Danish reactions to Biden’s inauguration

 Today we take a break from disease and see what Danish politicians have to say about the changing of the guard in the White House. It might not be very surprising, but let’s indulge in a little celebration and relief. It’s been a long four years for Western Europe to watch its greatest ally go rogue and then descend into antidemocratic chaos. Here are the party leaders:

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (DK) of the Social Democratic party:

“I hope that President Biden will be a unifying force after the unrest and division that we have unfortunately seen grow in the United States.”

Jakob Ellemann-Jensen (DK) of the Liberal Party:

“Now the world will be a more decent place … I look forward to being able to recognize an America that takes global leadership and is engaged in its surroundings.”

Pia Olsen Dyhr (DK) of the Socialist People’s Party: 

“Such a festive day. It’s hard not to be enthusiastic.”

Sofie Carsten Nielsen (DK) of the Social Liberal party:

“American democracy is being challenged, and it will be a gigantic task to gather people together. But today I will allow myself to hope … We must speak out against populism - but not turn our backs on the people who pursue populism. For we must speak together and solve the problems that nurture discouragement and the experience of loss of control and distrust of the establishment.”

Pernille Skipper (DK) of the Red-Green Party, retweeting a thread with photos of “some of the weirdest & dumbest sh*t our failed dictator did…”:

“Now I dare again to make fun of him … Priceless”:

Former leader of the free world staring into the sun during a solar eclipse

On the significance for the world 

In an interview on Danish television (DK), Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Danish prime minister (from the right-wing Liberal Party) and NATO general secretary, was asked, “Is there anything about Trump’s tenure you will miss?”

“No, not a single thing. He will certainly go down in history as the worst president the United States has ever had. He created division in the US, and he weakened the free world outside of the country. . . . He leaves a more insecure world than the one he took over. So it is a great relief for us all that he is gone, and I look forward very much to Biden as president.”

Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod added:

“[Trump] dragged the United States out of the world at a time when it had the greatest need for American leadership … The United States has the best in the world and the worst in the world gathered together in one place. . . . And what we saw on January 6, that was one of the worst things in the world.”

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.

Don’t vote socialist yet, Democrats

Denmark is back in the Democratic primary debates. When Amy Klobuchar listed various people that Trump blames instead of himself, she included “the king of Denmark.” Denmark hasn’t had a king for more than 60 years, and Trump didn’t blame the queen either. After Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called his proposal to buy Greenland “absurd,” he described her remark as being “nasty.” At his request, Queen Margrethe had invited him to visit Denmark, and after Frederiksen’s response, he canceled the visit. If he had come, he would certainly have found something to blame her for – perhaps for not banning the Trump Baby Balloon – but in this case, Klobuchar’s charge was inaccurate.

As model egalitarian societies, Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries remain in the background of the Democratic campaign, though, as they were when democratic socialist Bernie Sanders praised them in the 2016 campaign. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presumably know more about Denmark’s welfare state than Klobuchar does about its royalty, and their proposals of radical reforms to reduce social and economic inequities have found an eager audience among a segment of Democratic voters. About half the Millennials polled favor socialism over capitalism. If other countries can provide universal health care, tuition-free university and subsidized daycare, why can’t the supposedly greatest country in the history of the world?

The risks of failure
I can generally recommend Western European social democracy, although it is not quite the socialism that many American Progressives suppose and it is not clear that its socialist tendencies are responsible for its relative prosperity and social harmony. I don’t think this is the moment to bet on a major fiscal restructuring in the US, however. The country is in a political and cultural crisis with a rogue administration dividing the population into factions that can’t understand and communicate with each other. The domestic polarization is worse than it has been in 50 years, and in foreign relations, the administration has destabilized the world by alienating democratic allies and encouraging authoritarian regimes. The stakes have rarely been higher, and the Democrats’ priority should be to end the misrule. A platform of drastic reforms would greatly increase the chances risk that Trump will be re-elected. 

Trump’s base is apparently impervious to dishonesty, disinformation, corruption and consummate boorishness. And a sitting president with a fairly sound economy and no primary challenger in his own party has a huge advantage in the general election. If the Democratic Party is pulled toward the Progressive fringe, it will lose the centrists of both parties and the independents that it needs to win. Demands for open borders, health care for undocumented immigrants, late-term abortions and gender self-identification would alienate moderates. The country cannot afford the risks of another four years of Trumpism. It might be unrecognizable afterward, assuming that the Orange Oaf could be pried out of the office even then.

The risks of succeeding
Even if a Progressive Democratic candidate wins the general election, the implementation of structural reforms to mitigate wealth inequality, economic insecurity and Wall Street abuses is far from certain of becoming a reality. They would be very expensive and require enormous deficit spending, and the partial financing from a wealth tax, a higher capital gains tax, a financial transactions tax and more would most likely crash the stock market and cause a recession, probably another serious one. The market, which has been propped up by the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates and spigot of repo loans to the largest banks is long overdue for a correction, which would be blamed on “democratic socialism” or fears of the same. It would be used to discredit reforms and make it even harder to implement them.

There is a better chance of improving social welfare by first aiming to recapture the White House and restore a traditional liberal democracy before trying to overhaul the healthcare sector and the financial markets. If that succeeds, then it won’t be many terms before AOC and her cohort will get their shot at fashioning post-capitalist, post-racial, post-gender republic.