Social Democracy Will Save This Nation

Follow any political blog and subsequent comments; and, sooner or later someone is deriding another by calling them a socialist. It’s stated as a pejorative statement, but more often than not the accuser hasn’t the first clue about socialism and what it means to be a socialist. I will attempt to shed a little light on the subject.

I consider myself to be a social democrat verses a democratic socialist or communist. In most of the developed world, especially Europe, social democracy in one form or another is the social structural rule rather than the exception. One may ask: what is the ideology of a social democrat verses the other forms of socialism and free market capitalism?

At this point in the discussion, I think it’s important to clarify the position of social democracy. Social democracy is an economic and social structural system to alleviate social injustices utilizing the democratic process, to guarantee certain human rights to all, to regulate and support “soft capitalism," and through the collective bargaining process bring balance between worker’s rights and protections and the needs of owners and managers of capital. Social democracy does not want to eliminate the system of free enterprise and capital, but to ameliorate the negative social and economic impacts of the worst of free market capitalism. 

Classic socialism is an economic system where the means of production is held by social ownership and control is achieved through cooperative management. The most extreme form is communism. Classic socialism places the needs of the social whole ahead of the needs of the sovereign individual. Most often extreme socialism characterizes society as dystopian in nature; 1984 and Animal Farm are prime examples.

Social democrats hold the view that capitalism is the preferred economic structure and attempts to mediate a balance between the needs of the social whole and the needs of the sovereign individual. Acknowledging that unfettered capitalism is destructive to the common need and that unfettered socialism is destructive to the needs of the individual. Hence, this creates a need for compromise and balance between the two extreme systems.

The social democratic movement supports the position, that since not all are automatically endowed with equal opportunity due to circumstances beyond the individual’s control, then the society as a whole must create a minimum social guarantee of individual sustainability. These guarantees include unfettered opportunity for meaningful employment, food, shelter, clothing, universal education, universal healthcare and freedom from unwarranted discrimination.

The challenge is to provide a safety net capable of providing the guarantees without overly burdening the ability of a society as a whole to sustain such guarantees. Many critics of social democracy hold that by providing the social safety net, that it eliminates all incentives for achievement. This is a faulty supposition, since the majority of other first tier developed nations don’t find their citizens unwilling to be productive and achievement oriented. Also faulty is the idea that the social safety net creates too much dependency on the provider reducing self responsibility. This is an extreme expression of sovereign individualism denying the interdependency between us all. There has never been a child who completely raised themselves; we are dependent on others from the moment of our conception until we take our last breath.

Only social democracy can save our nation in the future. As our population increases and our need for social stability grows, social democracy will provide the economic and social structural framework to allow our culture to continue to exist and flourish.