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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies
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Social Democratic America (Hardcover)
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Social Democratic America (Hardcover)
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For decades, scholars and commentators have differentiated the US
from Europe by pointing to the relative weakness of the American
social welfare state. European social democracies-particularly the
Nordic ones-have erected broad and deep social insurance systems to
buffer the effects of the capitalist marketplace, and as
consequence virtually all citizens have access to housing, health
care, and transfer payments that alleviate the effects of
unemployment/underemployment. In combination, these policies have
made Northern European societies among the most comfortable and
egalitarian in human history. In contrast, conventional wisdom
holds that America's patchwork welfare state, which only grudgingly
redistributes income to the least wealthy, is miserly in
comparison, more wedded to free market individualism than social
solidarity. In Social Democratic America, the eminent scholar Lane
Kenworthy has crafted the most definitive rejoinder yet to
champions of American exceptionalism. He shows that in fact, the US
is well along the path toward becoming a social democratic society.
Certainly, it has moved in fits and starts, and our nation's
peculiar federal structure has generated a number of cumbersome
solutions for delivering social insurance. But over time it has
delivered, and for every step backward, policymakers have crafted
and passed policies that have moved the nation two steps forward
toward social democracy. Built in bits and pieces, the modern US
welfare state, while still less encompassing than European
counterparts, is not only massive but expanding its reach. The
evidence, which has accumulated over three quarters of a century,
is now overwhelming: Social Security, national unemployment
insurance, AFDC (later replaced by TANF), Medicare and Medicaid,
the Earned Income Tax Credit, and-most recently-the Affordable Care
Act (Obamacare). What's more, almost every conservative effort to
undo these programs has failed ignominiously. Along with tracing
the evolution of the American social welfare state, Kenworthy
stresses throughout that America is bending ever further toward a
social democratic path. This is a difficult argument to make for
two reasons. First, Americans are deeply invested in the idea of
American exceptionalism, Second, Republican policy successes in the
1980s and 2000s reinforced the notion that America is at base a
center-right nation, inhospitable to European-style social
insurance schemes. The combination of Obama's first-term
legislative successes and his recent re-election has caused
observers to think twice about these arguments, but Kenworthy shows
that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Drawing from his
unparalleled knowledge of social policy in the advanced industrial
world, he shows how the US has been (and continues to be)
progressing slowly but steadily toward a clear endpoint: genuine
social democracy. Social Democratic America will attract a great
deal of criticism, but even the most incorrigible doubters will
have to take stock of his powerful and well-substantiated thesis.
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