Many hopes rest on the next presidency. Not the least of them is that America will grow up.
It goes, almost without saying, which candidate is more likely to carry these hopes forward. If a majority of voters are ready to entrust the nation’s economic future to John McCain – or a voice in its foreign policy to Sarah Palin – Republicans will get what they deserve. The rest of us will be forced to share the consequences.
The White House will stay in the hands of a party that has employed empty theories, and even emptier fear-mongering, to lead the United States into economic catastrophe at home and futile bloodshed overseas.
In the latest blast from the Republican presidential campaign, both McCain and his running mate accuse Barack Obama of plotting a de facto Marxist takeover. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are up front about their objectives,” McCain said on October 18, offering no details but clearly implying that those objectives are harrowing.
A grown-up America would stand back and put such fears and accusations into informed perspective. It would begin to re-examine words and concepts that have been stigmatized, by a generation of conservative ideologues, in a deliberate effort to blind us.
I allude here to the celebrated “l” word, liberalism, of course – but also to a broader political concept that grew from it, which was seeded in 19th century idealism, took practical root in the Great Depression, and became the keystone of Western European prosperity by the mid-1960s.
The name of that concept is “social democracy.” On the American right, it is regarded with even more contempt than liberalism, although it has always been committed to both free enterprise and personal freedom. Social democracy has nothing to do with the Marxist nightmare implied in the harangues of McCain and Palin – which, in any case, ring startlingly false at a moment when a Republican administration has all but nationalized the bankrupt U.S. financial industry.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
The following anecdote is what social democracy can mean at the level of daily life:
Late last year, just as I turned 60, I was faced with a potentially fatal malady. It brought me to a hospital in Milan that bears favorable comparison to the most modern in the United States, an Italian counterpart to the Mayo Clinic or Stanford Medical Center. The doctor who evaluated and treated me there was of the same calibre, a graduate of top-flight surgical and internal medicine programs in Italy, France and California – Stanford, to be precise – and author of a leading textbook now in use at medical schools across Europe and North America.
My treatment was comprehensive and painstakingly thorough. I owe my health and peace of mind to that eminent doctor and his team. My wallet owes them nothing. As a tax-paying legal resident of Italy, I am entitled to free and unlimited state-of-the-art medical care, including all tests, hospitalization and medications. The pills I now gulp down each morning retail for more than $2,000 per year in the United States. The total cost of my treatment would have approached six figures. The annual premiums on insurance to cover it would reach into five figures, even with a hefty deductible.
From Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, a story like mine is simply taken for granted. In today’s America it is unimaginable.
Nor is it a story of universal health care alone. European universities, for the most part, are also free. In the Netherlands, which has one of the West’s most vibrant private economies and lowest unemployment rates, half the population lives in comfortable subsidized housing. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Spain are crisscrossed by 150-mph/hour state-run trains, the most advanced transport network on Earth.
Signs of leftist hegemony? Hardly. On the strength of an immensely popular, firmly middle-class political consensus, a sleek 21st century public infrastructure has been built in Europe over the past two decades, while much of America’s has sunk into creaking disrepair.
AN ALTERNATIVE, NOT A PLOT
These are the principles that unnamed Europeans, in McCain’s account, hope to foist on Barack Obama’s America:
A mixed economy, driven by private enterprise, but overseen by a limited number of regulatory agencies acting in the common interest. Carefully budgeted subsidies for essential public services. Taxation levels that maintain a realistic balance between government income and outlays. Domestic and foreign policies that make ethical concerns part of the ongoing assessment of national interest.
Confronted with disastrous foreign policy scandals, a sinking economy, a tidal wave of mortgage defaults and grotesquely unaffordable health care, Americans have good reason to survey alternatives to their current status quo.
That’s the adult way to view the European model: not as a radical conspiracy, but as an alternative set of pragmatic options, based on the experience of nations that share our history and our values – flexible options, open to regular updating as conditions change.
The mystery is not that social democracy succeeded in Europe. It is that its success is viewed by so many Americans as evil incarnate.
The record has been endlessly distorted by the Republican right, dismissed as a bureaucratic con game or condemned as a Soviet-style triumph of the omnipotent state over the powerless individual.
The good news is that the central philosophy of social democracy is alive and well, thank you, in part because it ceased long ago to depend on keeping the left in power. On the contrary, the most ambitious of Europe’s public enterprises – France’s TGV high-speed railway comes to mind, as does the massive upgrading of eastern Germany’s public facilities and services – were the initiatives of proudly conservative Gaullists and Christian Democrats.
TENABLE GROUND
The results speak for themselves, and their message is that the most promising terrain for contemporary reform lies mid-way between two untenable extremes. To the left is the bleak chronicle of top-heavy Marxist states that seldom trusted their own citizens and often enslaved them. To the right is the hyper-deregulation so beloved by American neoconservatives, who come absurdly close to proposing that the state has no useful function at all.
Believe that and you’ll believe anything, including the premise that Wall Street investment banks will police their own operations, or that a crumbling infrastructure can fix itself.
The genius of social democracy, and its most important legacy, is to have turned both extremes on their heads and placed legitimately elected governments at the service of their citizens’ expressed needs and demands.
Hence the emergence of social democracy, in the decade after World War Two, as a central point of common political reference across Western Europe. By the 1980s, its theories had spread to the developing world, exerting a profound influence on such rapidly modernizing “miracle states” as Taiwan, South Korea, India, Brazil and Chile.
Each of them faced a choice, at a decisive moment of economic and political doubt, between loudly contending extremes. Each of them wound up, instead, on a middle road that carried them to thriving consumer economies and full-fledged participatory democracy. In a sense, it could be said that their societies grew up, ignoring the rabid propaganda on both sides, and forging their own mature syntheses of guaranteed personal freedom and enlightened public interest.
It is high time that Americans, at an infinitely momentous crossroad, do likewise.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
