Democracy Prevailed. Now What?
It's time to go from liberal democracy to social democracy
Whew! The election is over in the U.S. and once again, it’s safe to come out from under your bed or inside your closet.
Without a doubt you were hiding there, since all the Republican attack ads kept drumming into your head that the U.S. was under the greatest crime wave since…the last election in 2020.
It’s a funny thing, though: after this Election Day, the crime wave amazingly disappeared.
Perhaps the biggest crime wave leading into this election was the so-called Red Wave that was going to sweep the country. But the Red Wave turned out to be just another crime wave that never materialized.
Instead, the Republicans were left with an empty feeling in their stomach, what with their fear-mongering campaign falling on deaf ears. People just weren’t buying the bullshit, but they will keep on peddling it, because otherwise they got nothing.
Meanwhile, what the majority of the country showed with their vote is that they cherish democracy—people were not going to allow democracy to continue to wither, which would have happened if the Republicans took the House and Senate.
Democracy may have prevailed in the U.S., but the truth is that the type of democracy the U.S. has is a problematic outlier compared to most of the world’s democracies.
You see, while the U.S. is a liberal democracy, the great majority of the world’s democracies are social democracies. And there’s a major distinction between the two.
Because of this difference, the stability of democracy in the U.S., according to the international democracy watchdog Freedom House, ranks below that of not only the social democracies of the world, but also below Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Mongolia, Tuvalu, and many others.
The social democracies, which are found in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and a number of other countries, differ from a liberal democracy like the U.S. in very important ways.
Whereas social democracies are concerned with the public good and making sure there is a strong social contract and safety net, the liberal democracy of the U.S. is solely predicated on freedom and rugged individualism.
The U.S. was founded on the concept of freedom; it was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as the certain unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, took that phrase from the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, who wrote extensively about the pursuit of happiness as not a selfish act, but instead a selfless act.
Locke based his ideas on the writings of Aristotle, who, on writing about the pursuit of happiness, said happiness is predicated on human flourishing, and human flourishing only occurred when a society took care of all its citizens.
That’s the part that goes missing in America—taking care of all its citizens.
The U.S. has no universal healthcare, universal childcare, robust labor protections, low cost or free college, generous welfare programs, excellent nationwide public transportation, and large scale public investment, which are some of the hallmarks of the social democracies of the world.
Instead, America tells its citizens to go it alone and then hope for the best.
People in the U.S. end up going bankrupt because of medical bills, even though they have health insurance. People in the U.S. end up with enormous student debt from going to college—often anywhere from the high five figures to six figures, and that’s just for an undergraduate degree.
Eighty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; 40 percent of Americans don’t have the resources on hand to cover an unexpected $400 expense; and in 2022, total household debt in the United States is over $16.5 trillion. Even when leaving this earthly plane, the debt continues: 75 percent of Americans die with an average debt of $62,000.
Furthermore, nearly half of all Americans age 18-64 work low-paying jobs, making a median salary of $10 an hour and median annual earnings of $18,000 a year. Working two and three jobs at the same time to make ends meet is the norm for a lot of people.
In addition, in comparison with other developed nations, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy; second highest poverty rate; spends the most on health care and has the worst health outcomes; has the highest child mortality rate; has a citizenry that spends the most on college; has the highest income inequality; and has the lowest voter turnout in elections.
All these facts made it no surprise when the U.S. ranked 28th on the most recent Social Progress Index, which uses 50 metrics to measure quality of life in countries around the world. Out of the 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil, and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.
This gloomy reality led Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index to say, “The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action. It’s like we’re a developing country.”
Ironically, an American who has done much to destroy the fabric of America, Charles Koch, considers himself a “classic liberal,” in that he’s a libertarian who believes that government has no place in regulating society and business.
And that’s what you get in a liberal democracy: the belief that government has no place in regulating business (or society for that matter), which allows businesses to operate according to the principles of the free market.
This fundamental belief gives corporations and individuals free rein to make as much money as they can without any concern of the impact on society or the environment.
This philosophy is the underlying reason why there is massive income and wealth inequality these days.
The 50 richest Americans, with a worth of $2 trillion, hold almost as much wealth as half the country. In addition, the top one percent of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion, while the poorest 50 percent—about 165 million people—hold just $2.08 trillion, or 1.9 percent of all household wealth.
At the same time, wages have stagnated over the last few decades, while worker productivity has increased. When there’s an increase in productivity and no concurrent rise in wages, the end result is more profits for the corporate owners and shareholders.
And we can thank all this to the fact that the idea of a free market without government constraints is the guiding principle of a liberal democracy.
When you have a society, as in the social democracies, in which the public good is of the utmost importance, and there is a strong social contract and safety net, there is less chance of people falling through the safety net and ending up finding themselves in dire straits.
The ironic thing is that the world’s first social democracy occurred in the 1930s in America, during the New Deal era of the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As the country attempted to dig itself out of the Great Depression, government policies were instituted to help people. Large sums of money were spent as social investment in the public good—the government spent 40 to 50 percent of GDP over those years.
This amount of money created tremendous social cohesion, as the regular people were celebrated as the greatest public good the country had.
FDR’s policies were so popular that in his first midterm election in 1934, instead of the Democrats losing seats in the House and Senate, as is usually the case for the party in power, the Democrats gained nine seats in both the House and Senate.
And in 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in a landslide election, even though he was opposed by Wall Street, major corporations, and most of the country’s media.
Over his four terms in office, FDR wanted the U.S. to become an exemplar of social democracy. To that end, in 1944, during his State of the Union address, FDR proposed what he called a “second bill of rights.”
Roosevelt argued that the political rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” His remedy was to declare an “economic bill of rights” to guarantee these specific rights, which were:
***Employment (right to work)
***An adequate income for food, shelter, and recreation
***Farmers’ rights to a fair income
***Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
***Decent housing
***Adequate medical care
***Social security
***Education
After World War II, the U.S. helped rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan. Using the social democracy model of the U.S. as a guide, the various European countries were rebuilt in that image.
As nascent social democracies, European countries slowly began to thrive; meanwhile, the U.S. faltered. Roosevelt unfortunately wasn’t around to oversee the continued flourishing of America’s social democracy, as he died in 1945.
Over the ensuing decades, the two regions took different paths. Europe and the other social democracies followed suit with FDR’s second bill of rights, while America backtracked from a social democracy and regressed into a liberal democracy.
A big part of why this occurred was because of the fear that has been put into the minds of Americans over the concept of socialism—a fear perpetrated mostly by the wealthy, who have always been concerned about protecting their fortunes from any sort of redistribution of wealth through taxation.
One of the earliest examples of this fear mongering was in July 1892, when thousands of employees of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania went on strike. Two months earlier, Carnegie had unilaterally dissolved the steelworkers union. The union, in anger, chose to strike.
In response, Carnegie brought in 300 agents from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private security firm with a reputation for ruthless violence.
But the Pinkertons were overwhelmed and outnumbered by the striking workers, and retreated after a gun battle in which 40 workers were shot and nine killed, and 20 Pinkertons were shot, with seven killed. Carnegie knew he had to escalate the battle to win the war and next had the governor call in the Pennsylvania state militia.
Ten days after the strike began, the militia came in with a regimen far larger than the striking workers. The commander of the militia, in a public relations move aimed at getting the general public to side with him—and Carnegie—stated, “Pennsylvanians can hardly appreciate the actual communism of these people. They believe the works are theirs quite as much as Carnegie’s.”
The workers, outmaneuvered and outgunned, saw the handwriting on the wall and surrendered, and with it, the union was broken and Carnegie came out on top.
Branding the workers as communists painted them as the evil ones and influenced the public to side with Carnegie.
Then there was the Red Scare of 1919, in which many people sympathetic to socialism were jailed or deported.
There was another Red Scare during the 1950s in America, when Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the spotlight and claimed that communism had infiltrated the U.S.
No one was safe from McCarthy’s accusations, all of which were spurious, sensational, unsubstantiated, feckless, and demagogic. There was no basis for his claims, yet the press amplified it.
During his reign of terror, he destroyed the lives and reputations of people in the federal government, along with academics, writers, musicians, actors, film industry personnel, and countless others.
Even President Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t immune to McCarthy’s insinuations: He too was seen as being an agent of the communist conspiracy.
The days of McCarthyism are long gone, but the fear of anything that smacks of socialism lives on.
Now, to even suggest the U.S. be more like a social democracy gets a good percentage of Americans up in arms that the U.S. is becoming a socialist republic, like the former Soviet Union.
The reality, though, is this: social democracies are not socialist republics.
But leave it to Republicans to continue screaming from the rafters, as they did in this recent election cycle, and as they have done in all past election cycles, that the Democrats are socialists and communists—meaning that the Red Wave was also a Red Scare.
This time around, not enough were buying what Republicans were selling.
The time has now come for the U.S. to take the next step in its evolution, to become a social democracy.
As I pointed out, it wouldn’t be the first time social democracy was part of the fabric of America—the nation was the exemplar of the world in that regard at one time.
But now, the transformation is imperative. Or else the scourge of Trumpism, with or without Donald Trump, will continue.
When a large number of people are struggling to make ends meet, as is happening in the liberal democracy of the U.S., they become easy prey for predators like Donald Trump and others of his ilk.
Which means the saga of Trumpism isn’t yet over. And it won’t end until America transforms itself once again into a social democracy.