Socialist America

America, the only America that anyone now alive can remember, is 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.

In stark contrast to our own Premier League, the National Football League maintains the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as the very extensive welfare provision. The 2011 Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, have a not-for-profit model of community ownership which has had to be banned from spreading for fear that it would otherwise prove so popular. The Packers have never moved out of a Midwestern city of only 102,313 people as of the 2000 census. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too. In all three cases, displaying the name or logo of a commercial sponsor on the kit would be considered the very height, or depth, of sacrilege.

That is the America which 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. Until very recently, that America led the world in “not seeking for monsters to destroy”.

That is America, the most successful example of non-Marxist, and where necessary anti-Marxist, Socialism in the world. No one alive can remember America as anything other than that. The only thing missing was universal public healthcare. And even that has now been taken care of. So much so that the Presidential Election is between the man who delivered ObamaCare and the man who delivered RomneyCare, with no opponent of the principle on the ballot. Romney, remember, is the choice of millions of registered Republicans. Well, of course he is.