Social Democracy

Here’s a short chat with a reader, who notes: I think that we’re heading toward socialism. This election will determine if this is what Americans want.  

My thoughts:

Biden is a centrist Democrat, like Obama and Clinton.  He’s actually slightly to the right of where those others were when they were in office. He represents essentially no change from the neoliberalism that has dominated the American political-economic landscape since the 1980s.

The president runs one of three co-equal branches of the U.S. government.  The legislative, not the executive branch, makes the laws.

Personally, I would love to see the U.S. join the rest of the developed world with a government like those found in Europe and Scandinavia; this is called “social democracy,” or alternatively democratic socialism, Western socialism, or modern socialism.  It’s political, social and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy.

Whatever it’s called, it’s sure as hell not happening in the United States now, nor at any point in the foreseeable future.

As long as we’re discussing what Americans want, let us understand that, thank God, we want, actually demand, a cessation of what we have now–the dishonesty, the environmental devastation, the cruelty, the corruption, the breakdown of rule of law, the promotion of racial hatred, the constant embarrassment on the world stage.  I’m very confident that this is going to happen.