I don’t think that in his New Yorker piece John Cassidy has entirely put his finger on the reasons that there’s been a resurgence of interest in the United States in a political-economic theory that’s been on life support for 30 years—state socialism. I think he’s got this part right:
In retrospect, a key moment for the revival of American socialism was the Wall Street bailout of 2008 and 2009, when taxpayers were forced to rescue the very rogues who had helped bring about the financial crisis, even as many ordinary families were being evicted from their homes for failing to service their mortgages. From an economic perspective, there were some sound reasons to prevent the financial system from collapsing. From a political perspective, the decision to save the banks persuaded many Americans—on the left, center, and right—that the political system had been captured. There is a direct linkage from the Wall Street bailout to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020, and to the Presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren, who made her reputation as a vocal critic of rapacious and irresponsible financiers.
Our present crony capitalist system should be condemned loudly and often. It is at odds with liberal democracy.
It astonishes me that he has apparently never heard of Fabian socialism. Fabian socialism is a gradualist approach to socialism (rather than by revolutionary overthrow) that largely came to rely on control of the primary means of production—money. Bernie Sanders likes to cloud the issue by calling himself a “democratic socialist” but he’s actually a Fabian socialist.
Socialism is a completely inadequate way of characterizing the states that he and those who proclaim themselves democratic socialists claim to admire. Christian-ethnic democracy would be better. Everywhere that cradle-to-grave welfare states were adopted were tiny, Christian, and ethnically homogeneous. Religion is a key component. The countries of Scandinavia were all Lutheran and 90% or more Danish, Norse, Swedish, or Finnish when their welfare state systems were adopted. That they are abandoning their welfare states as they become more diverse is prima facie evidence for my case.
Whenever multi-confessional, multi-ethnic empires (like the United States) have adopted socialism it has been Stalinist state socialism. You may not like that it has been the case but it has been the case.
That’s what drives my hypothesis about why state socialism has survived despite its failures. It’s about power. There will always be people who want to control the rest.
And Germany and France? Japan?
Steve
Neither Germany, France, nor Japan is used an example of democratic socialism or has the sort of welfare state that Denmark or Sweden had.
That having been said Germany’s social security system including its health care system was developed as a response to German unification in a Christian and ethnic context. There is no other major country as ethnically homogeneous as Japan.
France is an interesting case. One of the foundations of the modern French state is “Frenchness” (secularism is another). Need I point out that such a thing is impossible in the United States? France’s health care system had its foundations in the immediate post-war period when it was virtually supine, a client of the U. S., and much more ethnically homogeneous than it is now. It’s amazing what you can afford when you’re not paying for it. Their health care system is being reduced in its scope because the French cannot afford it.
Private insurance is not banned in France, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Finland as is the case in Bernie Sanders’s proposal. Germany’s system is based on private insurance.
Note that my point is not to claim that a cradle-to-grave welfare state is a bad thing but that we do not have the preconditions for it here. Our culture of diversity and “looking out for #1” are the main reasons that everything is more expensive here.
All of those countries would be called socialist by people on the right. The term is now essentially meaningless. What I think is that not that many people really want, at this point, cradle to grave welfare, but they do want universal health care that works. Lots of people on the left would also like to see growth more widely spread, while the right is happy keeping the wealth going to a small group of people in the 1%.
Steve
In France about 85% of health care spending derives from taxes. In the U. S. it’s something between 65% and 75%. France is socialist and the U. S. is free enterprise? I don’t much care what people call things. I care what works. I agree that our present system is not working but I don’t think any system in which everybody gets as much care they want while drug companies, hospitals, and physicians get paid whatever they want for it will work. I think we need rationing and cost control. Neither is popular so we’ll get a system that can’t work.
“The left” continues to promote higher education as the key to a bright future. See, for example, Elizabeth Warren’s free college proposal. Our problem is not that people need to spend more time in school. We have multiple problems. The first is that we are not getting what we are paying for from our education dollar.
The more grievous is that we are not creating enough jobs that pay enough to provide the sorts of standard of living that people think that a higher education entitles them to.