Homogeneity And The Welfare State

Brock sees a racist rat in the discussions of the sucessful Scandinavian welfare and its vaunted homogeneity:

Whenever I see claims that the Scandinavian welfare state owes its success to its “homogeneous population”, I always hear this in the background:

“America can’t have a successful welfare state because of all those lazy n—–s.”

I’m generally critical of imputing malign motives to ones political opponents, but I read this claim so often, with not a shred of empirical or theoretical evidence to back it up, that I think there really is a bit of racism behind it.

That’s certainly one way of looking at it, and I think when you hear about the Scandinavian work-ethic, one could easily make the argument that this notion is covering up some ugly sentiments. But when it comes to the argument that homogeneity is one reason why Scandinavians are willing to tolerate a high level of income redistribution, it has a fair amount of logical and empirical support. First, it just makes a lot of sense that people are more willing to redistribute income to those that look like them and with whom they have a broad base of cultural and almost tribal similarities with. And, I think, the evidence has generally borne this out. Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have published research showing that racial diversity can undermine support for income redistribution or for the funding of public goods. Glenn Loury, in his seminal article on crime and race, wrote that:

Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996.

It was during this period, of course, when the public largely turned against welfare. Just about every political scientist or observer admits that America’s history of racial conflict, and more fundamentally, of racial diversity makes large scale redistribution more difficult. Sheri Berman, in her history of European social democracy, The Primacy of Politics, makes the argument that some sort of social solidarity, one that can often be nationalistic and even exclusionary is necessary for social democratic politics to work:

A few of the commenters raised questions about my notion that social democracy has an
inherently communitarian nature—and here again I will stand my ground. You may not
like it, it may smack of nationalism or exclusivism, but the fact is that if you want an
order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests,
some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it
politically sustainable. So long as nation-states remain the basic form of political
organization in the world, moreover, such fellow feeling will have to be fostered within
national borders. Social democrats who can’t accept and deal with this will just end up
ceding ground politically to the radical right and various populists, who will step in to
supply the communitarian cravings that publics continue to display.

The necessity of this type of communitarianism, which very much has a “dark side” of nationalism and even fascism, has turned off some liberals from the very idea of redistributionist politics, like Will Wilkinson: “the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that leads to popular, high levels of redistribution ought to be unattractive to liberals, who are either cosmopolitan pluralists or not really liberals at all.”

So the question becomes for liberals who favor some higher levels of redistribution and a social-economic make-up resembling a social democracy is how can we create the levels of solidarity necessary to convince people to give up a (greater) portion of their income to people who live far away from them and look very different from them.

Many, like David Sirota, have proposed a very fervent economic nationalism, whereby Americans of all colors can be unified around the fact that they’re getting screwed by transnational elites. This approach, as evidence by Sirota’s paucity of ideas that would actually improve the economic situation of anyone in that article, would seem more likely to lead to pointless demagoguing against Dubai Ports or foreign ownership of infrastructure, and more dangerously, easily feeds into Dobbsian rhetoric against immigrants. Even Sirota admits that the Minuntemen are dark cousins of the very populists he lauds.  And if it comes to a choice of greater redistribution within the United States, or greater immigration into the United States, I’ll always chose the latter. And while admirable social democracy in Europe may have been built upon solidarity and a certain level of cultural and ethnic homogeneity, it’s not at all obvious that it was built upon the negative solidarity and fundamentally confrontational model of politics that Sirota and his ilk propose.

My proposal may seem idealistic, but I think it’s the best shot we have: simply convince people that social democratic arrangements are better! With the huge run-up in inequality and the health care crisis, we should be able to simply win some arguments on the margin. But it’s also important to stick to the big thing(s): ensuring every American has access to a decent and worthwhile life. The economic nationalist approach, which seems to value confrontational solidarity and nationalism as values in themselves is just too risky and, empirically, hasn’t exactly delivered the goods.