(Rudy Giuliani was on Morning Joe hammering the latest Republican criticism--Obama is turning American into a 'European social democracy.')
It Can't Happen Here
Why Obama won't bring European social democracy to America.
By Jacob Weisberg
Updated Saturday, March 7, 2009
Conservatives have finally figured out their critique of President Obama's agenda, and it's a familiar one: He wants to make us French. The columnist Charles Krauthammer recently called the president's address to a joint session of Congress last month "the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president." Newt Gingrich claims that Obama wants to bring us "European socialism."
Socialism is a scare word in our political culture and a poor description both of Sweden these days and of whatever it is that Obama has in mind. But the case that the United States is moving away from market capitalism and toward a European-style social compact in which the state has a much broader role in the economy and the lives of its citizens is not absurd. The Obama administration is responding to the financial crisis by nationalizing financial institutions, subsidizing failing sectors of the economy, and, while it's at it, regulating industry to fight climate change. It views greater social equality as an explicit goal. If Obama succeeds in turning health insurance and funding for college into universal entitlements, he will have expanded Washington's obligations on the scale of an LBJ or an FDR. This year, government spending at all levels will jump to 40 percent of GDP. Obama's proposals could bring that figure even closer to the EU average of 47 percent.
Even in areas where Obama seems to be moving in a more statist direction, there are crucial distinctions. Like most Americans, he believes government should guarantee health insurance. And like most Americans, he believes the system should be privately run. He, and we, may be kidding ourselves in thinking that it's possible to have universal access and cost control without stifling innovation or limiting individual choice. But Obama is going to try to thread the needle. His college plan is for universal access to loans, not the essentially free ride that most students get in the European Union. And he looks poised to pare back Social Security benefits and Medicare spending, in addition to raising taxes, to constrain the overall cost of government. One way to describe Obama's program is a move toward cradle-to-grave opportunity, as opposed to the European model of cradle-to-grave security.
The indictment that Obama wants to foist foreign ways upon us echoes the claim by Roosevelt's critics that he wanted to usher in socialism under cover of the New Deal. It similarly misreads an ideologically moderate president's substantive views, his political sophistication, and what's within the realm of the possible in our country. Obama gets that Americans want government to fix the free market, not take its place.
A version of this article appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.
http://www.slate.com/id/2213040/
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