I’m a democratic socialist from Denmark. Here’s what Bernie Sanders gets wrong
The job I’ve held the longest was at a McDonald’s.
For much of high school and later as a full-time employee, I flipped burgers, wiped down tables, and took pride in knowing the exact amount of mustard in a cheeseburger (for the record, it’s 0.7 ml). It was a great job. My past employment surprises Americans. The surprise quickly turns into outright amazement when I describe the working conditions: paid sick leave, five weeks of vacation, overtime pay for nights and weekends, mandated time off between shifts and four guaranteed days off bi-weekly, employer matched 401 (k), and a minimum salary of $20 per hour.
When I went back home from Christmas, Sanders was on everybody’s lips. Does he really stand a chance of being elected? Have people asked you more questions about you and your life? Wasn’t it cool to hear Denmark being held up as a model example in a democratic primary debate?
No, no, and yes.
As a center-left progressive by Danish political standards, surely I must be infatuated with a candidate who asked, “What can we learn from Denmark?” back in 2013 long before the presidential spotlight was even on him.
But I’m not.
People call me everything from strange to a traitor, who does not understand the country I grew up and lived in for 26 years. I can agree with the former. I simply laugh off the latter and find it amusing, not to say insulting, to be lectured on the merits of the Danish welfare state by people who rely on diverse and thorough evidence such as a summer vacation, a semester abroad, Internet memes, or that 45 percent of people bike to work or school in Copenhagen. One time, I even had a friend argue against me with some of the experiences and facts that I told him about. I guess he had forgotten.
I’m still an ardent supporter of the Danish system. Working in the U.S. has given me a newfound appreciation for the Scandinavian model and the welfare state. I would love to see America move in that direction. Logically that should make me one of Sanders’ most fervent supporters.
But the truth is that Bernie Sanders isn’t advocating for the Danish system. And his political revolution isn’t really a revolution at all. That makes him seem inauthentic to me.
Sanders is not a radical, he’s basically a Democrat
Perhaps due to the many negative associations and misperceptions the word socialist brings up, Sanders’ agenda is mistakenly being labeled as radical.
On almost all the issues, his ideas align with the Democratic Party. He favors raising taxes the top earners, infrastructure spending, pay equity, increasing the minimum wage, expanding social security, combatting climate change, campaign finance reform, and raising wages. A single payer health care system isn’t a new idea and it happens to be one that a lot of Democrats agree with. His idea to make college tuition free is a broader step, but the concept isn’t historically foreign to American politics and the thought is similar to President Obama’s proposal for two years of free community college.
Bernie Sanders isn’t suggesting something truly different. It’s just that he is willing to go even further on most of the ideas that Democrats agree on. From a policy standpoint, you could even argue that Martin O’Malley had a more progressive agenda.
Here’s how Denmark really works
What undoubtedly appeals to the liberal base is mainly tied to his soaring rhetoric like taxing the top one percent and breaking up a rigged system. But this sort of economic populism is not how Denmark works.
Let’s get one thing straight. Denmark is a capitalist market economy. Labeling what Sanders proposes as democratic socialism is not only wrong, but also harmful to the left’s political goals. More on that later.
It is true that Denmark has one of the world’s highest tax rates, but the Nordic model does not rely on wealth redistribution from the top to the bottom as some Sanders supporters have argued to me. Instead, the reason why I grew up with the benefit of universal healthcare, tuition free college, and being able to bring a $900 stipend to study at an American college is that Denmark tax the middle class heavily through high taxes on income and consumption. This includes a 25 percent sales tax and an 8 percent labor market contribution tax of your salary. There are high taxes on alcohol. We even have a tax on cow flatulence.
In fairness to Sanders, he has been the only candidate who has been willing to raise taxes on middle incomes, but his tax plan doesn’t even come close to bringing the U.S. on par with Denmark.
A major surprise to a lot of Americans is how the relationship between employers and employees is mostly completely free from government intervention. Working conditions and salaries are bargained solely between the trade unions and employer federations based on the notion that the individual industries and local conditions should dictate what is fair. Denmark does have high wages, but there isn’t a law on minimum wage. In fact, the Danish labor market has some of the most flexible regulations in the world. It’s easy to fire people when the economy is hurting and it’s easy to hire people when there’s an upswing. It has always seemed ironic to me that the country where government is more involved in the labor market is the United States.
The government’s role in turn is to provide a vast safety net for the people who don’t have a job. When some of my friends graduated from college or were unemployed for a while, unemployment benefits that matched almost 90 percent of a regular salary would kick in. As a member of a so-called a-kasse, you’re eligible for those for two years while it is your responsibility to apply for a set number of jobs each month and take part in job training that will keep you as a viable job candidate. You pay into those with monthly dues. For those who aren’t members, government still has programs that pay to prevent the jobless from falling into poverty.
Lastly in Denmark, roughly two-thirds of the workforce are a member of a union. A lot of scientific studies link the decline in union membership and rising income inequality. Both in the United States and in Western economies in general. That should make sense to most people. When workers have more power, they are better positioned to bargain for company profits ending up in the hands of people on the assembly line instead of the hands of shareholders and management.
Sanders isn’t arguing for the that …
He doesn’t talk about the need for broadening the tax-base. In fact, Sanders doesn’t propose most of the policies or advocate for instituting the labor market structures that define the Scandinavian model. The Danish government employs nearly a third of all workers in the country, almost double the number of the U.S. Yet, you don’t see Sanders arguing for the government as a job creator. A policy of guaranteed government work is a radical policy idea that would square more with a political revolution.
Instead of calling for renewed commitment from corporations, higher union membership, and incentives to encourage more profit-sharing companies, Sanders’ main narrative of corporations pushes a frame of struggle and divisiveness, not inclusion and cooperation.
Sanders is a staunch supporter of unions, but there is little in his platform about how he would raise union density or promote the role of collective bargaining.
And while he often invokes Denmark, he focuses solely on praising all the benefits and pivots into taxing millionaires and billionaires while leaving out all the other core parts that makes the Nordic welfare model plausible. That disconnect between rhetoric and promises is one of the main reasons I don’t find him as authentic as many of my progressive peers.
… and he’s not bringing attention to another issue that is core to wealth inequality
As much as I have enjoyed Sanders’ focus on a lot of issues that rarely sell politically like campaign finance reform and lower drug prices, there is one issue that I would have thought he would be all over: housing policy.
To this day, I’m stunned that none of the candidates consistently address housing policy.
Nearly half of American renters are paying more than 30 percent of their incomes. The foreclosure crisis still lingers with millions of homeowners being unable to access the government programs that were set up to help them. Apartment rents are increasing faster than anytime since the crisis, leading to concerns about housing affordability and displacement. Evictions are rampant. Public housing is in decay.
And in what fits directly into Sanders’ narrative, you have companies and hedge funds taking advantage of antiquated tax sale systems that allow them to buy a home valued at $200,000 for $2,000. In Baltimore, you can lose your home over an unpaid water bill as low $350.
It may not be fair to hold the Vermont senator to a higher standard but given his history of creating affordable housing in Burlington, that he doesn’t have a section on housing on his website, and his own selling point that he is a different kind of candidate, this is a disheartening omission.
He doesn’t speak about the good of government and the flaws of capitalism
But the most disappointing thing to me is the lack of the most basic of arguments that is implicit in his agenda: that government is a force for good.
The idea of government has taken a beating for decades and public trust among the American people has eroded. Arguably, the biggest obstacle to build support for both his own and more traditional Democratic policies is the political distaste for “big government”. Without the public’s trust and willingness to put pressure on elected officials, his ideas will never be sellable to the larger American public. That Sanders has built his case almost exclusively on economic justice and populism is discouraging.
I’ll go even further than that. A major strategic blunder is his embracement of the term democratic socialist. Sanders is a smart politician and he knows that it would hurt the authenticity that has fueled his campaign if he ran away from it because it isn’t popular. But in a time where even Goldman Sachs questions how capitalism works and where the aftermath of the Great Recession has opened up a once-in-a-century opportunity to challenge the flaws of capitalism itself, we are being robbed of that discussion.
This might seem like an outright assault on Bernie Sanders. And it sure sounds ironic, especially to myself, given that he is the candidate I agree with the most on most of the issues.
What I can’t seem to shake is the squandered opportunity to advocate for another version of capitalism. One that promotes stronger government and challenges our way of thinking about the economic system. The conservative movement is still succeeding in pushing false and the disproven narratives of trickle down economics and the infallibility of the free market.
I would be feeling the Bern if he demanded a fundamental confrontation with the way we think about society.
Imagine a candidate who spoke about happiness and growing human capital. Instead of buying into the notion that people are an instrument to create value in the economy, why aren’t we talking about quality of life? To his credit, Sanders briefly touched upon this line of thinking when he questioned whether economic growth should be a goal in itself. That unreleased potential might be why his candidacy makes me all the more dissatisfied.
While I agree with almost all of his positions, I had hoped that Sanders’ candidacy would spark a genuine competition about ideas in the Democratic Party, not just highlight the small differences about how high we set the minimum wage. A truly radical candidate who argues for a political revolution would spark a discussion about bold economic reforms, aim to bring attention to overlooked issues, and mount a fierce defense of government as a concept.
Yet there’s nothing revolutionary about Bernie Sanders. Nothing surprising about his policy positions. Nothing radical about his agenda. And he’s certainly not a democratic socialist.
