The crux of the Bernie Sanders campaign is whether Americans want a fundamental change in the American system.
It also leaves the issue of whether Bernie Sanders understands how his model European countries work in reality.
“The issue is whether Americans would be willing to accept the trade-offs that go along with such a system — higher taxes and unemployment rates, open trade, slower growth, more income redistribution — and whether Sanders has overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs of adopting it,” Steven Pearlstein wrote for The Washington Post.
The divide is evident in how Sanders speaks of Scandinavian countries as a model for his democratic socialism. Sanders emphasizes government-guaranteed benefits and high taxes. He repeats that democratic socialism means “guaranteed economic rights for all.”
Denmark, however, doesn’t bill itself as a paradise of democratic socialism. It has high taxes and many state-granted benefits for its citizens, but it, like its Nordic neighbors, takes pride in its robust capitalist model.
To import that model requires Americans to re-evaluate expectations for the American government and the benefits they receive.
As economist Luigi Zingales told the Post, “The danger for the United States is that it would wind up looking more like Italy and Greece than Denmark and Sweden.”
Restructuring the United States is no easy task. For Bernie Sanders to over-promise and under-deliver on the costs and benefits of his promises would threaten the attempt to fix problems in America. His promises on the costs of universal health care and free college have been inaccurate at best. His tax plans, too, have obscured the true cost of new taxes on the middle class. The trick of the Nordic model is not a progressive tax system that benefits the poor and middle class, but a high-tax system that benefits the people being taxed.
Part of the problem with changing the American system into a Nordic system, accurately designed or not, is path dependency. Once a country establishes norms, economic systems, and its political culture, it’s hard to jerry-rig into something else. Politicians can raise tax rates or expand benefits, but to import a new model is difficult.
That was seen with American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the problem remains when trying to copy the efficiency of Scandinavian government services. He’d need a political revolution that upset the status quo not only of what Americans expect from their government, but of the power their government can exercise, and the rights the people do and do not have.
That challenge might be too much for Sanders, even if a majority of American voters support him in it.
