In a speech recently at St Anselm College in New Hampshire, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders urged an “ideological change of course” in the Democratic party. Sanders, who is technically a party independent but operates in the Senate as a Democrat, has made a name for himself as a prominent American democratic socialist. Therefore, it was not surprising to hear how Sanders defined the “ideological change” he calls for:
The reality is that today, sixty percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. We have massive levels of income and wealth inequality. … we have massive levels of corporate greed in every part of society. The very rich are getting richer, working people are struggling.
Senator Sanders went on to rail against the U.S. health care system, which has been a target of his and of the radical left for decades. A long-term advocate of a Scandinavian-style single-payer system for health care in America, Sanders relies purely on ideological arguments to make his case.
In short: he is on an ideological crusade to make America more socialist, and he is not limiting himself to government-run health care. A government takeover of the health-care system would only be a step toward his so-called democratic socialism. The senator wants to take every measure possible to reduce differences in income, consumption, and wealth among American households.
It is important to note what Sanders means by socialism. He has never argued that government should take over corporations or in any other way end private property rights in America. His definition of socialism is centered squarely around the idea that government provides for people’s needs—and does so based on the goal of eliminating economic differences in society.
Sanders advocates this definition of socialism even though there are non-socialist pundits and analysts out there who claim that his definition of his own ideology is wrong.
Among his favorite policy tools for advancing socialism is a so-called ‘living wage’. This is a legally mandated minimum wage that is so high that it covers all the expenses of an average family—regardless of what work they do. Senator Sanders repeated this concept while being interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union” last Sunday. He seems to believe that heavier emphasis on these traditional socialist issues will help the Democrats recover working-class voters who, as the CNN host pointed out, have left them for the Republicans. Being asked about this voter flight, the senator responded with thinly veiled frustration (and a frivolous attitude to facts):
You have a Republican party that wants to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, a Republican party that does not want to raise the minimum wage, a Republican party that opposes legislation that will give workers the right to form unions, a Republican party which wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The senator then concluded that the Republicans have been relatively successful in recent elections (losing the White House in 2020 being an exception) because “the Democrats have not been strong enough” in their opposition, nor have they presented “a strong alternative” to Republican policies.
Republicans have made no spending cuts like the ones the good Senator refers to, yet Sanders continues to pundit otherwise. This rhetorical strategy makes sense, though, when placed in the context of the revival of socialist ideology that Sanders calls for. In the last 3-4 years, Democrat politicians have not put much emphasis on their traditional policy issues, the most notable absentee being single-payer health care. This issue has been a staple of the policy platforms of Democrat presidential candidates at least since former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis unsuccessfully ran against George Bush Sr. in 1988.
Over the years, this issue has come to symbolize the commitment to an expanded welfare state among the American left. Four years after Dukakis, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton defeated Bush Sr. while including a proposal for single-payer health care in his platform. However, when he tried to get it passed in Congress, it died and was never heard of again. Barack Obama brought America a step closer to a single-payer system with his so-called Affordable Care Act, ACA. Among its many statist absurdities, the ACA made it illegal for Americans not to have health insurance coverage.
While the mandate was removed in 2019, the tax-paid subsidies and coverage mandates for health insurance remain in place. This means that the ACA still fills its role as a vehicle for increased economic egalitarianism, i.e., reduced economic differences between individual citizens.
Now Bernie Sanders wants the Democrat party to ‘finish the job’, namely get back to advocating a full single-payer system. If he can exercise enough influence over the Democrat platform for next year’s election, he will also want to inject government-run childcare for all, general income security including paid family leave, and an expansion of basic income security programs.
Senator Sanders claims to be on the right side of history. As CNN’s “State of the Union” explained, Democrats continue to lose working-class voters to the Republicans. The senator is convinced that the reason is to be found in the Democratic party’s refusal in the last 2-3 elections to put so-called economic inequality at the forefront of their campaigns.
Some commentators agree, contending that the Democrats have abandoned the economic and cultural values that traditionally are appreciated among working-class Americans. Along the same line of reasoning, it has been suggested that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race because she openly opposed the democratic socialist agenda proposed by Bernie Sanders, her only real competitor in the 2016 primaries.
Regardless of whether this is true or not, a resurgence of openly socialist politics from the Democrat party would significantly sharpen their ideological profile in next year’s election. The question is if the Republicans would oppose the agenda; it is by no means a given that Republicans would find reasons to oppose more welfare-state programs. Not even ideologically astute conservatives and libertarians can be counted on to outline arguments against a big, redistributive government. It is possible that they would declare a walk-over on the welfare state and instead try to win the election on cultural and social issues.
A Republican stand-down on new government spending programs would not come as a surprise. Over the past six decades, they have unsuccessfully opposed, then accepted, and even helped expand the modern, economically redistributive American welfare state. Figure 1 shows the gradual expansion of this welfare state as a share of total federal government spending (blue line). The military spending share is included for comparison (red line). The welfare-state share increased almost uninterruptedly under every president from Kennedy through Obama; the Trump presidency was the first exception since Carter.
Figure 1
Source of raw data: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
The following spending categories are included under the blue line (with spending in $bn in 2021):
- Income security $2,762.5
- Health $1,781.0
- Education $171.3
- Housing and community services $71.8
- Recreation and culture $48.6
These items add up to $4,675.2 billion, which is 65.3% of the total $7,154.4 billion that the federal government spent in 2021. If we add state and local government spending to the same categories, the total bill for the American welfare state lands at $6,092.6 billion, almost exactly 65% of the $9,342.3 that constitutes the total government outlays in the American economy.
It is important to remember that these numbers include some lingering pandemic-related spending, but the proportions in the budget are essentially the same as they are in a ‘normal’ year. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, the federal government alone doled out $3,147 billion on the welfare state, equal to 66.1% of its total outlays.
The historic lack of Republican resistance to more government spending has its origins in the very creation of the current welfare state. It came about as a result of President Lyndon Johnson and a big plan for giving the federal government a whole new purpose: economic redistribution.
Johnson did not invent redistribution as a policy goal. Prior to John F. Kennedy being elected in 1960, it had lingered on the outskirts of the federal budget for some time. Tallying up to less than a third of total federal spending, it was more of a residual than the main purpose of federal spending. It consisted partly of the poverty relief programs that Congress passed into law under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and partly of the old-age retirement benefit system known as Social Security.
At that time, defense spending accounted for almost half of the federal budget; with public safety added, the protective core function of the U.S. government got a bit more than all federal tax dollars. However, that changed quickly with the so-called war on poverty, a change that came without more than defensive conservative resistance. As I explain in The Rise of Big Government, Chapter 1, at the time when President Johnson declared his determination to fight poverty with massive new government spending, “conservatives were unprepared for—and under-educated on—the ideological, economic, and political force of egalitarianism.”
This point is not unique to the mid-1960s when the American welfare state underwent a socialist metamorphosis. It has applied throughout the decades and continues to be valid today. Generally speaking, conservatives and libertarians tend to disagree with socialists over what socialism is, thereby misunderstanding the expansion of government that Senator Sanders is now promoting and the expansion that Democrats have successfully promoted over many decades.
In other words, it is unreasonable to expect the Republican presidential candidate to oppose a Democrat platform that promotes an expansion of the welfare state. The only probable point of contention would be taxes, should the Democrats choose to add ‘full funding’ to a welfare-state expansion program. Republicans are very unlikely to accept any major tax hikes, which would leave them in the awkward situation of explicitly or implicitly accepting large, new spending programs but rejecting the means for funding those programs.
It remains to be seen exactly what influence Bernie Sanders and his ideological friends will have on the Democratic party in 2024. However, as I explained in Democracy or Socialism, if the Democratic party does indeed make the turn to the left that Sanders wants to lead, the consequences will be fateful for America.
