Social Democracy in America: The In-Between Time
We are in the midst of a shift in the policy paradigm. We don't quite know yet where we are going.
The economist Noah Smith's recent essay The Wreck of Bidenomics detailed the reasons why Joe Biden’s economic agenda had faltered. He had originally been quite hopeful about the prospects for Bidenomics. The reasons go beyond Joe Manchin’s obstinance. I think his analysis is sound but misses something deeper which sets the stage for what I hope to accomplish with this Substack.
[This essay was first drafted before the Manchin reconciliation bill was unveiled. While passage of that bill was a significant step forward and win for the Biden administration, it underscores Smith’s characterization of Bidenomics. I believe the analysis of why the ambition of the Biden administration was scaled back significantly and central elements left out remain intact.]
He starts by harkening back to something he wrote in February of 2021 when he was hopeful.
The tenor, pace, and scope of Biden’s economic programs proposals, and the muted nature of the ideological opposition, suggest that we’ve entered a new policy paradigm — much as when FDR took office in 1933 or Ronald Reagan in 1981…
The Biden program is multifaceted — it includes things like support for unions, environmental protection, student debt cancellation, immigration, and a bunch of other stuff. But it would be wrong to characterize his program as merely a grab bag of long-time Democratic policy priorities. Three approaches stand out above the maelstrom:
Cash benefits
Care jobs
Investment…
Cash benefits were at the center of the COVID relief bill that already passed…A child allowance [is] basically a pilot universal basic income program for families…
The new “infrastructure” bill includes tens of billions of dollars a year for long-term in-home care for disabled and elderly people…
The third pillar of Bidenomics is investment — government investment, and measures to encourage private investment. The former includes tens of billions a year in new research spending, massive construction of new green energy infrastructure like electrical grids and charging stations, retrofits of existing infrastructure (e.g. lead removal from pipes), and repair of existing infrastructure like roads and bridges.
Bidenomics emerges from the passage of The Inflation Reduction Act significantly diminished.
The concept of policy regimes is a tool political scientists use to compare periods of a country’s history centered around the shaping political and economic assumptions defining the terms of the debate. The policy regime shapes policy regardless of who is in power.
In the United States, we can identify the Jefferson/Hamilton period, the Jacksonian period, The Gilded Age, The New Deal regime, and the era of Reaganomics which is unraveling before us.
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY LEXICON
JEFFERSON vs HAMILTON: Pre-revolutionary politics in America was a split between the dominant republican ideals of revolutionaries and the Tory conseratism of the loyalists. Republicanism defined a broad spectrum of temperament and thought. Post-independence, the major rift was between the visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamiliton which split republicanism into more specific tendencies.
Jefferson was set on a nation of yeoman farmers and artisan craftsman. His vision of liberty and development grew out of an idea of freedom guaranteed by widespread property ownership among the citizenry. A propertied citizenry of smallholders and the self-employed would disperse power widely and evenly, foregoing the need for a strong central government.
Hamilton, who grew up working in a counting house attached to the international trade of St. Kitts, foresaw a country rooted in manufacturing and international trade need strong central government and banking. His vision of freedom was one where a government bound to the rule of law by liberal principles vouchsafed the liberty of the citizenry, many of whom would be employed by others.
Those two visions have often defined the political rifts in America though they often make a hash of our ideas of right and left. For much of our history Jeffersonianism was considered the egalitarian tendency in American politics and Hamilton the more hierarchal tendency, associated with the financial and capitalist class. But since The New Deal, a Hamiltionian tendency has been associated with the active government championed by the American left and Jefferson’s nation of self-employed citizens associated with the atomistic market fundamentalism of the American right (at least until Trumpism threw that into flux). Social democrats have productively drawn on both tendency as has served their needs. We’ll find useful ideas and attitudes in both.
Policy regimes set the terms of debate for both parties. The last big progressive policy regime shift, The New Deal, occurred under a wildly popular president and a Democratic Party that held huge majorities in both houses of Congress. A much narrower majority elected Biden than FDR. Biden has slimmer majorities in the House and Senate (really, no Senate majority, rather a tie that can be broken by Kamala Harris).
FDR’s majorities helped to launch a policy regime that ushered in robust social democratic reforms followed by a second raft of reforms with LBJ’s Great Society. (I will define and outline ‘social democracy’ in a future essay. For now, think Sweden and the other Nordic nations). It also defined the terms for the Eisenhower and Nixon administration. We see this in Ike’s massive infrastructure project to build out a national highway system and Nixon’s passage of the Clean Air Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and attempt to pass healthcare reform and a proto-UBI with a negative income tax. We can hear it in Nixon’s announcement, “We are all Keynesians now.”
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY LEXICON
KEYNESIANISM: The model of economics put forward mid-century by John Maynard Keynes dominated the the post-WWII era, defining social democratic governance. There are a lot of moving parts to Keynes’ thought but for our purposes we can highlight a few key concepts of Keynesian governance.
The central insight was that markets are not self-correcting and can get stuck in recessions and depressions. They can be unstuck through deficit spending on the fiscal side and an increase in the money supply on the monetary side without causing inflation until demand catches up with the capacity of the economy. A strong economy is the time for paying down debt and deficits. As Keynes famously put it, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”
The central project of Keynesianism is the management of aggregate demand, matching it to aggregate supply in the economy through fiscal and monetary means. The primary lever here is full-employment. Full-employment and rising productivity should be prioritised, though balanced with managing inflation to ensure stable prices.
The Unraveling of the Reagan Regime
The New Deal consensus started unraveling under Jimmy Carter with the wave of deregulation that defined the Reaganomics era. The project was completed under Bill Clinton with welfare reform and more deregulation, gutting U.S. competition policy. Reaganomics started showing signs of unraveling under Obama with the tepid Keynesianism of the stimulus packages and Obamacare's passage. Obama, however, was still a part of the Reagan consensus, closer to Bill Clinton than FDR or LBJ. Real signs that a new leftward consensus was forming in the Democratic Party came with Bernie Sanders' surprisingly potent candidacy in 2016. That year, he was joined by, among others, newly elected Representative Pramilla Jayapal from Seattle who would quickly ascend to the leadership of an energized and emboldened House Progressive Caucus. The House Progressive Caucus then got a major infusion of energy and exposure with the entrance of the charismatic members of The Squad in 2018.
With Trumpism pushing the country into a dangerous flirtation with fascism (then and now), signs that a paradigm shift was underway were all around. With majorities in the House and Senate, the Republicans could not muster the votes to bring an end to Obamacare. Republicans had no viable alternative because the ACA already represented the right-of-center version of healthcare reform. It had been conceived of by The Heritage Foundation and first birthed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The real hurdle was that, after decades of unaffordable, unaccountable healthcare, people weren’t ready to give up the gains of the ACA. After The Great Recession, they wanted more help managing risk in their lives.
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY LEXICON
REAGANOMICS
Reaganomics is the name we give to the neoliberal tendency in the U.S., running parallel to Thatcherism in the U.K.
The defining aspects were an attack on unions, turning public services over to the private sector (this was especially dramatic in the U.K. where industries like mining and the railroads were run by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), cuts in the welfare state, deregulation — particularly in competition policy, that is, the rollback of regulation that stopped or slowed the concentration of industries and injected competition back into markets.
The flashing red light that the writing was on the wall for Reaganomics was the passage of The CARES Act. Signed into law by Trump on March 27, 2020, the spending in The CARES Act was fully Keynesian with a deficit-financed price tag of $2.2 trillion. This was more than double the $831 billion of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ($1 trillion in 2020 dollars). The social democratic character of the package was unmistakable in the universalist direct relief payments of $1,200 for adults and $500 to dependent children, and the $600 top-up of unemployment benefits.
The shift had its roots in material reality. A change in progressive politics had started under George W. Bush with the antiwar movement and then took on a more fluid, continuous form with the progressive blogosphere and the netroots. It took electoral form with the insurgent primary challenge of the Howard Dean campaign and the rise of small donor democracy.
Signs that we were heading into a social democratic renaissance began to take shape. This was due to two defining events — The Crash of 2007 and the COVID pandemic. A generation came of age when Americans and people around the world were turning to government to manage risk in a way they hadn’t in some time. Majorities during the Reagan policy regime had bought into the idea that they should be taking on risk for themselves rather than expecting the government to manage risk collectively. Elites especially were enamored of this idea.
Bidenomics
Joe Biden has always instinctively occupied the center of the Democratic coalition. Wherever that happens to be. The left flank of the party wasn't paying attention but Biden moved in a decidedly progressive direction during the 2020 campaign. The ambition of the Biden agenda in 2020 was maksed by the maximalism of Bernie and Warren’s platforms. That move has been even more decisive since coming to power.
The turn from the neoliberal centrism of Bill Clinton to an explicitly social democratic vision has been shaped by the two main drivers of progressive politics in the Democratic Party — Sanders and Warren.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent complementary social democratic visions for America. They agree on most issues but their emphasis and assumptions are quite different. Sanders is drawing on the Hamiltonian tradition in America. Sanders emphasizes the centrality of labor unions and a universalist welfare state. Warren draws on a Jeffersonian vision that takes its form in neo-Brandeisian competition policy. Hers is the egalitarianism of open, competitive markets.
The Biden administration has been the most pro-labor since LBJ if not FDR. Bill Clinton and Obama were clearly the lesser of two evils for labor. They didn’t do much to help but at least they weren’t on the attack. The Biden administration has been a clear break with the last 50 years of elite Democratic ambivalence towards organized labor.
We see this in the wave of strikes during ‘Striketober’ and the wave of successful new organizing at Amazon, Starbucks, REI, Apple Stores, Trader Joe’s, and elsewhere. The outbreak of labor activism and militancy hasn’t happened by coincidence. With former labor leader Marty Walsh taking the helm of the Department of Labor and General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo’s bold moves at the NLRB the Biden administration has made more progress on this front than perhaps anywhere else. Workers and unions were ripe for militancy and they’ve been emboldened by an NLRB that they can count on for fair and pro-labor rulings.
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY LEXICON
THE NEO-BRANDEIS MOVEMENT is an antitrust academic and political movement in the United States that suggests that excessively centralized private power is dangerous for economically, political and social reasons. The movement advocates that United States antitrust law seek to improve business market structures that negatively affect market competition, income inequality, consumer rights, unemployment, and wage growth. The movement draws inspiration from the anti-monopolist work of Louis Brandeis, an early 20th century United States Supreme Court Justice who called high economic concentration “the Curse of Bigness” and believed monopolies were inherently harmful to the welfare of workers and business innovation. It considered part of the Jeffersonian tradion in American politics.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is redefining the premises of American antitrust and competition policy in the neo-Brandeisian direction championed by Warren. That shift is being put into action by high-profile neo-Brandeisians Lina Khan at the FTC, Jonathan Kanter Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and Tim Wu’s leadership of Technology and Competition Policy at The White House.
Then we have the unabashedly social democratic aspects of The American Rescue Plan, the first and foremost being the refundable Child Tax Credit. We can also see it in the original ambition of Build Back Better to build green infrastructure and a care economy. On infrastructure and climate change, the Biden administration came in committed to direct government investment rather than changes in the tax code meant to indirectly spur innovation.
Noah Smith summed up Bidenomics this way:
Before I go on to discuss the justification for this new paradigm, I’d like to sum up all these “pillars” into one more-or-less cohesive vision of where I think Bidenomics is taking us. I think it’s aiming to create a two-track economy — a dynamic, internationally competitive innovation sector, and a domestically focused engine of mass employment and distributed prosperity.
Beyond the narrow majorities which Biden and the Democratic Party contend with, Smith identifies the lack of visibility and popularity of what Biden HAS accomplished as a problem. Biden passed a COVID relief package that was coherent and unabashedly social democratic but was marginally smaller than the package signed by Trump. The bipartisan infrastructure package that was passed was substantial and much-needed but will mostly plug holes left by decades of under-investment. It will not leave any new Grand Coulee Dams or high-speed rail in its wake. He had accomplishments in rolling out vaccines but his administration made confusing missteps. Polarization on public health has made it impossible to put the pandemic behind us. Foreign policy accomplishments — in exiting Afghanistan and building a coalition to aid Ukraine — just don’t build support in the way that foreign policy failures attract blame. His approval rating is now lower than Trump’s was at this point, heading into his first midterm.
At a deeper level, and a problem for the premise of this Substack, he points out that Biden’s big social democratic achievements have not proven particularly popular.
One reason is that what I thought of as the first pillar of Bidenomics — cash benefits — turned out not to be as popular as many had hoped. The idea was that because the expanded child allowance was quasi-universal, it would garner broad support like Social Security did. Initial broad support for the policy seemed to validate that hope. But then, surprisingly, most Americans didn’t want to make the child benefit permanent. Whether that’s because Americans are in a stingy mood, or because they believe that government benefits should come with work requirements, or because they’re worried about the inflationary effects of cash benefits is not yet clear. But what is clear is that cash benefits failed to get the broad popular buy-in that FDR’s social insurance or Reagan’s tax cuts secured.
… and then asks, “Is Bidenomic ‘Fit for Purpose?”
There’s a third big reason Bidenomics failed, and it’s that substantial parts of the program didn’t actually address the needs of the nation as much as I thought they would. As the British say, key elements of Bidenomics turned out not to be “fit for purpose”.
First, care jobs. A big pillar of Biden’s agenda was the “care economy” — the idea that as manufacturing jobs get automated away, people will move en masse into health care, eldercare, education and child care. In fact, this has already been the trend for many decades now. So Biden wanted to speed the transition along, to ensure mass employment with good wages.
But the thing was, the U.S. didn’t really seem to need that sort of a push. The economy seems to have done a good job at restoring mass employment on its own, with the prime-age employment rate — the best single measure of labor market health — bouncing back to about 80% after every downturn.
As for wages, these have become a bit less unequal in the last decade. Since the mid-2010s, wages in the bottom half of the distribution have outpaced wages in the top half, with the lowest quartile seeing the biggest percentage gains.
The common progressive belief that inequality trends upward without a big corrective push by the government may simply be false, at least as far as wage income is concerned. The mild but consistent improvement here could have taken away some of the impetus for a big push to create care jobs.
… A pillar I did strongly believe in — and still do, really — is cash benefits. Cash is far simpler to administrate than welfare with means tests and work requirements. It catches all kinds of people who fall through the cracks of more targeted systems. If it’s done in a more universal way, it avoids many of the perverse incentives of means-tested programs. Not all the research supports cash benefits, but a lot of it does. I still think cash has the potential to become the future of our welfare state.
The problem here is the macroeconomic situation. In the Great Depression, our economic problem was unemployment, as it also was during most of the Obama administration. In 2022 our problem is definitely inflation. And whether or not the cash benefits handed out during Covid were a major cause of the current inflation, it’s definitely true that cash benefits are inflationary. This is because poorer people spend a lot more of their income than rich people, so giving poor people a bunch of money means a boost in spending, whether or not you pay for it with taxes on rich people. If you don’t pay for it with taxes, and just borrow to pay for the benefits, it’s even more inflationary.
That doesn’t mean cash benefits are a bad idea; it just means that we have to get inflation under control before we start doling out a lot more of them.
…An inflationary economy simply isn’t the kind of thing the progressive economic policy package was designed to deal with. The playbook inherited from FDR and the New Dealers, which is now embraced by the aptly-named Roosevelt Institute and many of the other progressives advising Biden on economics, is all about fighting depressions. It’s about mobilizing big government to take over when the free market has failed, pumping up aggregate demand, providing jobs, boosting wages, and carrying out needed investment.
The investment part of that is still vitally important (and would be deflationary in the medium term due to increased capacity). But the other two pillars — a big push for care jobs and a big increase in cash benefits — look more suited to 2009 than to 2022.
Democrats Caught Betwixt and Between
I think this analysis is correct on the immediate reasons Bidenomics has stalled. At a deeper level, the weakness is due to a failure by Democrats to establish a coherent vision of the economy and how to organize it. Outside of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to discern a theory of the economy or a throughline of economic policy among Democratic leadership. What was Hillary Clinton’s theory of the case in 2016? I don’t think she had one. She just had an ad hoc laundry list of thoughtful policy proposals written in response to a laundry list of focus group-derived issues. We knew Paul Ryan’s theory of the case when he was Speaker of the House, what is Nancy Pelosi’s? …beyond progressive stances on social issues and using the government to provide noblesse oblige aid to the less fortunate? She put together two massive packages of COVID relief totaling $4 trillion and yet failed to use them to tell a story about the Democratic vision for the country. She delivered hodgepodge grab bags. They seemed equal parts social democratic relief, crony capitalist sops to big business, and whatever fragments of the Democratic wishlist were lying around her office.
In part, that’s because the Democratic Party is a hodgepodge grab bag of interest groups, partly because there is no vision of governance in the Democratic Party establishment that distinguishes between progressive reforms and crony capitalism. Or thinks they need to project a vision of governance at all. But it’s the responsibility of party leaders to turn meeting those interests into a compelling vision of governance with a legible logic and ethics. What is Chuck Schumer for? … beyond a general sense that active government can be a force for good?
[ If you want to see what a coherent, well-developed model of governance looks like, check out this talk by former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. It’s also the best introduction to the Nordic Model I’ve come across.]
The Democratic Party is caught between the exhausted Clintonism of the Baby Boomer leadership and a progressive tendency among younger generations. That new progressivism hasn’t yet developed the coherence of a model with a clear logic and ethics. Without a coherent governing philosophy, something like a universal income program, like the Refundable Child Tax Credit, with no work requirements cannot read to the broad public as common sense. Meanwhile, economically illiterate deficit hysteria can be presented as tough-minded realism.
We are 15 years out from The Crash of 2007 and Keynesian economics (a.ka. economics) is still counter-intuitive for most Americans. Blessedly, our leaders in Washington DC have quietly become Keynesians again but nobody with any profile, aside from Paul Krugman, has tried to explain why “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” Thus, we got Joe Manchin, a man who over the past 20 years served as Secretary of State of West Virginia, Governor of West Virginia, Chair of the National Governor’s Association, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, going around spouting economic nonsense. Yet, he is treated as if he were delivering hard-headed analysis. That’s due to a failure to convert the counter-intuitive aspects of Keynesianism into widely accepted common sense.
Still, there are emerging visions of social democracy taking shape in America. We see it in the new organizing by SEIU and other progressive unions with Fight for 15 and now national campaigns at Amazon, Starbucks, and the rest. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ calls for universalist welfare programs and the neo-Brandeisian approach to competition policy championed by Elizabeth Warren and taking shape in the Biden administration. We see it in the way the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s Ai-jen Poo’s vision of the care economy became mainstream and then an animating vision in the Democratic Party. We even see the outlines of a reprise of the postwar American system that took shape in the 1950s and 60s. That consisted of strong industrial unions, investments in home ownership, infrastructure, research and development, and public university education. The Bidenomics updated version was laid out by Noah Smith in that February 2021 essay:
I’d like to sum up all these “pillars” into one more-or-less cohesive vision of where I think Bidenomics is taking us. I think it’s aiming to create a two-track economy — a dynamic, internationally competitive innovation sector, and a domestically focused engine of mass employment and distributed prosperity.
[The Biden folks want] domestic-focused sectors of the economy … to do the heavy lifting in terms of giving most Americans a job, as they did in Japan. Those domestic sectors include the care economy, where Biden’s team believes much of future employment will come from.
This is partly a story about technology — automation, the end of mass manufacturing employment, etc. With even retail jobs commonly believed to be at risk from new technologies, many people look to care work as the last thing we know we want humans to do. But it’s also a story about globalization, and the shift of global economic activity from the U.S. to Asia. With Asia becoming the workshop of the world, the U.S., with its low population density and relatively remote location, has been forced to become something else — the world’s research park.
The U.S. still has the world’s best research universities, and an enormous concentration of talent from around the world. If we can sustain both those things, we’re well-positioned to continue to be the world’s idea factory; innovation is our comparative advantage. And as long as we do that, we will maintain highly competitive knowledge industries whose specialty is continuous innovation that’s downstream from government science — software, high-tech manufacturing, and pharma/biotech. That’s an assembly line even China may never be able to match.
But while this sector will generate a lot of productivity and a lot of export revenue, it is not going to employ most Americans. Instead, most Americans will work in less competitive, domestically focused sectors — selling houses to each other, pulling each other’s wisdom teeth, preparing each other’s food, bagging each other’s groceries, taking care of each other in their old age.
… So I think Bidenomics, with its dual focus on research/investment/immigration and care jobs + cash benefits, is an attempt to boost both sectors of the economy at once — to make the export sector more productive while making the domestic sector better at spreading the wealth around. If there’s one unified characterization of the vision Bidenomics is creating for our future, I think that’s it.
I’ve been saying since 2016 that we are heading into a social-democratic renaissance and I think the evidence has only grown stronger. Social democratic parties are winning elections all over the place, in the U.S. and around the world. Rising social democracy is being met by right-wing nationalism. That’s a dicey proposition. I think our side will win but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Here are the premises of this Substack.
Social democracy is the most successful political-economic system in human history.
There are surprisingly few self-identified social democratic partisans or ideologues (I mean ideologues in the neutral sense: animated by an idea rather than the pejorative sense: animated by an idea to the point of short-circuiting reason or evidence).
What we do find in social democratic coalitions are progressive capitalists and democratic socialists.
Progressive capitalism is undertheorized but necessarily so. By its nature, it’s a reactive ideology. It primarily responds to the disasters and problems created by poorly managed capitalism.
Democratic socialism is wildly over-theorized. We have far too much White Board Socialism speculating on comprehensive systems that give an account of what we might do to resolve all the contradictions if we could only start from scratch. Jacobin founder Baskar Sunkara refers to Five Minutes After Capitalism to pose the question of what a democratic socialism might look like. But there is no Five Minutes After Capitalism and never will be. Capitalism can be constrained, eroded, and replaced over time through struggle, but there never will be a Five Minutes After Capitalism moment in a democratic system. Spending a lot of time and energy on theorizing about something that isn’t going to happen delivers diminishing returns, if not outright vaporware. Socialists have been spending too much time at the whiteboard and not enough time figuring out what to do next.
The political theorist Roberto Unger talks about the problem of reforms that are too close to what exists and feasible are seen as uninspiring, while reforms that are too distant from what exists are seen as inspiring but utopian and unrealistic. We are too frequently caught between the trivial and the utopian. Programmatic thinking he tells us is not about blueprints but about successions. This project will be about potential successions and reforms that we can see in the middle distance, hopefully, both pragmatic and inspiring.Social democracy, especially outside of the Nordic countries is calamitously under-theorized and we need a theory of the case in short order. If social democracy is what progressive capitalists and democratic socialists are aiming at in the near to medium term, we should commit to getting good at it.
Even within the Nordics, we need new formulations of a post-neoliberal social democracy. Social democracy must now assemble new, post-industrial coalitions and address the challenges of the 21st century — globalization and immigration, climate change, democratizing AI and biotech, governing social media tech giants, data sovereignty and digital governance, precarity in labor markets, the over-financialization of the economy, affordable housing in growing cities, the need for new middle-class infrastructure, falling rates of unionization and the need to organize the knowledge economy proletariat as well as the service sector.Social democracy should be understood as its own thing, an end in itself, not as a way station towards somewhere else or as a half-a-loaf.
Never an end state — social democracy is a system of adaptation and problem-solving. We should think of it as a platform for generating coherent responses to social challenges. It should no longer simply be understood as what we get when progressives save capitalism from itself or when democratic socialists and labour parties get half a loaf. Any version of either runs through social democracy so we should put more effort into doing social democracy well. I submit that we should think of social democracy as a system unto itself with a different logic and ethics than either existing capitalism or speculative democratic socialism.
My intention with this project is to sketch out a vision of a post-capitalist social democracy. Social democracy is practiced in its most explicit, most coherent forms in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland as well as in The Netherlands, so there will be a lot to be said about those countries.
Beyond the Nordic Model, I have posts in the pipeline about:
Education and homelessness reform in Finland
Prison reform in Norway
Social housing in Helinski and Vienna
Police reform in New Zealand
The industrial districts of Northern Italy
The Mondragon Cooperative in Spain as well as coops movements in Cleveland, Ohio and Preston, England
The fusion of public health and medical care in Costa Rica
Parks and libraries in the U.S.
The recovered factories movement in Argentina
The history of social democracy in Uruguay
Data sovereignty and digital governance in Estonia and Barcelona
Participatory budgeting in Brazil
Urban governance in Bogota, Colombia from 1995 to 2003
Hillary Cottam’s social work reform in England
Sectoral bargaining in France and codetermination in Germany
State-Owned Enterprises
We’ll explore the new frameworks of social democracy emerging in think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute, Demos, the Open Markets Institute, the Stigler Center, the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and The People's Policy Project. We see a vision emerging as well in the success of Jacobin Magazine, breaking into the mainstream conversation and their recent turn towards social democracy as a goal rather than a failed attempt at democratic socialism. We see it in Ezra Klein’s call for Supply Side Progressivism and the parallel calls on the libertarian center-right — economist Tyler Cowen and The Niskanen Center —for a State-Capacity Libertarianism.
We see it in the emerging popular literature: Freedom from the Market by Mike Konzcal, Liberty from All Masters by Barry Lind, The Sum of Us by Heather McGee, Eric Klinkenberg’s Palaces for the People, Ezekial Emanuel’s Which Country Has the Best Healthcare, The Mission Economy and The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato, the neo-republicans Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, Elizabeth Anderson, and Danielle Allen. All that and much more.
With a bit of luck, I hope to convert some readers into social democratic partisans. At the very least, I hope to make common cause between progressive capitalists and democratic socialists, sharpening their thinking along the way.