In Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, an advanced statist apparatus with high levels of taxes and welfare emerged after WWII too, exactly as it did in the EU and in Japan. All that changed in the 1980s for these three English-speaking countries, whose statist traditions were never as extensive, historically, as on the Continent or in Japan.

The causes of the change? Sluggish economic growth and lagging competitiveness brought about major free-market reforms in those countries; these, in turn, moved their economies closer to the American system, much to their benefit. Since the reforms, Britain--- once a near laughing-stock in the EU at the end of the 1970s --- has outperformed almost all the EU countries save Ireland, another relatively free-market country by European standards; it has not only closed the per capita income gap with Germany and France, but today has a clear lead over them. Australia and New Zealand too have regained much of their earlier lost ground in an era of anti-welfarism and deregulation. And Ireland's pro-business policies, implemented in the 1980s too, transformed that country from one of the two or three poorest in the EU into the very richest.

Only Canada --- ruled for almost all of the 4 decades since the start of the 1960s by the Quebec-based Liberal Party --- has let the state sector and welfare transfers grow in a semi-EU way, making their economy something of a half-way house between the EU welfare state and the Anglo-American model. And even Canada has begun in the last few years to retrench, cutting back government spending to regain more dynamism.

Even so, the ideological legacies on both the left and right in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand --- not to forget Canada --- still differ from those in the US. Statist tendencies are particularly strong on the left, but they also exist in some sectors of the conservative and liberal parties in those countries.

Here's another way to gauge the large differences in the size of the governmental sector across industrial countries, particularly since 1960 . . . a period in which full employment and prosperity had been achieved everywhere in the industrial world, but in which the welfare state continued to expand with high-pulsating speed in almost all the EU and Japan, along with Canada and New Zealand. Note how government spending climbed almost 4 times as fast on the average between 1960 and 1996 than it did in the USA.

To Clarify American Exceptionalism

On the political right, American conservatism has never been statist in the sense found in conservative parties in both Japan and all over the Continent of West Europe even now. Not only that, it has also has lacked the patrician and paternalistic influences that have marked the Tory wing of the British Conservative Party, routed --- possibly for good --- by Margaret Thatcher’s anti-statist reforms of the 1980s.

On the left --- which our chief concern in this and the last three articles of this mini-series --- the Democratic Party has no socialist or Marxist legacies in its history and so differs from all other left-wing democratic parties on this score, whether in Europe, Latin America, or Asia. The British Labour Party, note quickly, is no exception here. Even though it was never heavily influenced by Marxism, it was formally committed to the full nationalization of British industry between 1918 and the late 1950s --- a sweeping, full-blooded socialist program . Only under the deft leadership of Tony Blair, who has won three general elections, has the party swung around to accepting the free-market reforms of the Thatcher era . . . and even then only after protracted internecine conflicts.

Our Chief Aim Can Be Rephrased As A Question . .

Specifically, what explains the unique lack of socialist and Marxist influences in American politics, past or present? Supplying an answer is what the current article is about, a direct continuation in this endeavor of the three earlier installments in this mini-series . . . which pinned down some influences so far, all economic in nature.

A key point rears up here. Try to keep it in mind.

Plainly put, the various influences in American history that immunized our politics from socialism have been multiple and range across politics and socio-cultural developments as well as economic ones . . . each and every one with roots that extend back over the centuries to colonial and early post-revolutionary times. So far, the three immediate articles have probed economic influences only. For that matter, another such influence --- income inequality, always comparatively viewed --- is the chief topic of today’s article.

Note quickly though. None of this means that we’re slighting political institutions and policies, or socio-cultural trends over the centuries, in shaping our ideological spectrum, whether on the left or right. It does mean that it takes time to set out a complex, multi-faceted argument, and it will take at least one more article --- dealing with the raw entrepreneurial energy and risk-taking in American life, a major source of both jobs and innovative technologies --- before we can move on and focus on politics and eventually social and cultural influences.

PART TWO:
THE EARLIER ARGUMENT SUMMARIZED

Three Related Economic Developments Have Been Dealt With So Far

Each of these has been probed at length, and what follows is a capsule summary, with some pivotal implications teased out in graphic form.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 03:42 PM CST [continue] [ 2 comments ]

This is the 4th article in a mini-series on the unique nature of the US ideological spectrum, all part of a larger, far more ambitious series --- stretching back now, it seems, through 14 articles to the battle of Gettysburg --- on the innovative prowess of the US economy, always comparatively viewed. Thanks to that prowess, the US has been the richest country in per capita income for well over a century now . . . a lead that defies standard economic growth theory, in all its variants. Right now, at the end of 2004, the US is 55% or so richer than the EU average for West Europe; and since the British, French, Germans, and Italians have a per capita income roughly the same as that average --- Britain slightly richer than the others --- the US lead is especially vivid and startling, no other words for it. Japan’s per capita income, come to that, is about that of the British, and hence the US lead over it is no less startling,

The articles on ideology are doubly relevant here to explaining this huge, surprisingly long-lasting US lead: in particular, they're part and parcel of an institutional and cultural approach that underpins the overall argument of the series on the US economy’s innovative powers. Note: doubly relevant. How so?

• The US lacks a statist-conservatism of the sort that is rife on the Continent of West Europe and in Japan . . . the dominant political parties there, for generations now, suspicious of free markets and capitalist competition of the sort Americans take for granted.

• The US also lacks, on the left, a socialist or Marxist tradition that marks deeply the history of all the dominant left-wing parties in West Europe and Japan . . . to the extent one can even find an organized Japanese opposition party since the 1960s. The American left can draw on some radical and populist traditions, stretching back to Jefferson and in various trade union movements (especially the CIO and the miners, both organizing mass industrial workers and badly exploited mine workers early in the 20th century), but never a socialist heritage, let alone one marked by Marxist views of capitalism.

And so, down to business

The nature and causes of the Republican Party’s anti-statist ideology will be the subject of future articles in this mini-series. Right now, our task is to continue the analysis ---- started a couple of weeks ago --- that focuses on the US left: specifically, in order to sift out and explain the various reasons for its general indifference, historical and in the present, to a socialist, heavily statist way of organizing the US economy in the sense that prevails in West Europe or Japan. Yes even today . . . despite some pro-market reforms in Germany and elsewhere, it needs to be added, to make the economies there more competitive and vigorous.

PART ONE:
ECONOMIC REASONS WHY THERE IS NO SOCIALIST HERITAGE IN THE US: CONTINUED

A Brief Refresher of Where the Argument Was Left Hanging Fire: The First Two Influences Summarized

In a previous buggy article published on December 16th, 2004, two major economic influences that shaped the American ideological spectrum on the left were discussed at length:

• An unusually high standard of living, with the US the richest country in the world in per capita income for well over a century now.

• And, more to the point, an unusually high real wage in the US early on, compared even to Britain when that country, the industrial pioneer, was much richer in per capita income. More specifically, the average wage earned by unskilled labor in the US was double the British wage in 1830, and still almost 60% higher in 1914 despite a mass outflow of poor people from Britain and Europe in the interval, nearly 40 million people, most of it to the US itself.

Note that the startling American lead in living standards hasn’t been fully closed by the EU or Japan in the 90 years that have elapsed since then. On the contrary, it is still huge, with the US now enjoying about a 55% higher per capita income than the EU or Japan at the end of 2004.

You want more evidence?

Here’s some that is especially vivid. Two Swedish economists study noted recently that if any of the four big EU countries --- Britain, France, Germany, or Italy --- were suddenly to join the U.S. federation, each would be the fifth poorest of the existing 50 states, ranking just ahead of Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Montana, and tied with Oklahoma: all five of these, note with care, overwhelmingly rural states and far below average American per capita income. Tiny Sweden itself (9 million people) would be the 7th poorest state. The second richest EU country --- tiny Denmark (4 million) --- would be the 10th poorest, and Ireland with 4 million people too and the highest EU living standard would rank 14th among the poorest U.S. states.

A Third Economic Influence:
Unusual Land Ownership in the 19th Century

Huge as the gap between West Europe and the US happened to be in living standards and wages, what stands out even more strikingly, is the difference in land ownership. In 1830 --- at a time when the US was overwhelmingly an agricultural country --- 80% of the American population owned and worked the land for their livelihood. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in history.

Just how great the differences in land ownership were on the two sides of the Atlantic are brought more vividly in the following table.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 05:05 PM CST [continue] [ 3 comments ]

Our thanks to James Ruhland, a buggy visitor, for his stimulating comments: in particular, about the impact of economic influences in helping to account for the unique non-socialist nature of the American left in politics, whether past or present.

Prof Bug:

Is the emphasis on wage levels corresponding to presence or absence of a strong Marxist/Socialist tradition really warranted, given that Marxist and Socialist movements have more often than not originated not from the bottom, but instead from fairly well-off, well-educated segments of a population?

It's an observation made by Joshua Muravchik in his book Heaven on Earth. Those who clamor most for Socialism, those most likely to adhere to Marxist views, are rarely the poorest. They're most often a educated - if politically disempowered - class. The members of the Bolshevik movement weren't from poor backgrounds. Neither were the founders of the British Labour movement.

Muravchik believes that what made America distinctive was the nature of our own Labour movement, and its leaders, from Gompers to Meany, who rejected Socialistic/Class-warfare solutions. The focus on America's PCI relative to that of other nations as an explanation for the lack of a strong Marxist movement seems - well, almost Marxist in its Materialism.

SOME BUGGY REPLIES

James:

Thank you for the comments, all stimulating and in effect reducible to two different sets: one about the leaders and mass-following in the Marxist movements, and the other about economic influences in shaping the American left’s history. What follows are the buggy replies to each set.

I. Who Led the Socialist and Communist Parties and What
Were the Bases of Their Mass Followings?

1) The Mass-Based Support of Social Democratic Parties

It's true that the leaders of Socialist Parties in the 19th and 20th centuries were middle class types, usually intellectuals, but there would have been no mass party following except for large numbers of the new urban working classes flocking to their socialist messages and platforms . . . especially, of course, in those countries in West Europe (or elsewhere) that had mass democratic franchises. The same observation about intellectual leaders is even more applicable to the Communist Parties, or their forerunners like the Russian Social-Democrats cleaved into two wings (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), before and after 1918.

2) The Main Difference Between The Mass Followers of Communist and Social Democratic Parties After 1918.

The mass grass-roots supporters of Socialist parties were urban working classes, even if the leaders were still middle class themselves. By contrast, even in revolutionary Russia in 1917-18 and during the civil war period over the next three or four years, the urban working classes were very small in number, and Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership relied increasingly on the support of peasants, drawn to the party in that period by two policies: an abrupt end to the murderous war with Germany in early 1918 and the simultaneous transfer of huge estates to peasant ownership.

That policy of support in the countryside was then consolidated after the civil war ended after the civil war ended, roughly 1921, by the New Economic Policy, which allowed the peasants to keep their land for private use . . . even as the policy encouraged private manufacturing. The NEP lasted about eight years. It clearly enjoyed mass support, both in the countryside and in the cities. Only with Stalin's drastic industrialization of a command economy beginning in the late 1920s --- which nationalized all land under state ownership and forced the peasants into collective factory-farms --- did the peasants in great number fight back, burn their livestock and crops, and became increasingly repressed, crushed, and killed until all resistance was tamed. Large numbers of peasants in the Ukraine, one of the Soviet Union's biggest grain-producer, were slaughtered in enforced famine from Moscow.

3) The Communist Discovery of the Peasantry

Beginning in the 1920s, there was a further shift by small Communist parties in backward countries --- especially in China --- toward a mass peasant-base. Small wonder. There was scarcely any urban working class to mobilize in that country or elsewhere; by contrast peasants --- brutalized there as they had been in East Europe and Russia for hundreds of years by luxury-loving aristocratic landlords and rapacious states --- were the bulk of the populations, and what’s more, their hatred of the landlords and state bureaucrats (and security forces) could easily be mobilized by an effective CP leadership for revolution . . . particularly with the breakthrough development of guerrilla warfare and the political mobilization of the peasants by Mao and his followers in the Chinese CP.

4) Peasant-Based Communist Revolutions Were Always Led by Intellectuals

Needless to say, in China or Vietnam or Yugoslavia --- to take three countries with large indigenous revolutions that brought Communists to power without the presence on their soil of the Soviet Red Army --- the leaders were all university-educated intellectuals from the middle classes. The same is true of the mass-murdering Pol Pot Communist leaders in Cambodia in the 1970s and early 1980s: most were educated in France. In Cuba, Castro relied more on an urban-based support, not just peasants, but then he took power without claiming to be a Communist, something he only discovered to be his preference, it seems, after his success in the late 1950s.

One other point is worth noting in passing: the big difference between the Chinese peasantry and Russian state- and collectivized farmers since Maoism in China (1979) and Communism in the Russia.

By 1991, when the Communist system collapsed in Russia, farmers there had known only state- and collective-farms for over 6 decades. Nobody knew anything about capitalism, and at most farmers --- who were more or less agrarian factory workers --- had had some experience with small patches they could cultivate for personal use. By contrast, China's peasantry had been collectivized for less than 3 decades when the shift towards privatization in the countryside began in 1979. Unlike the Russian farmers who were totally uninterested in responding to new market-based incentives and land ownership, China's farmers --- most of whom remembered what a pre-Communist system was --- responded with diligent promptness. The result was a massive increase in agricultural production and output, which also freed up well over a hundred million formerly destitute peasants for work in the expanding industrial sectors in town-and-country enterprises.

II. Economic Influences in Shaping the Non-Socialist History
of the Left in American Politics

1) What Explains the Absence of Socialism and Marxism on the American Left?

As for the explanation of why there is no socialist or Marxist tradition in US politics, I agree: economic factors alone aren’t the only causal influences, important as they are --- and not only agree, it's something the article here clearly set out. For that matter, we haven’t even finished looking at the economic influences, such as property or land ownership in the 19th century in the US. Political, social, and cultural influences also count.

That said, you downplay wrongly, it seems, even the two economic influences singled out so far --- an unusually high real wage by international standards for unskilled workers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and an unusually high standard of living to boot. Recall that though Britain, the first industrial country, had a higher per capita income throughout almost all the 19th century compared to the US, American wages --- for the unskilled (the vast bulk of laborers at the time) --- were twice as high as far back as the 1830s, and were still 54% higher in 1914 on the eve of WWI despite a tremendous outflow of workers from Britain and Europe who immigrated in large number to the US (about 33 million in the period of the 19th century down to 1922), as well as several million others who went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Argentina.

2) High Wages (and Other Economic Influences) vs. Pragmatic Trade Unions Alone: Britain and the US

To grasp the importance of very high wages, note that a pragmatic trade union movement does not itself guarantee there won't be eventually a major socialist political party in a country.

Consider Britain as a foil here.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 06:19 PM CST [continue] [ 4 comments ]

This is the 3rd article in a mini-series that started earlier this month on the exceptional nature of American political ideologies --- in particular, the almost total absence of a socialist or Marxist heritage on the left and, on the right, an unique conservatism that is committed to free-markets and hence differs from statist-conservatism found in Japan and everywhere on the West European continent.

The Initial Article

The 1st article in the mini-series, as you might recall, set out a spectrum of ideologies --- on both the left and right --- that runs between two poles of total state dominance of the economy and society: totalitarian Communism on the far left and Nazism (and fascist variants) on the far right. It distinguished between eight kinds of ideologies, all of which emerged in the modern era of industrialization, nationalism and nation-states, democracy, and the counter-reactions to them that materialized with eruptive force by the late 18th century in West Europe and North America and then spread gradually around the world. Then, in that same article, a buggy analysis of the eight different ideologies was unpacked. It tried to clarify the meaning of each, along with some concrete examples: among other things, as it turns out, liberalism and conservatism mean different things in Europe and Japan, or for that matter in the rest of the world, than in the USA.

Liberalism in the rest of the world, just to remind you, means free-market enthusiasm --- what we would call libertarianism in the US --- and hence the pejorative term, neo-liberalism, to depict the anti-statist policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In European circles, never mind Latin America or among leftists everywhere, neo-liberalism is a big boo-word; just mentioning it is likely to send shivers racing up and down the spines of left-wing intellectuals, most of them totally ignorant about economics. Conservatism, too, means something different in the EU or elsewhere. It refers to statist-conservatives like the French Gaullist right or the German Christian Democrats or the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (now in power for the last 50 years).

What follows?

Well, to make sense of how Europeans view US politics, we should regard liberalism in this country as roughly equivalent to very moderate Social-Democracy . . . however misleading that term might be in the American context. As for American conservatiism, small wonder that Milton Friedman --- one of the two or three most influential economists of the last century and an icon of American conservative (and libertarian) thought --- told the German weekly Der Spiegel a few years ago that when he visits West Europe, he always describes himself as a "liberal", not a conservative, to clarify where he stands in European politics.

The 2nd Article

The next article in the mini-series focused strictly on the the unique left-side of the American ideological spectrum. In particular, it sought to clarify what the leftist heritage in the US amounts to --- certainly not socialist or Marxist, despite at times some radical influences in its policy-making. When that clarifying task was finished, the article moved on and surveyed the shifting policies toward activist government that the Democratic Party has pursued, with varying fortunes, since the New Deal days of Franklyn Roosevelt in the 1930s and the Great Society ambitions of Lyndon Johnson three decades later.

The outcome of these varying fortunes?

Well, if we’re to believe no one less than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, the era of Big Government is now over, period --- even if its current institutional nature still leaves a much more active and costly federal government than existed before FDR’s election in 1932. All this, mind you, however limited the American federal system is compared to governments in West Europe and Japan or even Canada these days.

All of Which Brings Us to the Subject of Today's Article

Consider it an extended effort --- which spans a host of causal influences, political and economic as well as social and cultural --- to explain the failure of socialism and Marxist views to ever take root in American politics. The current article, just to make what follows clearer, will probe a host of economic influences in American life, past and present; nothing more, but also nothing less. As for the various political, social, and cultural influences that have shaped the American left's unique nature, they will figure prominently in the next article or two in this series. Eventually, of course, our attention will shift to the right-side of the US ideological spectrum, and at that point we'll begin to examine and weigh the various reasons why no statist-conservatism has ever emerged here.

One more thing, a reminder . . . and then down to today’s business.

As buggy visitors will recall, this mini-series on ideological exceptionalism in American politics is itself part of a larger, much more ambitious series on the American economy, always viewed comparatively, to be more precise, with Japan and the EU. That series began last summer, and so far 12 articles on the rangy topic --- with its institutional and cultural thrusts --- have appeared. The current article, then, is the 13 in that series.

PART ONE:
ECONOMIC REASONS WHY SOCIALISM HAS NEVER TAKEN ROOT IN AMERICAN LIFE

By themselves, if we were to add one key political force in American history --- the emergence of a limited democratic form of government with 67% of American (white) males able to vote with no property restrictions in the 1830s: at a time when, in Britain, the corresponding figure was 1/20th --- the economic influences set out here would probably suffice to explain why socialism never had a large appeal to the masses of Americans, whether agrarian or urban workers. Probably, in large part; but not wholly. Keep this qualification in mind as we work our way forward through the economic influences singled out here and in the next article. As you'll eventually see, there were other political influences that offset a socialist or Marxist appeal in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the same is true of social and cultural trends as well. All will be discussed in due time.

In the meantime, keep your attention focused on economic influences . . . with their firmly planted impact on American politics extending back over two centuries now . . . much to the dismay of left-wing radicals these days, not least among the politically correct acolytes in US universities (outside economic faculties) and in certain activist circles in the Democratic party at its grass-roots level?

They’re several in number, six of them standing out; and as always in this series on the US economy and the smaller one embedded in it on American ideologies, we need a comparative perspective to make sense of American exceptionalism. Briefly summarized, the six we'll be examining in detail are the following:

Click on the right continue button to read more:

Posted by gordongordomr @ 05:07 PM CST [continue] [ 5 comments ]

A few days ago, a buggy article appeared that analyzed the nature and range of political ideologies around the world. Its main point? To show that the US is unique among industrial countries, lacking either an influential left-wing socialist tradition, Marxist or otherwise, or anything equivalent to the statist-conservatism that flourishes in Japan and everywhere on the Continent of West Europe these days. In particular, on the American right . . .

. . . The Republican Party Is Unique

With few exceptions, American conservatism has always been generally opposed to paternalistic big government, on any grounds --- not that Republican politicians, hypocritically to be sure, won’t dish out benefits on a grand scale to their constituencies or provide subsidies or protection to certain manufacturing or agricultural firms . . . usually big corporations, generous with their campaign contributions for their patrons. companies. All politicians, everywhere --- whether on the left or right --- do this. It’s a professional hazard. What alone differs is the PR-fluff used as rationalizations.

Still, the Republican party remains unique in the industrial democratic world with its suspicions of big government and partisan preferences for free markets.

These days, the only other major conservative party that has strong leanings toward smaller government and freer markets similar to the Republican Party is the British Conservative Party; and even then --- until Margaret Thatcher routed it with her powerful anti-welfare measures in the 1980s --- it had a strong Tory paternalistic wing, with roots in pre-industrial, pre-democratic British life extending back to the 17th century, that had no trouble managing the advanced welfare-state that the Labour Party established in Britain after 1945. And come to think of it, not only managing that rapidly growing welfare-and-regulatory state, but extending it during the 1950s, 1960s, and most of the 1970s. Elsewhere, since the 1980s too, Australia’s Liberal Party has emulated Thatcher-like and Reagan-like economic and social programs; and under various shifting guises and coalitions, so have the motley number of conservative and liberal parties in New Zealand.

What follows?

Well, the next article in this series will try to pin down and clarify the various reasons why American conservatives continue to differ from Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party --- in power for the last half century (except a 9-month flurry early in the 1990s) --- or the EU’s numerous Conservative parties whatever they’re called, whether Christian Democrats, Gaullists in France, or those in Scandinavia and Holland . . . their names and fortunes varying over the last few decades. For instance, Italy’s Christian Democrats were that country’s biggest political party until the end of the 1980s, after which, as one scandal after another was uncovered by some courageous magistrates and journalists, it disappeared . . . as did, come to think of it, the country’s second or third biggest party, the Socialists who were found to be no less corrupt. Remember, too, as several buggy articles have shown --- most recently in mid-November 2004 --- to the right of these mainstream statist-conservative parties there has emerged, with jolting force, several populist right-wing breakthrough parties.

No Less Unique: The Democratic Party's Heritage

All of which brings us to our main topic in today’s article, which requires a shift of focus back toward the left-side of the political spectrum: the lack of an influential socialist or Marxist tradition in American politics, historically or otherwise. The argument, you’ll note, unfolds in three steps:

PART ONE:
THE ABSENCE OF A LEFT-WING SOCIALIST OR MARXIST TRADITION IN AMERICAN POLITICS: SOME INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Is the Democratic Party Really Unique in the Industrial Democratic World

Yes, strikingly so. Historically, it has eschewed even the paternalistic, but clearly non-Marxist statist-heritage of the British Labour Party . . . at any rate until the last decade, since which time to stay in power and compete effectively with the Conservatives it has shifted to the more free-market orientation initiated on the right by Margaret Thatcher. Labour, it’s true, officially renounced in the late 1950s its historical platform to nationalize all industry; but then, more or less at the same time except in France, so did all the other West European Socialist or Social-Democratic Parties with their influential Marxist heritage, including a theoretical commitment to class-warfare.

A clarifying sidebar comment or two: When the British Labour Party was formed in 1900, a good three decades or so after the British working class could vote, it applied to join the Marxist Second Socialist International. The Continental socialists were puzzled. They were committed, in the German phrase, to Klassenkrieg . . . class warfare, something the Labour Party’s founders never espoused or wouldn’t. Eventually, in typically hair-splitting German fashion, Labour was given an OK when it was said to at least support Klassenkampf: class struggle.

As for the French Socialists, it finally achieved dominant influence in French politics in the 1980s, winning the presidency for the first time and governing in a coalition with radical Greens and Communists --- at one time, until the end of the 1950s, the country’s largest political party after 1945. The faithful on the French left were joyful. Socialism --- a big breakthrough past the huge statist welfare-and-regulatory state the French left and right had already constructed after 1945 --- was looming just on the horizon. What happened quickly disillusioned the left. The few radical economic programs the Mitterand-dominated government toyed with quickly sputtered or backfired amid vast unpopularity, and essentially the socialist Prime Ministers and others in the executive ended up administering welfare policies scarcely different from those in Germany or Northern Europe.

US Trade Union Leaders Less Concerned With Income Equality Than Swedish Industrialists

To make sure you grasp just how different the Democratic Party has been in its ideological heritage, note something especially revealing about American attitudes --- even on the political left here --- towards income redistribution. In an unusually stimulating book on ideas of equality in Sweden, Japan, and the United States, a Harvard team of political scientists combined with a team of Swedish and Japanese scholars and found, to their surprise, that even American trade union leaders were willing to tolerate a much larger range of income inequality as something desirable, a goal to achieve, than were the owners and managers of Swedish corporate industry. The same was true, interestingly enough, of the leaders of American civil rights movements. (See Sidney Verba, Steve Kelman, and others, Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) And Yet Note Quickly:

American wage-earners (as we’ll see with good statistical evidence alter) were not only always richer than Europeans after 1800 or so, but --- contrary to left-wing mythology here --- the income distribution was also more equal than anywhere in Europe . . . as late, believe it or not, as 1970.

Was this actually so? How was it possible?

Or at least students in the buggy prof’s classes, full of wonder, would always query when the relevant stats were supplied.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 06:51 PM CST [continue] [ 4 comments ]

This, the 12th installment in a lengthy series on the innovative prowess of the U.S. economy --- always viewed comparatively with Japan and the EU countries --- takes up a key topic that has only been briefly touched on so far: the absence in American politics, historically and at present, of a strong left-wing ideological tradition . . . socialist, Marxist, or what have you.. Its absence, historically and at present, is unique among industrial countries, including Canada ---which has had both stronger left-wing and statist-conservative traditions; even more important, it has helped to make the United States the richest country in the world . . . with a per capita income 55% higher than the EU-15 average and 50% higher than Japan’s.

What This Gap Entails

To drive home just how great this gulf in living standards happens to be, consider the four largest EU countries: Britain, plus Germany, France, and Italy . . . the latter three advanced welfare-and-regulatory states of the sort extolled by the left-wing radicals in US universities and among Democratic Party activists at the grass-roots as a model for this country: a saner, more equitable way to organize an economy, it’s claimed. The reality? As a recent study by two Swedish economists showed, if any of these four big EU countries were suddenly to join the U.S. federation, it would be the fifth poorest of the existing 50 states, ranking just ahead of Mississipi, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Montana, and tied with Oklahoma . . . all five of these, please note, overwhelmingly rural states and far below average American per capita income. Sweden itself would be the 7th poorest state. The second richest EU country --- tiny Denmark --- would be the 10th poorest, and Ireland with the highest EU living standard would rank 14th among the poorest U.S. states.

For that matter, according to the same Swedish study, 40% of all of Swedish households "would rank among low-income households in the USA, and an even greater number in the poorer European countries would be classed as low income earnings by the American definition. In an affluent economy, in other words, it is not unlikely that those perceived as poor in an international perspective are relatively
well off."

Our Aim In This and the Next Articles

It's to clarify the ideological spectrum across industrial countries, historically and at present and --- more to the point --- pin down the reasons for the lack of a socialist or Marxist tradition in American politics. Those two articles will then be followed by a third that deals with another American exceptionalism, ideologically speaking: the absence of a right-wing statist tradition of the sort found in Japan and on the Continent of West Europe, and the reasons why.

A fourth article will contain some clarifying remarks about ideologies in general --- in particular, why they are relatively new in history, part and parcel of the modern world of industrializing, nation-states, democracy, free-market capitalism, and globalizing forces that emerged out of a complex of vast changes that are little more than 200 to 250 years old. The political reactions to these modernizing trends, full of turbulence and dislocation for the existing status-quo in countries around the globe --- for and against democracy, capitalism, market-oriented industrialization, and free trade --- are reflected in the ideological heritages that divide the advanced industrial countries from all other countries, and more to the point for our concerns, how even among advanced industrial democracies the American heritage is noticeably different . . . with the other great English-speaking democracies, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada sharing much, but not all, in common with that American exceptionalism.

Is it surprising --- an accident of history --- that the two giant liberal great powers of the last 250 years, Britain and the United States, have destroyed in war all the main challengers from the far ideological left or right: Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, Militarist Japan and Nazi Germany and its fascist allies, and later in the cold war the Communist Soviet Union . . . and not only destroyed them, but forced their successor regimes, directly or indirectly, to move in the liberal direction of democracy, market capitalism, and freer trade?

PART ONE:
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN THE MODERN WORLD

The Ideological Spectrum Across Industrial Countries

Look at the diagram here, a graphic effort to depict the variety of political ideologies --- democratic or anti-democratic; free-market or statist; left-wing or right-wing --- that have flourished globally since the end of the 18th century, at any rate among industrial countries: a two-century era marked by the handful of revolutions that have shaped our modern world and that we mentioned a moment ago: the industrial revolution, the nationalist revolution, the democratic revolution, the scientific and technological revolution, and the globalizing revolution, all topics that we’ll clarify in due course here. For the time being, focus on the spectrum diagramed here without worrying about some complex points it entails, terminological and historical --- such as the meaning of liberalism or conservatism, which differs in the U.S. as compared with West Europe or Japan. That clarification, as it happens, will follow in due course too.

It’s enough right now to get a general working idea of what the range of ideologies is, and where the uniquely narrow U.S. spectrum lies . . . in the center.

Making Sense of The Spectrum

Note, first off, that the spectrum runs between two poles: both highly statist and anti-democratic, culminating on the far left in the archetypical Communist systems of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China --- still found in North Korea today --- and on the right in Nazi Germany and (to a lesser extent) its fascist allies in WWII.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 09:20 PM CST [continue] [ 3 comments ]

Prof Bug will be returning to the lengthy series, started last summer, on the innovative supremacy of the US economy, comparatively viewed. The 12th article will look at ideological influences in US politics and history that have shaped the unusually flexible and innovative economy of our country: in particular, the reasons for the absence of a left-wing socialist tradition. The 13th article, which will appear early next week, will then hop-skip across the political spectrum and explain why there has been no strong statist-conservatism in US politics similar to the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or, in West Europe, to Christian Democracy, Gaullism, the statist varieties in Scandinavia, and even the Tory wing of the British Conservative Party . . . even though Margaret Thatcher's dominant role in the party during the 1980s may have undermined its influence in Britain, and possibly once and for all.

In the meantime, the buggy prof wishes everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by gordongordomr @ 02:09 PM CST [continue] [ 1 Comment ]

Why a second article? Well, it's not really a new article --- rather the last part of the original article, published on November 13, 2004, after the buggy prof decided to break it into two halves; taken together, the resulting pair form a mini-series on the topic of EU domestic developments and their implications for US-European relations, now and in the future. Why the decision to slice up the original article? Nothing surprising really --- just that it turned out to be pretty long; maybe unseemly so. Much wiser, then, to have the brief mini-series. Note that the two articles go hand-in-glove, adhering to the initial organization: five main parts, plus a cluster of sub-divisions.

The first article, you might recall, covered parts one and two. About to unfold here, the second article takes up the argument where it was left dangling in mid-air and follows its twists and turns to the very end through three more parts.

THE FIRST ARTICLE'S ARGUMENT RECAPITULATED

To make sense of the analysis that follows, you really should read the first article or at least run your eye over its main points --- including the comments sent to the buggy prof by Francis, a British citizen living and working in France (after a lengthy stint in Italy). When you’re finished with that chore, you should have a much better working idea why --- thanks to political and intellectual vacuums that have emerged over the decades in the EU --- right-wing populist parties, some moderate as in Denmark and Holland, others far more extremist as in France, have quickly moved of late to fill that void. Except for Britain and Ireland, that's true almost everywhere in the EU these days.

That said, whether or not you've read the article, a good jump-off point here would be to set out briefly its main findings --- a task that now follows.

The Major Causal Forces Creating This Void In European Life, Exploited By The New Populist Right

Two overarching trends stand out here, one reinforcing the other.

• Political timidity and evasions that have marked the behavior of governing elites in the EU for two or three decades now in the face of mounting social and economic problems and growing ethnic strife.

• It gets worse. What has aggravated these political and intellectual failures of the governing elites all over the EU except in Ireland and Britain has been the influence of the poll-parroting media almost everywhere around the EU, save for 3 or 4 outlets in London --- notably The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph, to which list, at times anyway, you could add Die Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Note the key phrase here: not entirely successful in reassuring most West Europeans. How else explain the growing disaffection among more and more disgruntled West Europeans, reflected among other things by the upsurge of right-wing populist movements in the EU . . . and in some countries of new radical left-wing movements as well? Not to mention the powerful thrust and appeal of radical Islam in the rapidly growing Muslim communities, marked more and more by Jihad sentiments, racism, and growing crime and violence committed by young Muslims everywhere in EU countries.

What Are The Most Egregious of These Fervently Held Articles-of-Faith?

Intoned and repeated over and again in the EU media, university classrooms, and political discourse without let-up, those politically correct credos that loom largest in West European life --- each being torn to tatters by sharp-edged realities day-in, day-out, on the national, regional, and global levels, to the confusion and dismay of the faithful --- seem, stripped-to-their-barebones, to be the following bevy of arbiter dicta:

. . . Well, the list of these politically correct canons, clung to and repeated with the fervor of a catechism voiced by novice eager-beaver priests, runs on. And on. Dealing with most of the ones just listed was what the first article in this series did. It tried to show, specifically, how a far-flung complex of policies and behavior inspired by these politically correct articles-of-faith have backfired, creating one tangled mess after another in West European affairs: a mishmash of evasions, failures, and spiraling conflicts . . . and all at odds with hard, fast-moving realities.

All of which brings us to our . . .

MAIN TASK HERE

As it happens, this task is no less important than the one grappled with in the first article, and maybe more so: the need, tersely said, to gather together our various findings about the dominant trends in EU life pinned down earlier --- whether political, economic, or social; not to forget the intellectual and cultural thrusts in West European life --- and put them all in a wider international perspective. For Americans and Europeans, international here means something fairly restrictive: teasing out the trends’ multiple implications for US-EU relations, now and in the near future.

Our Main Conclusion of the Mini-Series Foreshadowed

Simply said, those multiple implications do not augur happily for Trans-Atlantic relations, just the reverse --- not that NATO will disappear as an alliance in the next decade or so.

That's unlikely. Rather, it will probably grow less and less important in the foreign policies of the US, as West Europe's numerous domestic challenges and problems get more and more entangled in a thicket of expanding grievances and resentments about the US and as West Europeans simultaneously direct more of their own disillusion and fears toward their own mainstream governing elites and other home-grown culprits, real or imagined . . . the latter of the scapegoating sort. Then, too, on a strictly global level as we'll see in a few moments, American interests will very likely continue to shift away from Europe and toward far more important countries in the Middle East and Asia, and again strictly for reasons of national security.

First, the domestic trends. Four dominant ones are at work here in US-European relations, and they are overwhelmingly European in nature, not American:

Posted by gordongordomr @ 03:05 PM CST [continue] [ 1 Comment ]

Francis, a Briton living and working in France (after a long stay doing the same in Italy), has been a frequent contributor to the buggy site with his comments on European life and attitudes, not least toward the USA in the Bush era. Those comments are invariably valuable and stimulating --- doubly so because they draw on his own personal experiences and observations, made all the sharper by his long efforts as a writer, both of fiction and non-fiction. Once again, he has left prof bug and the visitor here in his debt. Note that his comments have been slightly edited to make them more understandable to American readers.

From Francis, A British Citizen Living in France:

I'm glad to see you back writing Prof Bug. I'm not going to criticize your evaluation of the US because I agree with it and in any case you live there and I don't. However I disagree somewhat with your summary of European trends.

First a nitpicking correction: you mispelled the name of the the right-wing Belgian party; it's called the Vlaams Blok.

Second and more important, as you yourself note, the far right has been gaining support all over the EU, not just in Belgium, and the major cause is easy to isolate: the ongoing failure everywhere to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Up to now, mainstream governing elites of either the left or right have bungled this pivotal challenge. Either they’ve sidestepped it entirely or --- in some countries --- mishandled it when they did try something, however obliquely. Belgium is a case in point. The VB received 1 million votes in the last general elections there out of a population of 10 million (not the electorate, the population), and its level of support continues to grow despite universal condemnation by everyone respectable in politics, the media, universities, or the churches. The fact that the Belgium Supreme Court has just banned the party shows both a worrying lack of judgment and an extremely worrying lack of freedom of expression.

Then there's Holland, just across the border to the north. The reaction of the Dutch to the murder of Theo Van Gogh last week is doubly revealing here: more and more Dutchmen are unhappy with the country's political status quo, and the electoral success of Pim Fortuyn, before he was murdered two years ago, further reinforces this point. His right-wing populist party continues to be represented in the Dutch parliament, even though it doesn't have any members in the center-right coalition government.

In short, there's a major problem here, and in Holland and Belgium and all over the EU, the reaction of governing elites has generally been denial or misdirection.

All this, I believe, helps explains their anti-Americanism. By blaming Mid-East conflicts on those meddling Yankee cowboys in control allegedly of the powerful USA, the governing elites and their media and intellectual acolytes show their ignorance even as they hope, in demagogic fashion, to convince their populations to look elsewhere for their own home-grown problems --- especially growing racial frictions between Muslim communities and native Europeans. In the short run, perhaps, this diversionary tactic might work; it even helped Gerhard Schroeder to be re-elected in Germany back in 2002, when he won almost entirely because of his anti-American rhetoric. In the long run, though, the tactic will backfire. It only delays the need everywhere to tackle resolutely the threats posed by rapidly growing Muslim communities that are themselves increasingly alienated and at loggerheads with European secular life. In my view, the efforts to squelch or stigmatize the right-wing populists --- even responsible ones like Pim Fortuyn or at least some of the Vlaams Blok leaders --- are motivated in part by the fears of the governing elites, whether on the left or right, that their blatant failures to deal effectively with the challenge of fundamentalist Islam and the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants in West Europe will be exposed for what they are: bankruptcy in government.

There's more too. A double-standard is applied, it seems, to right-wing populist rhetoric that is deemed hateful or racist, whereas firebrand statements made by Islamic extremists are usually not prosecuted at all. Their hatred, it's said, reflects the shortcomings of European life, and the alleged grievances behind it need to be addressed. Call it hypocrisy or tunnel vision or what you want. Along with the anti-American diversionary tactics, the use of double standards here will likely have only one consequence: it will create more and more voters for right-wing populist parties and movements.

THE BUGGY REPLY:

PART ONE
RIGHT-WING POPULISM IN THE EU

Francis:

Many thanks for your valuable comments, all of which call for some replies . . . some in agreement with your analysis, others at odds with them.

Belgium and the Vlaams Blok

As you note, I managed to misspell Vlaams Blok, the Belgian right-wing populist party. A good lesson here. It would only have taken a few seconds to check the spelling in Google, something I just did.

One article that it brought up revealed that the VB--- which enjoys active support from Le Pen's National Front party in France (where it draws the support of about 20% of the electorate) --- is now attracting about 1/4 of the vote in the Dutch speaking areas of Belgium, the Flemish region that has about 6 million of the country's total 10.3 million people. That's in national elections. In local elections, the party does even better. In Antwerp, Belgium's largest port city and overwhelmingly Flemish, it has gathered about 33% of the vote in local elections. What does the party stand for? Essentially two things: strict limits on foreign immigration, with a racist message --- very similar to Le Pen's National Front's position in France really --- and independence for the Flemish, the Dutch-speaking people of Belgium's federal system.

The former message has caused legal troubles for Vlaams Blok. Just this week, as you note, it was found to be racist by the Belgium Supreme Court --- a ruling that will end any state financing that the other parties represented in the national parliament continue to enjoy. That said, the party hasn’t been banned as you implied. It will just have to find financial support elsewhere. And you're no doubt right: it will likely continue to enjoy more and more support. That's also true of its equivalents elsewhere in the EU --- whether more moderate or more extreme --- as long as mainstream politicians of either the left or the right fail to tackle the major social and economic problems that all the West European populations have to confront: among them declining native populations, a rapidly growing numbers of retirees who live on state-pensions, and very slow or stagnant economic growth . . . not to forget growing unemployment of a structural short, especially high among young adults, and surges of violent crime all over the EU. In the minds of more and more West Europeans, many of these problems are entangled with the rapid increase in size of the Muslim communities, themselves increasingly fundamentalist in nature and in conflict more and more with European secular life.

Holland, probably the most advanced post-modernist country in the EU in matters of sexual and other freedoms --- a small country of 15 million who rightly took pride in their long-standing traditions of tolerance and respect for civil liberties --- is a particularly useful weather-vane of shifting sentiments. Not only have the Dutch awakened in the last two years to find that they're caught up in a horrific vortex of growing ethnic and racial violence, what with the killing of Pim Fortuyn two years ago and the recent jihad-inspired racist murder of Van Gogh, the film-maker, last week, but even more the multicultural illusions and dogmas, pc-style that were inviolate before 2002, have now been shattered . . . probably for good, with a big revulsion among the Dutch native population towards their Arab Muslim minority (Muslims accounting for about 9% of the 16 million number of people in that country).

We'll return to the Dutch case later on in this article. In the meantime, you'll find the reportage in the New York Times November 14th, 2004, issue especially revealing here. Doubly so, come to that, because the American reporter, Bruce Bawer, had lived in Holland in the late 1990s, and was struck by the complacency and reluctance of his Dutch friends, acquaintances, and others he interviewed even to discuss the question of Dutch-Arab Muslim relations. All this has now abruptly changed. Click here for the Times article.

Back To Right-Wing Populism in the EU, Extremist or Moderate

As the last line of argument left hanging fire before the sidebar comments indicated, I agree in large part with your analysis of why these right-wing movements have been snowballing in their growing support around the EU; and for that matter, several earlier buggy articles have set out the reasons why and the evidence for their big electoral breakthroughs of the last few years. (Start with these two links, though there are plenty more: 1) and 2) ) Whether in Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, France, Austria, or Italy --- for that matter, in the eastern sectors of Germany --- those breakthroughs clearly reflect the failure of left-center and right-center Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum governments to respond effectively to the problems listed a moment ago.

Some of these populist right-wing movements --- in Denmark, Holland, and Norway --- have proved relatively moderate when they've shared power.

Posted by gordongordomr @ 07:59 PM CST [continue] [ 2 comments ]