Social Democracy in America?

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from Dissent magazine:


Social Democracy in America?
Rich Yeselson ▪ Fall 2014

Social Democratic America
by Lane Kenworthy
Oxford University Press, 2014, 248 pp.

Recently, a group of conservative policy intellectuals and writers captured the attention of the media and even of a few Republican politicians. These “reformocons,” including Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review, and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, believe it is time for the Republican Party to propose public policy solutions to domestic issues like health care and education, rather than provoke the cultural resentments of the party base, what Douthat has called the politics of “white identity.”

The reformocons chief policy entrepreneur Yuval Levin, editor of its flagship publication National Affairs, challenged the left in the National Review in June:

They (liberals) imagine that there is some kind of coherent liberal agenda that speaks to middle-class concerns…. But where is that agenda? What does it consist of? What did President Obama run on in 2012? What is the next Democratic candidate supposed to run on? Doubling down on head start and the minimum wage plus a carbon tax? To me, one of the most extraordinary features of this moment in our politics is that many serious liberals seem genuinely not to grasp the intellectual exhaustion of the left.

Levin has a point. Likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton—presumably an exponent of gender equality and family-friendly policy—can’t even be moved to endorse paid family leave: “I don’t think, politically, we could get it now,” she said to an interviewer recently. Not exactly a rousing call to arms. Minimum wage increases are a good idea as far as they go, but how far do they go, really? Is this the future of liberal domestic economic and fiscal policy in the United States?

In Social Democratic America, Lane Kenworthy says it doesn’t have to be this way. Kenworthy, a political scientist at the University of Arizona, writes with an almost eerily calm clarity. You want policies? He’s got them—a comprehensive expansion of the social insurance state combined with fewer regulations on businesses, what the Scandinavians call “flexicurity.” You’ve got questions about whether these policies can work in a U.S. context, or whether they can ever become law? He anticipates and answers them, marshalling the latest studies on each question. This is not a book of hortatory uplift—romantic, enraged radicals will not get their fix of romance and rage. It contains practically nothing about foreign policy, gender and sexuality, or racism; while this sharpens the book’s focus, it limits its consideration of how these factors affect fiscal and economic policy. It is a crisp, clean manifesto: a call to expand American social insurance in the most straightforward way possible—via enormously increased government transfer payments and programs, not mandates on businesses or means-tested entitlements. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/social-democracy-in-america

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1. GOP's "white identity" = WHITE ENTITLEMENT/WHITE RESENTMENT