Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #4: Democratic Socialism in Scandinavia

We ought to "look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people," said Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary debates. "What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble are what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden," Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also said in a recent interview.

Senator Bernie Sanders took on a very difficult task when he decided to explain his vision for democratic socialism to the American people. The road to the future is always blocked by those trying to protect the status quo, and by a lot of ignorance and prejudice. Democratic socialism is not a philosophy that can described in a few words. And Americans are not very familiar with what goes on in countries that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez cite as successful examples of democratic socialism. (On the other hand, it could be worse. At least there are successful examples of Democratic socialism. As an undergraduate, I once attended a debate between representatives of the campus Democratic, Republican, and Communist parties. The Communist was asked, "If communism is so great, why has there never been a successful communist country?" Poor kid; he had no idea what to say.)

Americans, I think, have only a vague notion of how life in northern Europe is different from that of the US. Witness Hillary Clinton's response to Bernie Sanders mention of Scandinavia in 2016, reminding Americans of ,"all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families." This response speaks directly to American prejudices; Norway is more socialized that the US, so it must have less freedom, so it must somehow be stifling small business. In reality, Scandinavian economies are doing just fine, as we'll see.

The fear-mongering and misinformation regarding northern European economies that comes from the American right is of course far worse, and is delivered in two distinct packages. The situation is summarized perfectly by an article in New York Magazine by Eric Levitz enttiled, Conservatives Can’t Decide If Nordic Socialism Is a Totalitarian Nightmare or Actually Capitalist.

As an example of the first case, Scandinavia as dystopian nightmae, Levitz first cites examples of classic red-baiting; such as that used by Commentary Magazine's Noah Rothman: "Rothman casts all proponents of single-payer health care as proto-Stalinists." "And make no mistake: America is hurtling down the road to serfdom at a terrifying pace. Democrats may think they "can control the monster they’re bringing back to life," Rothman writes, but if socialists are given an opportunity to prevail at the polls, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer "will find themselves prisoners to their party’s collectivists soon enough. After all, taking captives is what socialism does best." Levitz also quotes Rothman, "Likewise, establishing as a right the ability to access tuition-free education at public universities and a federal jobs guarantee—all planks of the Democratic Socialist agenda with increasingly broad appeal—are pillars of the Soviet Constitution."

The above are exactly the tactics traditionally used by the American right to attack progressive reform. As I noted in the last post in this series: According to the right, if anything favored by the left happens to also have been a policy of the old communist dictatorships, then it naturally follow that enacting that policy here will of course turn America into a Soviet-style autocracy.

Regarding the second argument, that Scandinavian countries are successful not because of their expansive welfare states but because they are largely free-market economies, Levitz says, "Perhaps Denmark’s welfare state isn’t the source of its strong economic growth. But there’s little question that the country’s aberrantly high levels of social spending are responsible for its exceptionally low levels of relative poverty and income inequality. If conservatives concede that it is possible for a country to provide all citizens with low-cost health insurance, child care, paid family leave, etc. — and still function as a vibrant, free-market economy — then how could they possibly justify the GOP’s ambition to throw millions of Americans off of Medicaid?"

And the idea that Scandinavian economies resemble the free-market ideal more than socialism is a dubious proposition, even when those on the right cherry-pick facts such as the lack of a minimum wage in those countries. In the article above, Levitz cites journalist Mat Bruenig who points out that:

"In addition to their large welfare states and high tax levels, Nordic economies are also home to large public sectors, strong job protections, and labor markets governed by centralized union contracts … The governments of Norway and Finland own financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP. In the US, the same figure is just 26 percent.

… State-owned enterprises (SOEs), defined as commercial enterprises in which the state has a controlling stake or large minority stake, are also far more prevalent in the Nordic countries. In 2012, the value of Norwegian SOEs was equal to 87.9 percent of the country’s GDP. For Finland, that figure was 52.3 percent. In the US, it was not even 1 percent.

… In Norway, the state manages direct ownership of 70 companies. The businesses include the real estate company Entra; the country’s largest financial services group DNB; the 30,000-employee mobile telecommunications company Telenor; and the famous state-owned oil company Statoil."

The divergence between the US economy and those of western Europe is best illustrated by the graphs below. While the percentage of national income earned by the top 1% and that earned by the bottom 50% has stayed about the same in western Europe since 1980, in the US the top 1% have doubled their share while share of income for the bottom 50% has fallen by half.

So what's it really like to live in northern Europe? I recommend the article After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why. by Ann Jones of the Nation. From Jones:

"Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours."

"Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the United Nations and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions such as affordable housing and employment to quality-of-life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway has ranked first on the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons in such areas as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press."

"Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce."

Next time I'll talk about the biggest pack of lies being sold by American conservatives regarding other leading nations: the widespread adoption of socialized medicine versus the American train-wreck of a health care system.

Tweet

Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #3: Red-Baiting in the 21st Century

In my previous post, I discussed Bernie Sanders' June 12th speech about democratic socialism as the guiding philosophy of his political career. The response to Bernie's speech from his more conservative rivals for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination was predictable. From Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press:

Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, "said Sanders was "wrong" to call for policies such as "Medicare for All" that would dramatically increase public spending and government involvement in Americans’ daily lives. Hickenlooper called for less expansive changes to the "regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years."

"Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists. If we do not, we will end up helping to reelect the worst president in the country’s history," he said in Washington. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats as long as (President Donald) Trump is at the top of the ticket.""

Hickenlooper's attack seems disingenuous since he, like Sanders is calling for Medicare to be expanded. To be fair, he's just doing what rivals for the Presidential nomination who are trailing in the polls always do: make headlines by attacking the front-runners. Putting those things aside, let's unpack the other reasons Hickenlooper is attacking Sanders and democratic socialism.

1. "(R)egulated capitalism... has guided this country for over 200 years". True. And in 1860, slavery had guided European settlement in North America for longer than that. Just because a country has been doing a thing for a long time doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good. Once upon a time, one could make the argument that American-style capitalism had created the highest standard of living in the world. But that's no longer true; as we reviewed in the first part of this series, today the US has a quality of life substantially below that of other leading industrialized countries. The "we've always done it that way" argument for American capitalism is part of the idea of "American exceptionalism", a philosophy that suggests among other things that laissez-faire economics are part of what America has to give to a backward world. More on that later.

2. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats".
Possibly that's true; time will tell. Republicans are in fact churning out a lot of propaganda demonizing Democrats as socialist. They're so in love with the idea, they this attack use for things that have nothing to do with socialism. For example, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently called the Democratic party movement to make Puerto Rico a state, "full-bore socialism", which is a line of logic I can't follow.

Red-baiting is the act of attacking or persecuting a person or idea as a Communist or as communistic. Red-baiting has been used by the right in America for more than a century to attack anything even vaguely leftist or collectivist or anything done by Democrats really as leading us on the path to an autocratic, dystopian nightmare. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, during the first Red Scare, US Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up, jailed, or deported thousands of suspected radicals, stoking fear that they were trying to import Communism (or anarchism) to the United States.

Red-baiting in the US reached its pinnacle during the 1940s and 50s when, (from Peter Dreier of The Nation), "another wave of hysteria swept the country during the Cold War, when politicians like Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon engineered witch hunts to identify and blacklist progressives and radicals in government, schools and universities, Hollywood, labor unions, and the media, alleging that Communists were infiltrating key institutions in order to undermine the American way of life. (McCarthy’s top witch-hunting assistant was Roy Cohn, who would later become Trump’s attorney and political mentor.) Anyone who questioned the nuclear-arms race, supported racial integration, or called for higher taxes on the rich could be branded an anti-American Communist. Not even Martin Luther King Jr. was immune."

Red-baiting and "American exceptionalism" are the reasons why Americans didn't start enjoying the benefits of single-payer health care decades ago. In the 1940s, Republican Governor of California Earl Warren introduced a single-payer plan for the state which initially enjoyed tremendous support but was done in by an advertising campaign which suggested, "We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don't want to be forced to go to "A State doctor" or pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not."

President Franklin Roosevelt had heard the same kind of arguments in attacks on the New Deal a few years earlier. In response he said, "A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical."

So it goes with the American right-wing, arguing the same thing into a second century:
1. Liberals want to do a thing.
2. That thing is something that socialists and communists support.
3. Socialist and communist countries are bad places to live.
4. So the thing liberals want must be bad by definition, and if we tried that thing, America would turn into a failed state.

Example, here's an excerpt from a 2018 letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times:
"How can we guarantee that a democratic socialist takeover of the Democratic Party will not descend into the same chaos we see currently in "socialist" countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua? How can we be sure that the rhetoric of class antagonism will not devolve into outright class hatred? Or that "Medicare For All" won’t result, as it has in Venezuela, in hospitals that can’t even provide bedsheets?"

I hear this exact argument all the time on social media: Expanding the highly popular and successful Medicare program to more people will transform American into a communist banana republic dictatorship. Never mind that every developed nation in the world has socialized medicine. Never mind that the United States already has socialized the military, police, fire departments, highways, education and dozens of other public services and yet somehow has avoided turning into North Korea.

In response to the L.A. Times letter cited above, another reader sent this response to the Editor:
"Why do people so often cite the failures of democratic socialism by cherry picking their examples? Why not cite Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, Norway, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands — all countries that have successfully achieved a balance between capitalism and socialism? No country is perfect, but citing the worst examples does not move the conversation forward in any meaningful way."

An excellent summary. Next time I'll comment on what actually goes on in those scary "socialist" countries.

Tweet