Democratic Socialists of America, Indeed

The DSA has many serious failings, but as long as you did not actually call it by the S-word, although sometimes even if you did, then the United States has always been rather good at the thing itself. 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 Green Bay Packers have a not-for-profit model of community ownership that 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 107,395 people as of the 2020 census. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too.

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 commonly began with the Lord’s Prayer, and which invariably began with the National Anthem, could never become what their counterparts had become here in a country where many people probably no longer knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer and where most people now alive had probably never known all of the words to the National Anthem.

That is the America that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, both against the exportation of that labour to ununionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. The main thing missing was universal public healthcare. But Obamacare is less Socialist than the scheme that was proposed by Richard Nixon, who also supported the Universal Basic Income, as did Milton Friedman.