With the 2020 presidential campaigns gearing up, it is clear that this is going to be a rocking and rolling primary adventure. The Democrats already have eight or more declared candidates with a definite bent towards progressive platforms. Bernie Sanders entered the race and raised $6 million in 24 hrs. making him an early favorite and bringing into view a vision of a social democracy.
The conservatives and what passes for the GOP these days quickly began their smearing of the Dems and shouting from the rooftops “socialism is coming, socialism is coming’. Quick grab the women and children and get them to safety from such a horror!
First, socialism and social democracy are two very different things Venezuela has socialism. The United States has social democracy. Yes, that’s right. We are already a social democracy. And it has worked quite well until the last thirty years or so as the GOP and private industry has worked to dismantle it.
The ‘great’ America that Trump wants to make again was the result of social democracy, not the invisible hand of the free markets. Starting with the GI Bill, which was the largest investment ever made by the government to its people, it triggered the housing boom, college became possible for many in the middle class, and the nationwide transportation network that enabled the smooth movement of so many products across the country. Amazon and FedEx have benefited mightily from this government investment. The big tech companies like Google and Apple are all by-products of the massive public funds that were invested in things like the Internet, GPS, SIRI and the algorithm behind Google. Zuckerberg’s Facebook wouldn’t exist if the Internet hadn’t been basically free for him to use in his dorm room at Harvard. Many of the drugs that are making Big Pharma billions had their start at the National Institutes for Health. In other words, the belief that industry is the source of all our success simply is not true. Instead, it has been a very successful marriage between government and industry that made America great!
Yet, since Reagan in the 1980’s there has been a slow and consistent branding of the US as a corporate driven innovator and that government just gets in the way. The facts do not bear this out! The heyday of “social democracy” in the 1940–1980s, saw a middle class expansion that made it possible for people to own their homes, send their kids to college, save for their retirements. Now in their late 60s, 70’s and 80s, these people that rode the wave as America’s greatest generation and the generation that benefited most from social democracy have somehow forgotten about this reality.
And what have we gotten with the dismantling of our social democracy? The greatest income disparity ever. Those in the top 1–10% get everything and the rest pick up the crumbs. Now our kids are saddled with massive college debt, they can’t afford to buy homes and many work in jobs that leave them one paycheck away from disaster and after forty hours of work a large portion of our citizens still live in poverty. Profits and salaries have soared for those at the top, while the minimum wage remains stagnant. The national infrastructure that was built during our time as a social democracy now crumbles beneath us while corporations and the top 10% receive tax relief and leave the public coffers with none of the money once available to build this great country.
The pendulum appears to be ready to swing again. We had forty years of a social democracy that made this the greatest country ever. We’re now finishing up forty years of dismantling that social democracy. Corporations and the wealthy have siphoned the money that was once invested in America into their own pockets and the disparity between the have and the have-nots has left a huge portion of the American citizenry struggling to survive.
We are now seeing a movement to revive our social democracy. No one should be surprised that this is exciting the coming generation of Millennials. They’re the recipients of the last forty years dismantling of social democracy and find themselves holding the bag of huge personal debt, crumbling infrastructure, climate change catastrophe and a future that will not equal that of their parents and grandparents. History has shown them what social democracy can do while in real time, they are living the outcome of capitalism on steroids and struggling to survive.
No one knows what the outcome of this election will be but the mid-term elections certainly has sparked a reawakening and awareness that a social democracy can make a great country. The GOP will try very hard to confuse the American public by insisting that socialism and social democracy are the same thing. They are not. Socialism has destroyed Venezuela. Social Democracy made the United States the greatest country ever.
