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NY Times Op-Ed, March 9, 2019
Socialism and the 2020 American Election
By Roger Cohen
Two of my children were born in socialist France. They survived. In
fact, their births were great experiences: excellent medical care,
wonderful postnatal follow-up, near-zero cost. My son’s bris, in a Paris
deserted through the August exodus, was another story, but I won’t get
into that.
France has one of the world’s most elaborate social protection systems.
The ratio of tax revenue to gross domestic product, at 46.2 percent, is
the highest of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
countries. In the United States, that ratio is 27.1 percent. Look no
further to grasp Franco-American differences.
This French tax revenue is spent on programs — universal health care,
lengthy paid maternity leave, unemployment benefits — designed to render
society more cohesive and capitalism less cutthroat. Of the French
Revolution’s three-pronged cry — “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” — the
first has proved most problematic, freedom being but a short step, in
the French view, from the “Anglo-Saxon” free-market jungle. Socialist
presidents have governed France for half of the past 38 years.
The country has paid a price for its social solidarity, particularly in
high unemployment. But France has prospered. It has a vibrant private
sector. It is a capitalist economy, among the world’s seven largest. Its
socialism is no European exception. The Continent decided after World
War II that cushioning capitalism was a price worth paying to avoid the
social fragmentation that had fed violence.
The parties that produced Europe’s welfare states had different names,
but they all embraced the balances — of the free market and the public
sector, of enterprise and equity, of profit and protection — that
socialism or its cousin social democracy (as opposed to communism) stood
for. Socialism, a word reborn, has none of the Red Scare potency in
Europe that it carries in the United States. It’s part of life. It’s not
Venezuelan misery.
A 21st-century American election is about to be fought over socialism.
Amazing! When the Berlin Wall fell beneath communism’s weight three
decades ago, capitalism unbridled strode forth over the rubble in search
of global opportunity. Ideological struggle seemed over.
But growing inequality and marginalization — byproducts of financial
globalization — have thrust socialism center stage. Grace Blakeley, an
economist and self-styled democratic socialist in London, told me, “For
most people today, socialism is freedom from a lousy warehouse job or
working 80 hours a week in a job you detest for people you detest.”
Right. The charismatic voice of such sentiment in the United States is
the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the lightning rod
of a new American politics.
“The definition of democratic socialism to me, again, is the fact that
in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no American should be too poor
to live,” Ocasio-Cortez tells NBC’s Chuck Todd. Like Britain’s leftist
Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, she favors significant state
intervention in the economy. Trump, unerring in his instinct for the
jugular, declares, “We believe in the American dream, not the socialist
nightmare.”
Europe demonstrates, however, that socialism and the free market are
compatible. The basic issue before the Democratic Party now is how far
left to go. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist. Kamala Harris
calls herself a progressive. John Hickenlooper, conciliator, says he can
“get stuff done.”
The notion that American elections are won in the center was buried by
Trump. The energy in the Democratic Party lies in the progressive camp.
It stems from anger at a skewed economy and millennial disgust at the
elitist turn that cost the Democrats their working-class base and much
of small-town America. This opened the way for Trump. My own
inclinations are centrist, but not a “centrism” that cares more for
Goldman Sachs than the opioid crisis. I don’t see how the Democrats can
eschew a new era’s left-leaning energy and win.
A word of caution: The United States was founded in contradistinction
to, not as an extension of, Europe. Self-reliance is to America what
fraternity is to France: part of its core. American space — so immense,
so un-European — conjures in Americans a bristling independence of
spirit that wants government out of their lives.
Nations do not cast off their cultural essence. I don’t think soaking
the rich — Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent wealth tax — is going to
get a Democrat to the Oval Office. Nor are the accusations of “worker
exploitation” that chased Amazon and 25,000 jobs out of New York — a
stupid waste.
The dirty secret of European welfare states is that they tend to be
business-friendly. As Monica Prasad, a sociology professor at
Northwestern University has pointed out, Sweden has a lower corporate
tax rate than the United States. The sweet spot for Democrats is getting
business to buy in to progressive reform. America can be nudged in a
French direction without losing its self-renewing essence.
France is also home to the yellow-vest protests from the marginalized.
So much for social cohesion, you might say. But there’s a lesson. As
James McAuley observed in The New York Review of Books, those vests
reflect, above all, a “material demand to be seen.” Socialism is no
silver bullet. The basic requirement of any Democratic candidate is to
make the forgotten, the struggling and the invisible of American society
feel visible again.
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