Socialist America

Tim Stanley is appalled, and talks of "class war", which is exactly what these measures prevent, and exactly what is waged by their opponents. That latter point is currently being made more starkly in Britain than in any other country on earth.

A fact not lost on Republicans as well as Democrats in the United States, where they passed the legislation in order to avoid the fiscal cliff because the alternative would have been "turning into Britain". On this anniversary of the death of George Orwell, his country is the globally acknowledged capitalist dystopia, conformity to which is actively feared even on the American Hard Right.

As long as you do not actually call it by the S-word, then America has always been rather good at it. 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.

America still had enough Faith, Flag and Family by the 1980s to restrain neoliberal economics then and subsequently. We did not, so we could not. Comparing their giant sporting interests to ours makes the point. God Bless America. Games that still begin commonly with the Lord's Prayer, and which invariably begin with the National Anthem, could never become what their counterparts have become here in a country where many people probably no longer know the words to the Lord's Prayer and where most people now alive have probably never known all of the words to the National Anthem.

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". Once the universal public healthcare option has come to be, then everyone will say that it is as American as apple pie. As, indeed, it is. ObamaCare is in fact less Socialist than the scheme that was proposed by Richard Nixon.

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 last Presidential Election was between the man who delivered ObamaCare and the man who delivered RomneyCare, with no opponent of the principle on the ballot. Romney, remember, was the choice of millions of registered Republicans. Well, of course he was.