So, in the grand health care debate, we progressives often point to countries such as Canada, the U.K., Switzerland, or Sweden to point out various roles for government involvement in the industry. But this is true more generally–we often look at foreign countries’ policies with respect to immigration, gay rights, drug policy, education, etc. But I don’t see a lot of this from more conservative analysts.
Which got me thinking–is this sort of analysis (with intent to emulate) of the domestic policies of other countries a unique activity of the Left? Do conservatives tend to stick to America ca. 1940-50 as their model nation? Do conservatives tend to be more theoretical in their policy prescriptions? Or are there countries that conservative Americans appreciate and seek to emulate? It’s a joke on the left that Somalia is the ideal libertarian nation–but I don’t think any of us really ascribe that view to conservatives seriously.
More broadly, does this have implications for “liberal” vs. “conservative” governance? Is this just a reflection of a desire for Internationalism on the liberal side and a belief in American Exceptionalism on the conservative side? Is the United States just the world’s most conservative/libertarian nation? What say you, conservadopers? What have you heard from conservative friends, liberadopers?
The United States is essentially a major exception amongst world powers, in terms of its political history.
When socialism as a defined concept began, it started in Europe and that is where it really took hold in the late 19th/early 20th century. The concepts of social welfare were just simply far more popular in Europe than they are or have ever been in the United States.
Part of it is definitely the different way of thinking that American political history has created. The United States is essentially the only great power that grew up on the backbone of rejection of old European styles of governing. The early colonies were essentially founded and ran by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs were the first people to push further and further west expanding the borders. Europe and Asia have been densely explored and settled since ancient times. The Americas were never as densely populated (even before the arrival of Europeans and their diseases.) Essentially America was founded on the concept of the individual man and on the back of entrepreneurs, no European countries were.
Since essentially as far back as detailed history of Europe goes powerful nobles essentially owned 100% of the land, slowly ceding some of it as time went on. Individual “commoners” were not the people who crafted states, it was alliances of nobles. Borders were not created by individuals because you couldn’t really do that when all the land was taken up already by powerful, entrenched states. It’s one thing for a trickle of pioneers to push west and with moderate-to-light backing from the U.S. military drive the natives out. In Europe major armies had to battle on the field in titanic wars to resolve conflicts over areas the size of Connecticut.
Essentially the political history of Europe was such that an American style birthing of a state was totally impossible. This lead to different ideals and different ways of thinking. I don’t really believe in “American Exceptionalism”, but I do believe America is distinct because of a combination of geographical and political realities. There’s nothing essentially special about “Americans” other than their surroundings.
The grim truth is that there aren’t any good models for laissez-faire capitalism. If there were, conservatives would gleefully point them out to us. Our past history doesn’t have it either. Laissez-Faire brought us The Gilded Era, and deregulation had a huge hand in the recent Great Recession.
The 1950s are often pointed at as an ideal time, but one thing they neglect to mention the 91% top marginal tax rate! Today’s conservatives throw a tantrum over letting the Bush tax cuts expire (with the top rate going from 35% to 39%). Glen Beck would probably burst a blood vessel if they brought it up to Reagan Era rates of 50%. So the 1950s economic policies are not going to be held up as an exemplar.
Economically, Hong Kong tends to come up. I have heard South Korea under Park Chung Hee as an example too, and the economic reforms of Deng in China (market liberalization) as examples. I don’t know if the reforms in South Korea were free market reforms, or involved heavy government investment or not though. I think one of the reasons people use that example is North Korea is communist, south Korea is a capitalistic democracy and people like to use the dichotomy to talk about ‘this is what happens when you pick communism over free markets’. However China and Vietnam are both communist and are experiencing massive economic growth. But I am pretty sure they are communist in name only, and don’t really follow communist economics.
As far as social policies, they tend to compare them to a idealized past and talk about how social reforms will take us away from them. I sometimes hear conservatives use the banning of gay marriage in most every country on earth as a reason we should ban it here, but there usually aren’t specifics (ie no countries are named individually).
However, the fact that there are no wealthy, developed functioning democracies that follow conservative economic (at least not idealized economic) policy should tell you something. All functioning democracies have universal health care, pensions for the elderly, high taxes, market regulations, etc.
There are no wealthy democracies that follow the agenda of US movement conservatives. Even our country won’t follow them. If they could, movement conservatives would disband medicare, social security, unions and the minimum wage (among other things). But the public would never stand for it.
Well sure, the majority of the first generational immigrants throughout the first ~300 years of history (from first colonization til the early 1900s) were European by ancestry but the realities of the New World created a fundamentally different political history and outlook than what would be seen in Europe. Essentially you’re just confirming what I’ve already said. There wasn’t anything uniquely special about the Europeans who went over as colonists, but the extremely different nature of the region they moved to created a people with a very different political history and outlook than that of the millions more who stayed behind.
What about nations like Canada, Australia or possibly New Zealand?
I have heard race relations are why the US has far fewer social programs. In the US any attempt to expand social programs is seen as benefiting ‘those’ people. Historically, ‘those’ have been poor black people but nowadays immigrants from Mexico are also added in as one of those groups. And it has been easy for wealthy business interests to convince voters that social programs would take money away from the ‘hard working real citizens’ and give it to the ‘lazy fake citizens’. Hence our social programs aren’t as good as Europe. However I don’t know how true that is.
The US tried to implement nationwide universal healthcare in the 1940s, which would’ve made it the first (as far as I know) developed nation to do so. Britian did it in the late 40s, many other OECD nations did in the 70s. But southern politicians were worried that it would lead to integration of hospitals, and opposed it. That is what Krugman said at least.
The more black people in a state, the more right wing the state is.
So a culturally/ethnically homogeneous place like Vermont is closer to Europe than a place like Mississippi, where 40% of the population is black. I’m guessing if New England broke off and became its own nation, it would resemble a place like France or Sweden more than the US.
You also have to wonder if immigration to Europe of people with different races and ethnic cultures will cause native Europeans to do the same thing and start opposing social programs.
More extremely different a nature than British North America? Or Australia?
Unfortunately, with legislative and executive power divided between Congress and the President, unlike a more streamlined parliamentary system, there seems a lot more room for deadlock and endless debate. Which was the intent, I suppose, but there’s definitely a sacrifice also. The rest of the world moved on - we didn’t.
A different kind of conservative ideal, but: gun rights advocates will point to Switzerland as an example of a place with the highest gun ownership rate in the world and one of the lowest of violent crime. Sure, people will argue that Switzerland has less poverty and social tension than the US so it’s not the same, and this is true, but even then that forces them to concede that it’s not literally the actual guns themselves that are the problem.
I see plenty of it. It’s just that in many cases they find things that aren’t working in other countries, and that they don’t want here.
But not always. Many conservatives wish we could have France’s energy system (nukes), as well as the freer markets of the Asian tigers. Certainly libertarians wish we could have the drug and prostition laws of some other counties.
They’d probably love to have immigration laws of most other countries – ours are among the more lenient in many ways. And the educational systems in Asia are not ones that most Liberals would embrace.
More to the point, I don’t see why “models” are important. I don’t think anyone’s speech laws are as free as ours; and yet I’d like ours much freer.
Whether our laws are freer depends on whether you want to talk about or show sex, as opposed to violence. American standards for showing sex are quite prudish, but quite free when it comes to violence. Someplace like Germany is the opposite. It’s not really a one dimensional line between “more free” <----> “less free”.
Ireland doesn’t have universal health care, at least not at the primary care level. Unless you’re over 70 or really poor you have to pay out of pocket for doctor visits, which average around $87 per visit, and have to pay full price for your medicine (at among the highest prices in Europe) unless the cost exceeds about $145 per month. Not surprisingly this has a dampening effect on people going to their doctor when they’re less than really, really, really sick.
Ireland has more in the way of social welfare benefits than American conservatives would like but it’s not much of a welfare state compared to continental Europe. Ideologically the leading parties are more free-market oriented than a lot of their European counterparts (the government’s favourite cliché is “closer to Boston than Berlin”). Not coincidentally the Irish economy is well down the toilet at the moment, and expected to remain there for quite awhile.
American anti-abortion fanatics do see Ireland as a model because of the near-total prohibition here. There are very close links between Operation Rescue and Ireland’s own homegrown nutters, Youth Defence.
They’d probably also like the education model, in which schools are run largely by churches, under direct control of local boards of management, with the state pretty much only setting a basic curriculum and providing some funding. Of course we’ve also seen recently how well that’s worked for Irish children.
I hear Chile being praised a lot – ahead of the curve on dismantling tarriffs, privatizing utilities, and other concepts dear to the heart of mainstream conservatives. Plus, for more ultra-rightists, it has a good dose of student-and-intellectual-killing military dictatorship in its recent history, and is more “white” than your typical Latin American country.