By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, June 20, 2019
The unfinished business of the Democratic party is socialism.
Don’t take my word for it — consult Bernie Sanders.
Senator Sanders gave a madcap speech in which he
ridiculed past conservative critics, beginning with Herbert Hoover and Ronald
Reagan, for characterizing the expansive welfare-state ambitions of the New
Deal and the Great Society as movements toward socialism. And then he .
. . characterized the expansive welfare-state ambitions of the New Deal and the
Great Society as movements toward socialism.
“This is the unfinished business of the Democratic party
and the vision we must accomplish,” he said. “These are my values, and that is
why I call myself a democratic socialist.”
President Hoover, the prescient man, is owed an apology.
As my colleagues and I recently documented over the
course of two special issues of National Review, socialism — not exactly progressivism,
certainly not liberalism — is ascendant among Democrats, including
Democratic elected officials, and on the American left more generally. Senator
Sanders is a declared and avowed socialist, one who is attempting to
posthumously recruit the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to his cause. (King
took a hard economic turn toward the left in his later years and spoke of
socialism on a few occasions, but to deputize him on behalf of the gentleman
from the whitest state in the Union is a bit much, and more than a bit
unseemly.)
Senator Sanders is not alone in this. Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the callow young Democrat from New York, is a member
of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as is Representative Rashida
Tlaib, the Jew-baiting strange-o from Michigan, along with about 40 other
candidates who were elected as Democrats in 2018. “We are building a pipeline
from local positions all the way to national politics,” the Socialists said in
a statement after the 2018 elections. Former Colorado governor John
Hickenlooper was hooted and jeered at when he affirmed on the stage of the
California Democratic convention that “socialism is not the answer.”
And yet . . .
Ronald Reagan, an FDR man, spent his entire career
insisting that he was a New Deal Democrat estranged from his party: “I didn’t
leave the Democratic party — the party left me!” Many conservatives see in the
tax-cutting, Cold War–fighting John Kennedy a kindred spirit. Much of the
Republican criticism directed at the hilariously misnamed Affordable Care Act
asserted that it would undermine Medicare, the jewel of Lyndon Johnson’s
so-called Great Society program — and some of those Republicans even meant
it.
Richard Nixon insisted that by the 1970s we were all
Keynesians. Are we all socialists now?
There are two important factors at play here: The first
is ignorance of the past, and the second is ignorance of the present.
Socialism is an idea with a history. (And a body count of
some 100 million human beings in the 20th century, but leave that aside for the
moment.) The most ordinary and traditional kind of government spending is on public
goods, which are defined in economics as non-rivalrous and non-excludable
in consumption. Think of a missile-defense system: Missile defense is a
non-excludable good in that a system that protects the civic-minded taxpaying
citizens at No. 7 Main Street also protects the freeloading deadbeats at No. 9
Main Street, whereas a guy selling apples can exclude those who do not pay; it
is non-rivalrous in that Smith’s enjoyment of protection from Nork nukes does
not diminish Jones’s possible enjoyment of the same, whereas every apple Smith
eats leaves one less apple available for Jones.
In theory, spending on such public goods as defense and
law enforcement is most of what liberal governments are supposed to do, with
some political disagreement over what counts as a public good. (Roads? There
are both public and toll models.) In reality, most of what modern liberal
governments spend their money on is social welfare, the public provision
of non-public goods such as food and education, both of which can be (and
historically have been) provided on an ordinary market basis. These are not
public goods rigorously defined, but they are publicly provided in practically
all modern democracies on the theory that a society as a whole is better off if
there is guaranteed universal access to a minimum of them.
The public provision of non-public goods is sometimes
described as socialism, but it is distinct in that socialism requires an
additional factor: central planning, often but not necessarily in concert with
state ownership of the means of production. Food stamps are social welfare, but
government-run farms and groceries are socialism; housing-support vouchers are
welfare, but government-owned housing projects are socialism. American
conservatives spend a fair amount of effort trying to convert or partially convert
such genuinely socialistic projects as the monopoly K–12 education system (in
which the means of production are state-owned and the workers are state
employees) into more conventional social-welfare programs by replacing or
augmenting direct-provision models with vouchers or other market-enabling
alternatives. There is a significant difference between government funding of
services and government provision of services, which is why, for examples, most
Republicans have made their peace with Medicare but resist a British-style
socialist-monopoly model of health care.
But, then, most European countries resist that model,
too, which is why there is no NHS-style national single-payer system in France,
Germany, Sweden, etc., and no state-provided health care at all in happy,
well-governed Switzerland. And this is where the ignorance of socialism as an
idea with a history meets the ignorance of actual political and economic
practice in the European states, particularly the Scandinavian ones, that
America’s self-proclaimed democratic socialists claim to admire. Senator
Sanders et al. point to countries such as Sweden and Denmark and conclude that
the lesson to be learned from them is that the United States should do . . .
exactly what Senator Sanders et al. always have desired and always will desire
to do: enact punitive redistributive taxes notionally targeting the wealthy and
corporations (as though middle-class workers, particularly in the public
sector, were not major corporate shareholders through their retirement funds)
while building new entrenched and centralized bureaucracies to be staffed by
comfortable, highly compensated Democratic constituents.
This response to the example of Sweden — which is in many
ways a well-governed and prosperous nation — makes sense only if you do not
know very much about Sweden. Senator Sanders, for example, desires to radically
increase the tax on inheritances for moralistic reasons. Sweden’s inheritance
tax is 0.00 percent. Senator Sanders wants to centralize the provision of
health care in a federally funded and federally administered cluster of
bureaucracies; health care in Sweden is radically decentralized, funded and
administered mostly at the local level. Left-leaning Democrats such as Senator
Kamala Harris of California have criticized Republicans for not doing enough to
cut middle-class taxes (Senator Harris, who does not seem to know how tax
refunds work, blasted the 2017 bill as “a middle-class-tax hike”), but what in
fact distinguishes the Scandinavian model (and most Western European countries)
from the United States is not how they tax the rich but how they tax the middle
class — which is to say: They do it. While about half of U.S. households pay no
federal income tax, and middle-class households pay relatively little,
middle-class earners in Denmark pay about 50 percent in taxes. Taxes in the
United States are disproportionately paid by those with high incomes —
disproportionately even when you take the income difference into consideration:
The top 1 percent takes home less than 20 percent of total income and pays
almost 40 percent of federal income taxes. Taxes in the Scandinavian countries
fall heavily on the middle classes, which also are the main beneficiaries of
the programs those taxes fund.
Senator Sanders is an ideologically blinkered man, and he
is not an intellectually curious one. His views have been set since he was
honeymooning in the Soviet Union as a young man, and his speeches and writing
testify that he simply lacks the intellectual capacity for growth and change.
Sweden has changed radically since the 1970s, but Bernie Sanders has stood
still in time, an irritable red ant suspended in amber.
But the so-called intellectuals of the Democrats’ new
socialist vanguard have no such excuse. Some of them are simply dim and poorly
educated (poorly but expensively, in the case of Representative Ocasio-Cortez),
but many of them are intellectually dishonest. A particularly dishonest young
socialist writer with something of a following recently published an income-disparity
ranking of countries that was supposed to show how the Scandinavians had
cracked the inequality problem. And Northern Europe was well represented on the
list, which also included France, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Estonia, among
other nations, in the top ten. Which is to say, the top ten countries
represented radically different modes of government, radically different
health-care systems, different labor markets, and different tax systems
(Switzerland, for example, does not tax capital gains, something our
progressive Europhiles rarely mention), to say nothing of radically different
cultures. (And many scholars of governance agree that culture is a key
ingredient in the Scandinavian secret sauce.) But even among the Nordic
countries, there are very large differences: Iceland, for example, has one of
the world’s highest work-force-participation rates; Finland’s is down about
where ours is, and ours is higher than the overall EU rate. There isn’t a
single, unified policy story to be derived from all that diversity.
But that is beside the point, for the Democrats. What
Senator Sanders stands for is the continuation of a very old and very dumb kind
of politics: adolescent anti-Americanism. It does not matter that Germany,
Sweden, and Switzerland have fundamentally different political and economic
models: These countries are only rhetorical cat’s-paws deployed in the
fundamental progressive project: establishing that the United States and its
institutions are hopelessly corrupt, and that they may therefore be cleared
away to make room for something new. In this regard, the energetically
nationalistic Franklin D. Roosevelt is a poor model for them — their actual
lineage traces to Woodrow Wilson, whose racism and warmongering make him an
unattractive totem but whose frank rejection of the Constitution and the
founding principles of the nation presages their own. In this way, the
socialist renaissance may be understood as distinct from the broader
progressive project but also subsumed within it. The overall economic model is
essentially the Democrats’ health-care model writ large: Destroy and discredit
what’s there, and then . . . improvise.
Senator Sanders, in his speech, gives some thought to the
Constitution — and finds it wanting. What good is the Bill of Rights, he asks,
when one must struggle so hard for mere material existence? “Are you truly free
if you are forced to work 60 or 80 hours a week?” The median American work week
is, as of this writing, less than 35 hours a week, significantly lower than it
was in 1980. What in fact distinguishes low-income households is not on average
that they have too many hours of work to do but that they have too few: Only 40
percent of the working-age poor (those below the federal poverty line) in 2014
worked at all. Among those who do work, many are involuntarily relegated
to part-time or seasonal work. High-income households average more work hours,
not fewer, than low-income households. The unemployment rate for those without
a bachelor’s degree is twice that of those with one. The problem the
poor face is not long hours at the salt mine but unemployment.
But what are a few inconvenient facts when there’s a
utopia to be built?
And that is the proper context in which to understand
what it is that Senator Sanders et al. stand for. They may, like Senator
Elizabeth Warren, roll out 55 five-point policy proposals per hour, offering
them with varying degrees of seriousness, but theirs is fundamentally a
negative platform. What they hate and wish to liquidate is the system of
markets, trade, law, regulation, and taxes that we call, for lack of a better
term, “capitalism,” and their reasons are as much tribal (they resent the
social status conferred by wealth as least as much as the political power
attending it), moral, and aesthetic as they are economic. But their policy
proposals are almost always the same: “Pillage the rich and create a lot of new
public-sector jobs for me and my friends.” And that much has remained constant
whether they call themselves liberals, progressives, or socialists.
Socialists used to care a great deal about history —
“historical materialism,” they called their big metaphysical idea. Something
for Senator Sanders to contemplate in his waterfront dacha.
No comments:
Post a Comment