The big Republican knock against Bernie Sanders - and, to some extent, the knock on Hillary Clinton and any Democrat - is that they want America to be more like Europe, in particular Northern Europe.
Bernie’s socialist policies might work fine for Scandinavia, Republicans say, but they’re pretty much D.O.A. in the good old U. S. of A.
Marco Rubio even went so far as to joke at a recent debate that Bernie would actually be better off just running for
president of Sweden.
Now, Sweden doesn’t actually have a president (it’s a constitutional monarchy with a king as its head of state and a prime minister as its head of government), but Rubio’s point here is still pretty obvious.
Basically, he’s saying that even if it were a good idea, Bernie Sanders’ Sweden-style socialism would never work in the U.S. because damnit, this is America and we don’t like pinko commies here.
Conservative columnist David Brooks gives another version of this argument in his latest
op-ed for The New York Times.
He writes, “There’s nothing wrong with living in Northern Europe. I’ve lived there myself. It’s just not the homeland we’ve always known. Bernie Sanders’ America is starkly different from Alexander Hamilton’s or Alexis de Tocqueville’s America, or even Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s America.”
But is that really true?
Is Sweden-style social democracy really as alien to the American way of thinking as David Brooks says it is?
Do Americans really prefer our way of doing things to the Scandinavian way of doing things?
Well, contrary to what you might hear on Fox So-Called News, they don’t.
Americans actually really like socialism, in particular Swedish-style democratic socialism, the kind Bernie Sanders is promoting as part of his political revolution.
