercialize the appeal of the welfare state.

This implies that the conservative work ethic's central tenet—that what you get should be consistent with what you have earned—is the only way the progressive work ethic could gain political power. According to Anderson, the Scandinavian approach was "generous enough to prevent middle-class defection to private insurance" (252). However, keeping people from leaving is not the same as convincing them that everyone deserves equal dignity regardless of what they earn. Instead of altering the fundamental assumptions of meritocracy, the Scandinavian model succeeded by making the system sufficiently generous that opting out stopped to make financial sense. This indicates that solidarity was based on a common calculation of self-interest rather than a shared belief in the ideals of the progressive work ethic, which is only valid as long as the calculation remains unchanged. If that is true, then social democracy was never the culmination of the progressive tradition so much as its most successful compromise with the tradition it was supposed to overcome.

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