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The archives of the American broadcaster C-Span is one of the Internet’s little wonders. In January 1993, an “Anthony Blair” toured Washington with another British MP named Gordon Brown. Their mission: to guess how the elected president Bill clinton had won the office and what their four-time defeated Labor Party could learn. Their interview with a C-Span presenter from school just got the facts (“How many MPs in the House of Commons?”) Is immortalized.
In the absence of Covid-19, Washington’s floating population would include foreigners looking for similar clues of a progressive bent. President Joe Biden’s center-left peers are discharged and often in bad shape in the UK, France, Australia and the Netherlands. In Germany, they did not hold the Federal Chancellery since 2005. Brazil was also in the hands of the Social Democrats. Right-wing populists now rule there.
In truth, the travel restrictions saved these impatient learners from unnecessary travel. If the Democrats stand out from a center-left discomfort, it is for reasons which cannot be imitated outside the United States.
A couple is evident. A strict two-party system protects (indeed, over-protect) incumbents, so even a clumsy Democrat would win almost half of the vote in a presidential election. The liberal, working-class and green veins of thought, so often distinct in Europe, are crammed into a single American movement.
Breed adds to this structural advantage. The tilt to the left of minorities can be exaggerated (Republicans won, especially among Latinos) but it holds often enough to matter. Few democracies have the ethnic diversity of the United States, so few left-wing parties have the electoral reach of Democrats.
On their own, these variables would save the party from the almost terminal pangs of progressives elsewhere. But a third really makes Democrats impossible for others to imitate, at least in Europe.
It does not flatter the European left to suggest that it is cursed by past successes. The welfare state is so big and support so deep that voters can turn to the right or the far right without endangering it. Most German Christian Democrats are comfortable with the mixed economy. The French National Front tends to equate free markets with social dislocation and foreign influence. British Conservatives extol Singapore more in thought than in word or deed. They know the public aversion to more flexible labor laws.
For all the fame of the United States cultural war, it is the poor and the middle classes of Europe who are freer to vote on values. Their material interest in public services and statutory paid holidays does not depend so much on a change of government.
The weakness of the American welfare state, both in scope and cross-party support, gives Democrats a purpose. For workers who like to see a security net under their weight there is a cost, or at least a risk, to voting in another way. The question is not why so many poor Americans support Republicans. That’s how many more could if the party demanded a ceasefire on mostly popular programs and regulations. Had Donald trump ruled half as paternalistic as it ran in 2016, this column would focus on the first twists and turns of his second term.
Seen from afar, the left of Europe is not just inept, then, just only otiosis. What is the point of a movement when its central cause – redistribution – has the assent of its rivals, at least for the most part? Even though progressive parties offer more and better well-being (an expensive choice), this cannot compare to the promise of universal health care in a country that lacks it. The American left is profiting from its historic failure. Never having completed the welfare state, let alone entrenched, Democrats have a existential goal. This is not an omission the brother movements would aspire to replicate, even if they could bend time and space to do so.
Asked for help, Democrats can still provide advice of immense value. Try not to elect radioactively unpopular leaders (British workof secular tradition). Avoid complacency about youth unemployment (French Socialists). Corruption, or even its aroma, is bad (various). But these are truths or banalities. They do not require any study or visit tocquevillienne.
What is typically American is the gap between the two parties on the social contract. And the subsequent necessity of the democratic voice. That the Biden and the Republican plan to pandemic relief are separated from $ 1.3 billion could not speak more eloquently of the stakes. Looking at their election record and then the plight of poor Americans, it’s hard to tell whether Democrats are the most successful progressives in the rich world or the most consistently disappointing.
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