Topic: Liberal Fascism
Partisans of Bernie Sanders go ballistic when conservatives call him a socialist—even though he calls himself a socialist. Team Bernie assumes that when a conservative so labels Comrade Sanders, the implication is that the candidate is a closet Marxist-Leninist. No, the Sanders claque insists, their man is not a Bolshevik—he’s a Democratic Socialist!
Ah.
This gets to the power train of the Sanders campaign, which when you look under the hood consists of nothing more than progressivism’s longstanding desire to turn America into a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Democratic Socialism (the term is often capitalized by devotees of the idea) is supposed to foster a kinder, gentler form of capitalism: not red of tooth and claw but docile and pliant under the yoke of a benevolent government bureaucracy. Oh, and with plenty of free stuff for everybody…
There are three assumptions here: (1) that there exists something called “Democratic Socialism; (2) that it can be purchased, so to speak, at the ideological apps store; and (3) that it can be scaled up or down to suit the needs of nations large and small. The examples usually cited are the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and, less frequently, Germany. The argument is: “If they can do it, why can’t we do it?”
Though the question is rhetorical I shall answer it anyway, beginning with the observation that there’s really no such thing as “Democratic Socialism.”
Looking at the Scandinavian welfare states and admiring them, progressives in this country have brand-identified them. Sweden, Denmark, etc. practice “Democratic Socialism” and America should as well. This shows you the perils of abstract thinking. For if the word socialism means anything at all, there’s nothing particularly socialist about any of the Scandinavian countries. Nor by American standards are they particularly democratic. To be sure, these countries have political parties and elections. But the range of issues in, say, a Swedish national election is considerably narrower than in an American national election. In Sweden, a broad-based political consensus rules many issues out of consideration. In those rare cases where discontent does give rise to a populist political movement, the establishment parties unite to freeze the interloper out. This happened in Sweden recently over the question of immigration, the establishment parties conspiring to prevent a national election that might have resulted in big gains for a populist anti-immigration party.
Now a political consensus of this kind is only possible in a small, wealthy country that is ethnically and culturally homogenous. That is to say, it wasn’t imposed by political elites under the name of “Democratic Socialism” but developed gradually, organically, over a long period of time. It works for Sweden, Denmark, etc. because it’s Swedish, Danish, etc.
So there’s no “Democratic Socialism” app available in the ideological apps store. Team Sanders is simply cherry-picking elements of the Scandinavian welfare states that it particularly likes and proposing to scale them up for this country. Left out of the equation are all the cultural, ethnic and political factors that actually make those systems work in their countries of origin. This is an important—indeed the vital—point. Suppose for a moment that Bernie Sanders actually managed to get himself elected president. How easy would it be for him to remake this country in the image of Sweden?
It would be practically impossible, because the necessary political consensus would not exist. The travails of Obamacare, passed on a narrow partisan vote, enduringly controversial and unpopular, prefigure the fate of any such scheme as Comrade Sanders’ twelve-point agenda for America. There are signs, indeed, that Sanders himself recognizes this. He frames his potential presidency as a fight to the finish against those wicked, greedy special interests that lord it over the poor and the middle class—in plain language, Bernie Sanders preaches class warfare. However beguiling this may sound in the ears of his devotees, it’s a recipe for political strife, gridlock and ultimate frustration. Unless Sanders somehow seized absolute power and ruled as the American Lenin, he’d inevitably crash and burn.
The final, fatal objection to “Democratic Socialism” in America can be summarized in one word: gigantism. Already the executive branch of the federal government has grown so large as to be dysfunctional, unmanageable, unaccountable. Sanders proposes to make the federal government even larger, hence even more dysfunctional, even less manageable and even more of a threat to democratic accountability. In his People’s Democratic Socialist United States of America, the administrative/bureaucratic/regulatory state would swell to such a size as to elicit a wince from Thomas Hobbes, maximizing the federal government’s already-scandalous inefficiency and corruption.
So much, then, for that ideological nothingburger “Democratic Socialism.” And so much for Comrade Bernie Sanders whose campaign, though it harps on a different string, is just as unmelodious as Donald Trump’s.
