I'm about to start year 2 of my project of rereading my college notes, but I didn't finish up putting down some last notes on year 1.
The part of Gov 1170 that really struck me in my final read had to do with political parties and their role in enabling social conflicts to be resolved through political negotiation rather than violence or fascism. In relation to Germany in the period from the late 1880s through the first couple decades of the twentieth century (I may have the timeline a bit off, it's been a while since I read the notes), the political parties of new social classes had some success in becoming organizing groups for life in a comprehensive way, I guess like socialist parties did in Eastern Europe. But the German parties did not succeed in becoming strong enough to be in the bargaining with the industrialists and the Junkers in the political process, the way the Labor Party came to do in Britain. Probably more because the Junkers, especially, did not want this kind of political process. Could the socialists or the Zentrum have approached their political role differently? What would that have taken? I have no idea, not based on my notes or anything I know since.
It's hard for me to disentangle this question from today, when legislative processes and the Democratic party are not succeeding either in keeping today's conflicts inside politics, and perhaps again it's beyond their power. I also relate this to things I learned and wrote about later in college. I found a paper last spring about Weber and Schmidt, from a junior year class, about among other things what weakens parliamentary processes for social conflict. And I think in a new light about a piece from another course that made a big impression on me at the time, Schattschneider's "The Semi-Sovereign People." He argued that political success is often about defining who is and is not in a political conflict, which can involve widening the circle but also can involve contracting it, as a strategy, and progressive forces are as likely in a particular case to shrink as to widen involvement when it suits them.
Professor Hall talked in his final lecture about the pillars of successful democratic polities after fascism (and this was remember still the 1980s), which included Keynesian economics and the welfare state, in addition to capitalism and multiparty democracy. This framework created a broad social center, encompassing quite a lot of the social structure of not only the four countries in the course but also the U.S. He wondered whether the Keynesian and distributive framework would endure, and he also noted the responses of groups who do not feel that the system works or is justified. I think he labeled these as "terrorism" and "the politics of crunchy granola", the latter being people who opt out of public for a presumably private-only meaningful life.
I am pretty sure I appreciated learning so much about the history of the welfare state after having learned so much the prior term about the many potential and conflicting philosophical foundations behind it even among its supporters. It's the part about political parties and the organization of conflict in and out of political institutions that is compelling me right now.
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