The Real America Resurgent

Irwin Stelzer shrieks that President Obama is turning America into "a European-style social democracy". Er, yes. The New Right banged on and on that that was his intention, and the electorate duly voted for him, i.e., for it.

Well, of course.

Stelzer promotes (although he is hardly alone in this) a totally false idea of his own country, which is in fact the land of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

That land long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. And that land could until very recently say that she led the world in that she "did not seek for monsters to destroy".