When I studied economics decades ago, most of the courses analyzed the pure mechanics of capitalism. Political economy only raised its head in a final-year course on the history of economic thought, which came as a revelation, and in which anyone who did not follow mainstream capitalist thinking was described scathingly as "heterodox. In a short telephone call, Laura Macdonald, a Carleton University professor and former director of the school's Institute of Political Economy, offered the following:.
Stella Gaon, a theorist at Saint Mary's University in Halifax who specializes in the economic and intellectual origins of political thought, says Trump's remarks hark back to the era of McCarthyism. Socialism and liberalism are both rooted in the Enlightenment values of freedom, rationality and equality, she said. The difference between socialism and liberalism is that socialists don't believe equality is real unless you include economic equality.
In its purest theoretical form, socialism required people to be equally rich, an ideal that Gaon said has never been attained in practice. In its original form, it also required the state to be in control of everything. No private businesses allowed. Socialism has come a long way since the days when socialism and communism meant roughly the same thing, said Tom Flanagan, a political theorist and professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.
Socialism meant the state control of all industry and "the replacement of the markets by an administrative economy," said Flanagan, a conservative political activist who was an adviser to former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. But since then, and especially after the creation of the Soviet top-down communist system in the 20th century, social democracy became the mainstream form of socialism outside communist countries, a kind of watered-down version we see in northern Europe and elsewhere that attempts to share the wealth and equalize opportunity without requiring economic equality.
By every discernible metric, economic inequality and economic stress on the working class is worse in the United States than in Canada. Economic conditions for workers in Canada are bad and getting much worse. In the United States the economy for workers is going from worse to broken. This is the economic situation that is driving people to look for alternatives.
It would be mechanical and foolish to argue that the degradation of public services, work and daily life has automatically led to the socialist resurgence in the United States. There is only a dialectical interaction. The material conditions of inequality is the basis for this resurgence, but not its cause. The rise of socialism is the outcome of a whole series of political struggles that led it to sprout in the current political terrain.
Republican and Democratic adherence to the ruling class project of neoliberalism since the late s has sowed the seeds of the political instability that came home to roost in The traditional liberal-labour coalition that was a mainstay in the Democratic Party faded, superseded by the pro-corporate wing of the party, the Democratic Business Council and the Democratic Leadership Council in the s.
The Democratic Party that emerged from the s was a coalition that fused together tech, healthcare and Wall Street capital, the costal liberal upper middle class, and solid African-American and increasingly Latino voting blocs. Elite favoured policies were couched with woke words.
The Republican Party meanwhile cobbled together elements of the Christian right and the business lobby. The political class as a whole, both Republican and Democratic parties, was upended by two major political events in the 21st century: the Iraq War and the Great Recession. The lies sold about the Iraq War, that Americans would be greeted as liberators, that it would bring democracy to the region, that WMDs would be found, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat turned out to be way off base.
This all-party consensus position on Iraq had damaged the political establishment in both parties, but especially the Democratic Party. In both the and Democratic primaries and in the Republican Party, the Iraq War became a key litmus test. Establishment Democrats and Republicans were tarnished by their support of the war.
In Obama partly distinguished himself from Hillary Clinton because he could credibly say he opposed the Iraq War. Both Sanders and Trump used their opponents support for the Iraq War to great effect. The entire political establishment was delegitmized by its support for the Iraq War. From the Arab Spring to the crisis in the EU, the Great Recession has had a profound impact on the political terrain across the globe.
In the United States the all party consensus for neoliberal policies was cracked by the depth of the economic crisis. Both parties supported bailing out the banks, while leaving millions of unemployed and homeless workers hanging out to dry.
The Great Recession not only delegitimized the political establishment, it left people desperate and angry with a system that looked like it only cared about the well-off. As Adam Tooze noted :. Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been going through a profound transformation since precisely because the establishment has no easy answers for either the political or economic challenges they face in what Michael Roberts aptly calls the Long Depression.
A Republican President openly advocating for increased protectionism and trade wars, while the most popular politician in the country is an open socialist is not something that was imaginable a few years earlier. In Canada, there has not been a similar upending of the political landscape. Outside of Quebec no new party has risen on the left or right to capture part of the political terrain. It is remarkable how stable thus far minus some isolated changes in New Brunswick and PEI, and the larger shift in Quebec Canadian political parties outside Quebec have been.
In the United States, it is not just the political institutions that are in crisis, but the whole U. Trust in mass media is near record lows.
Trust in big business, banks, the church, congress are all noticeably lower than in the early s. Only one institution, the military, has seen an increase in trust in the last number of years. In Canada, trust in institutions has dipped, but remains relatively higher.
The Edelman Trust Barometer for found disparities across the board when comparing American and Canadian trust in institutions. Perhaps the biggest difference between the United States and the Canadian left is the state of the institutions of the working class. Canada has an existing social democratic party, the New Democratic Party NDP , that despite its many faults has remained the default political institution for the working class. The NDP is seen by the establishment as a working class trade union party and its voting base is disproportionately working class voters.
Since there is little doubt the party has been in a prolonged crisis. Its long march to the political centre has not led to overwhelming electoral success. Decades of accommodating to the political agenda set by business has left the party unable to pull the political debate to the left. Canada continues to thrive while the U.
The difference grows starker by the month: The Canadian system is working; the American system is not. Marche calls Canada's superior model "a hardheaded even ruthless , fiscally conservative form of socialism". I couldn't find the study from Environics etc.
The numbers don't seem to align with the Fed's recent figures see page 17 of Changes in U. The Fed looks at US family not household net worth in not Still, the main thing going on is pretty obvious. The net worth of US families fell sharply between and because of the collapse in US house prices.
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