The U.S. Has Become a Social Democratic Country

Janan Ganesh: “The pandemic has crystallized a thought for which there was once only scattered evidence. But at some point in this century, the US became a mildly social democratic country, in its attitudes if not the reality of its welfare state. It is the knottiness of the country’s lawmaking — the counter-majoritarian Senate, above all — that stops the one translating to the other, not some deep folk aversion to ‘socialism’ or the European way.”

“In their preferences, to be clear, Americans are hardly Danes. The reduction of inequality is well down their list of desires. Their tax tolerance is lower. But even as 40 percent reliably vote Republican, they do not inhabit the party’s vision of an eternal frontier of rugged self-reliance. If the US was once ideologically exceptional within the rich world, it is now just different in degrees.”