Capitalists should listen to Bernie Sanders

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) By E J Dionne Jr

There is an irony to the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders: The senator from Vermont is often cast as exotic because he calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Yet the most important issue in politics throughout the Western democracies is whether the economic and social world that social democrats built can survive the coming decades.

Let’s deal first with the tyranny of labels. “Socialist” has long been an unacceptable word in the United States yet our country once had a vibrant socialist movement; its history has been well recounted by John Nichols and James Weinstein. Socialists had a major impact on the mainstream conversation. Reforming liberals including Franklin D Roosevelt co-opted many of their best ideas and it’s one reason they were marginalised.

Moreover the vast majority of “democratic socialists” are now properly described more modestly as “social democrats” because most on the left believe in a successful private sector. But they also favour a government that achieves broad public objectives from a clean environment to wide access to education and regulates and redistributes in ways that strengthen the bargaining power of those who don’t own much capital. When Sanders defined his own brand of socialism this year in a speech at Georgetown University he made clear he’s in this camp. But there is great honour in this. The bargain between government and the market that allowed the US and the other Western democracies to share growing prosperity from the end of World War II until recent years was essentially a social democratic achievement.

As economist J Bradford DeLong argued in a recent essay on Talking Points Memo these economies were “relatively egalitarian places when viewed in historical perspective (for native-born white guys at least).” The chance to influence politics was “widely distributed throughout the population” while “the claims of wealth to drive political directions” were “kept within bounds.”

Yet the headline on DeLong’s piece — “The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy” — raises the question we need to debate far more explicitly in the presidential campaign: Was the great social democratic experiment an aberration in history? Are all wealthy societies destined to become far more unequal as they were in the late 19th century because of globalization and technological change? Or can governments find new ways of ensuring a degree of justice and fairness?

These questions have absorbed my former colleague Steven Weisman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics for some years now. His new book “The Great Tradeoff: Controlling Moral Conflicts in the Era of Globalization” provides an excellent text for the discussion we need. Weisman painstakingly avoids dogmatism and is careful in laying out the often-agonizing choices we face. For example: Globalisation has “elevated the living standards of hundreds of millions if not billions of people worldwide” but also “has helped suppress the incomes of low-skilled middle-class workers in rich countries.” Where do our loyalties lie? How do we balance obligations to our fellow citizens in the communities and countries in which we live against the interests of those far away?

Weisman is more sympathetic to globalization than are many on the left and I’m more drawn to its critics than he is. Still Weisman does not let advocates of the market off the hook. Defending the achievements of globalization he argues requires facing up to its costs.

“The global economic system” he writes “should be one in which opportunities are more equal the distribution of rewards is fairer and the preservation of communities is more respected.” How to achieve these goals is what politics needs to be about. The presidential campaign would be more edifying (and more relevant to the problems so many American face) if it focused directly on the need to renegotiate a social contract that once provided broadly inclusive prosperity but is now in grave jeopardy.

On the contrary the survival of democratic capitalism depends upon facing the difficulties the system is having in delivering on the promises it was once able to keep.

Washington Post