Has Denmark been knocked out of the Democratic debates?

With Joe Biden’s primary win in Michigan and most of the other Super Tuesday II states, I thought it might be time to retire Denmark from the presidential election debates. Sanders has continued to compare his “democratic socialism” to the Danish and other Scandinavian social democracies, but voters in the more populous states after the Nevada caucuses, with some nudging by the Democratic National Committee, have mostly said No thanks. It is unclear whether they did so because they reject Sanders’s platform, they don’t believe it’s feasible, or any number of other reasons – they find Sanders ideologically rigid or less electable than Biden. Sanders still has a substantial following and could draw out the primary contest, but it looks like his socialist revolution will have to wait until a future election cycle.

So it is curious that also on Super Tuesday II, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that it is Biden who “is the true Scandinavian.” Sanders, with his hostility toward free markets and other features of a liberal democracy, writes Friedman, “probably couldn’t get elected to a municipal council in Denmark today.” That’s an exaggeration. He could be elected to Copenhagen’s city council, which is notoriously “red.” In 2017, the far-left Red-Green Alliance won 18% of the vote, more than any other party except the center-left Social Democrats, enough to enable them to pursue their vendetta against automobiles, for example. But Copenhagen is an exception, and Friedman’s point generally holds: Sanders would belong to a fringe movement in Denmark. The country wouldn’t vote for nationalizing the transport and the energy industries. Of course, many of Sanders’s signature proposals already exist in Denmark, so the comparison isn’t clear-cut.

(If some think I should therefore disown the subtitle of this blog, with its reference to a “socialist monarchy,” my excuse is that it was a provocative exaggeration intended to draw a stark contrast. I do confess, however, to being mistaken in an early post in 2016, when I assumed too easily that Sanders was really a social democrat and not a dogmatic socialist.)

Utopia or the best of both worlds?
But what, according to Friedman’s thinking, is the stealth Scandinavian program that Biden may not even know he is a proponent of? Friedman gives a good summary of the welfare state services and benefits that Sanders admires, the heavy taxes that they require, and other features crucial to Denmark’s prosperity that Sanders ignores or overlooks. The most important of the latter is a free market economy that is open to entrepreneurship and globalization. There is little of Sanders’s demonization of corporations and billionaires. Proponents of a planned economy of the type Sanders’s favors are a small minority that has been held in check in recent years by alternating center-left and center-right administrations.

The second aspect that Friedman highlights is the “high-trust social compact among [Denmark’s] business community, labor unions, social entrepreneurs and government.” His point is that such cooperation is impossible if you accept Sanders’s premise that capitalism is essentially evil and its success stories are owing to greed and corruption. The wages of around two-thirds of the Danish labor force are governed by agreements between employers’ associations and labor unions. Friedman recalls a meeting of the Danish “Disruption Council” that he attended. He watched “corporate leaders, national union leaders, educators, social entrepreneurs and cabinet ministers” brainstorming respectfully and understanding the need to compromise for the sake of greater good.

Viking Joe the mediator
It is less clear how Biden fits into the Scandinavian model. He obviously has a much more modest approach to reform than Sanders and would pursue an expansion of the social safety net incrementally. He has a broader ideological and demographic appeal, to no small degree because he is more pragmatic and less ideological than Sanders. Any prospect of reducing wealth inequality and poverty or job and healthcare insecurity depends on reducing the polarization and gridlock in Congress, and Biden, as a moderate with a more collegial history and relations with Senate Republicans, is eminently better qualified than Sanders to forge a basis for cooperation – assuming that Republican congresspeople would return at least partially to their senses after the departure of the evil wizard who has bewitched them. 

Biden’s critics on the left will point out that you can’t be a senator from Delaware for many years without being a good friend to corporations, a very good friend, as they might put it (the same people who would say that Friedman is a good friend to neoliberalism). One curious feature of Danish parliamentary politics is that on a few occasions in recent years, the left-wing administration has enacted conservative measures that the preceding right-wing administration did not even attempt, and vice versa. If the parties had held strictly to their ideological profiles, they would have encountered resistance from the other side. Although there has been a gradual drift toward the right that dismays a significant segment of the electorate, there is much to be said for the increased efficacy of policies based on consensus-seeking. Biden has a better chance of achieving that than any of the other candidates.