Many of the challenges facing social democrats today have deep historical roots. Labour politics were never simply encoded in the daily experience of the industrial working class; they had to be made. Labour had to adapt to an already acculturated working class, but over time, through a combination of rhetoric and public policy, it not only did so but it also changed the culture of that class. This chapter analyses both the practical strategies developed to build Labour’s base a century ago, and the parameters (and limits) of the vernacular social democratic politics that emerged from its eventual success. Vernacular politics are not ideological or partisan because politics is marginal to most people’s lives. Practically minded social democrats therefore need to identify where their goals chime most naturally with vernacular politics. This means recognising the predominantly contractual conception of social entitlement, but also where universalism has put down deepest roots: not just in health and education, but also in housing and in the care of the elderly and infirm. Above all, Labour needs to rediscover the ethical and emotional appeal at the heart of its historic claim to represent all working people: championing the dignity of labour and of place.

This chapter introduces practical social democracy as a novel framework for understanding reformist politics. It argues that social democracy can be understood in terms of the challenges that reformist parties face with respect to balancing electoral, governance, and organisational considerations. These dimensions of politics are often in tension, but each of them is of central importance to reformist parties, which is why such balancing is essential to social democracy. The chapter contextualises practical social democracy by relating it to the existing literature on reformist politics and political parties. In addition, the chapter provides an overview of the volume as a whole and discusses how practical social democracy can shed light on a range of topics, such as the evolution of reformist politics, policy making in various issue areas, and the role of ideology and rhetoric.

Friendship has its public life in urban spaces. Drawing on recent social constructionist approaches to the domestication of space in urban studies, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the outdoor spaces of a mall in Beijing, China, this chapter explores how ordinary visitors domesticate the mall in their everyday lives. Focusing on the practice of friendship in three small groups, I trace how the mall’s spaces are (1) appropriated as “playgrounds” by after-school children, (2) negotiated as “informal childcare workshops” by guardians, and (3) claimed as “senior centers” by elderly visitors. I argue that the mall is not merely a backdrop for friendship, but that friendship practices constitute the mall beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This chapter contributes to scholarship on modern friendship beyond the private realm and advocates for a more embracing conceptualization of friendship in urban spaces.

Social democracy may sometimes present itself as technocratic, but within its wider world of meaning, there are beliefs that speak to more radical change, even upheaval. The world of social democratic ideology is one of possibility, rather than something narrowly circumscribed. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘common meanings’, this chapter explores the multifaceted nature of social democracy, which is significant for understanding how adaptable it has been as an ideological tradition. In elaborating what social democrats – and people on the centre-left more broadly – can think, the chapter presents analyses of literature from the twentieth and twenty-first century, with novels and poetry as representations of our social world. Rather than making empirical claims about what social democratic ideology is right now in a particular country or political party, the chapter explores the possible beliefs – very recognisable ones – of social democrats, and how those beliefs shed some light on the everyday dilemmas that people on the left of politics encounter. Three broad, common meanings of clear relevance to the world of social democracy are identified: money, class, and indignation. All three are discussed in relation to dilemmas social democratic actors must consider in contemporary politics.

This chapter revisits “critical friendships,” exploring how moments of sociopolitical and health crises shape and challenge relational bonds. Drawing on UK-based studies of personal responses to Brexit and dating app use during COVID-19, we demonstrate that theoretical assumptions about friendship’s egalitarian and inherently “good” nature often fail to capture the complexities of lived experience. The Brexit study revealed how political differences strained friendships, yet participants often prioritized shared history over political alignment. The COVID-19 study found that while apps facilitated “suffused” relationships during lockdown, these relationships were ultimately disappointingly short-lived. Using Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” we demonstrate how the illusion of the ideal “pure” friendship creates an inevitable disappointment when such relationships prove unachievable. Yet despite these disappointments, the “goods” of friendship can still outweigh the “bads” of “the times” in the potential for new suffused relational forms, however fleeting, as well as in the effort expended to sustain friendships.

Education has long been central to the social democratic agenda. In the postwar period, social democrats largely expanded access and reduced disparities through comprehensive schooling. By the 1990s, they shifted towards ‘Third Way’ social investment policies, incorporating market-oriented reforms, testing, and expanded childcare. The former was an ideological project that began with the demands of the party base and sought to persuade the electorate, while the latter was a more pragmatic project that started with broader electoral appeals and aimed to convince the base. Both, however, entered institutional contexts that varied in their receptivity to change. This chapter looks at political speech regarding education across these two periods to examine how social democratic parties adapted their rhetorical strategies to navigate the specific constraints of their political contexts. Using a hand-coded dataset of party manifestos from 1945 to 2022 across advanced democracies, it identifies four key rhetorical approaches social democrats employed in their educational speech: putting more emphasis, focus, clarity, and equity framing. The analysis reveals that while early social democratic rhetoric was more ideologically consistent and equity-driven, later discourse became more layered, ambiguous, and focused on economic outcomes.

Since 1945, the practical solution to the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s ideological goals of ‘solidarity, equality and planning’ always tended to be yet another sweeping welfare state reform. Delivery was in keeping with the ideological rhetoric. However, increasingly the high taxes to support the reforms met with strong criticism from the party’s core blue-collar voters, disgruntled about marginal taxation and VAT. Yet, when in 1981 the party totally reformed its taxation policies by reducing marginal taxation, it infuriated key members and voters who felt that high-end earners benefitted unfairly. Moreover, the U-turn had knock-on practical effects on welfare state expansion. In 1982, Prime Minister Olof Palme stated that the welfare state could expand, ‘but not as a share of the total economy’. Suddenly, tax and welfare state ceilings had been put in place, with efficiency drives becoming increasingly necessary, leading to further U-turns when the party dropped most of its resistance to privatisations and to the marketisation of the welfare state. Yet the party’s rhetoric about the need for welfare state expansion and criticism of lower taxes remained intact. No longer does the delivery square with the rhetoric. Gradually, practical decisions have placed the party in an ideological dilemma.

The category of friendship called “friends and fun” popularized via gay sex/dating apps captures a pre-existing reality among queer people around the world: that friendships include a continuum of sexual, romantic, and sentimental affects and practices. In Beirut, this category takes on specific utility amidst power relations that define (un)acceptable ways for embodying intimate relations: it enables queer men to conceal their intimacies by adjusting their behaviors to suit the norms of male–male friendship. As queer men move their relationships from the privacy of the bedroom to the publicness of the street, they act like friends while holding contrasting sexual and romantic affects under the surface of these embodied practices. The chapter argues that “friends and fun” derives its meaning from the practices men undertake as an embodied response to the sexual and gendered exigencies of public space, thus showing how friendship practices and categories do not merely challenge, but also shore up power relations.

This chapter examines the character of British Labour as a reformist party. Drawing on work of United States diplomats reporting back to Washington, and the work of Egon Wertheimer, a social democratic journalist in London during the 1920s, alongside other sources, it advances an original perspective on Labour politics, one that is based around its empiricism, its antipathy to theory, and its insularity. It argues that such empiricism is grounded in the circumstances of its foundation, the decisions of key actors in its early years, and the wider context of British politics. In turn, such a practical outlook shaped the party’s insularity and general lack of concern with developments elsewhere. Focusing on the years of the Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 alongside other material, the chapter examines how this orientation shaped Labour politics. It asks whether the party can be considered ‘exceptional’ in comparison with European social democratic parties. It concludes that empiricism and insularity offer revealing insights into the Labour Party and its approach to politics, insights that have frequently been neglected in scholarly enquiry.