This article is special to the Mirror by Giancarlo Sopo. It appeared in Quillette Magazine, and is republished with permission from Mr. Sopo and Quillette.
When I attended a rally with my family in Little Havana for then-Senator Barack Obama in 2007, our old neighborhood greeted both us and the future 44th president as if we were traitors. Older, conservative protestors yelled “Comunistas!” at us from across the Miami-Dade County Auditorium. We brushed off the attacks because we knew they came from understandably traumatized exiles and, to paraphrase the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, as Cuban Americans, we know socialism when we see it. Obama was no socialist. In fact, his message resonated with us, in part, because of his emphasis on helping those who were struggling by giving them a hand up, rather than a hand out—that was our story.
My mom came to this country shortly before I was born and worked as a social worker while she studied English. The pay wasn’t great, and she sometimes had to work a second job, but the hours were flexible and she had good healthcare benefits for our family. After 15 years, she was able to save enough money to start a small business and move us out of our modest duplex off Calle Ocho and into Miami’s middle-class suburbs.
Given our humble immigrant roots, student loan debt, and monthly medical expenses, you’d figure that democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would appeal to us—but they do not. Instead, they’re eerily reminiscent of the left-wing populists that millions in my community fled. Don’t get me wrong. I agree we must do more to help families like mine, but the policies of democratic socialists would have shackled us to the duplex where I was raised. I know this to be true because that is exactly what happened to the loved ones my grandparents left behind in socialist Cuba. They died in the same place where they were born.
In a classic bait-and-switch scam, democratic socialist politicians and their allies in the media are hoping that Americans confuse them for Nordic social democrats. While the terms are phonetically similar, those of us who have worked and spent time in Latin America understand that this is more than a misnomer. The ideology and policies of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which include an end to profits and “democratizing” the means of production, are much more like those of Havana and Caracas than Helsinki and Copenhagen.
Having been raised in a community built by the victims of socialism, it is difficult to explain just how bizarre it is to hear American media personalities—from The View’s Joy Behar to the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig—assure us it’s “just like liberalism” and “unlike your grandfather’s concept of socialism.” Of course, they fail to mention the part about government seizing control of people’s businesses and property. Such blitheful ignorance would usually be met with laughter at my house, but it just so happens that my grandfather had such an intimate understanding of socialism that he died as a political prisoner for opposing some of the very same ideas being peddled by the socialists du jour.
The failure of pundits to discern between democratic socialism and Nordic social democracy is not for a lack of transparency on the part of DSA. While their political candidates tend to resort to platitudes, DSA isn’t hiding the ball. In an article published in Jacobin, the socialist magazine’s editor and DSA’s Vice-Chair laid out a case for why Scandinavian social democracy is not what they have in mind, arguing a need for “a militant labor movement…to not merely tame but overcome capitalism.” Further dispelling the “it’s just free healthcare” myth, prominent democratic socialist Megan Day was even more explicit: “here’s the truth: democratic socialists want to end capitalism. And we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States.”
If this sounds extreme, it’s not because it upsets our American “right-of-center” political sensibilities. When I presented a team of Norwegian economists with a summary written by Vox of DSA’s economic ideas, eleven out of the 12 indicated the views would fall on the “far-left/fringe” end of Norway’s political spectrum. Meanwhile, in neighboring Denmark, DSA’s commitment to ending the free enterprise system is a near mirror image of the platform of the Enhedslisten, the one-time communist Red-Green Alliance party that has averaged less than 4 percent of the vote in elections since 1990.
Americans are likelier to find quotidian examples of democratic socialism directly to our south. In Venezuela, the late Hugo Chavez both identified as a democratic socialist and governed like one. Unlike in Scandinavia, where state-owned enterprises are largely independent, profit-pursuing ventures and property rights are sacrosanct, Chavez confiscated private assets, and not only nationalized major industries, he ran them, too. For example, when the workers of oil giant PDVSA refused to embrace his policies, he fired and replaced them with unqualified cronies (including a cousin) in a move that accelerated the oil-dependent nation’s demise.
Venezuela and Cuba are perfectly valid illustrations of democratic socialist policies, but if this sounds like trite red-baiting, consider the outcomes elsewhere in the region. In Argentina, presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner nationalized major companies and placed them under the control of incompetent allies, which taxpayers continue bailing-out to the tune of $400,000 per day. True to the democratic socialist playbook, they also implemented labyrinthine business regulations and grew public payrolls by 61 percent. Kirchnerismo’s results ranged from lackluster to so dismal that government officials felt they had to manipulate economic data to conceal their performance.
The problem is not, as some say, that “democratic socialism” has not been tried and that only they know how to get it right; it’s that, by design, it makes economies fail and societies susceptible to totalitarianism. Just like 1959 Castro and 1998 Chavez, U.S. socialists stress their commitment to democracy, but human nature is a stubborn thing. Why should Americans trust that America’s socialists would be any more willing to relinquish power than their ideological brethren in Latin America and across the world? Indeed, it is odd that those who argue President Trump has authoritarian tendencies, are often the same people who want to give the federal government even more power over our economy.
To be clear, Latin America’s misfortunes are no excuse for inaction on healthcare and education at home, but they should help make us more scrupulous consumers of politics. Just as my family and most Americans were wise to dismiss the socialist slurs against President Obama, Democrats should be wary of those who assure us that “democratic socialism” will make us more like Europe. As millions of Latinos will tell you, it won’t.
Giancarlo Sopo is a Miami-based public affairs consultant specializing in Latin America.
Hitler and Mussolini both Socialists, it was the policies of France, Britain and the United States that created both countries to become socialist after World War 1, our history books tell it differently but its true, the unconditional surrender placed on Germany forced them into the total economic collapse citing the people to make a change from the Keiser to Hitler supported by Communist Russia but later decided on Socialism.
I could give a lecture on this subject if I was younger. our schools don’t teach the students anything.
Not to put too fine a point on it, anthony Sacco, but on May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, entering World War I on the side of the Allies—Britain, France and Russia, so it is unclear how the policies of France, Britain and the United States that created Italy to become socialist after World War 1.
Italy came into WWI on the side of the applies because of the Treaty of London on April 26, 1915, which was a secret treaty between neutral Italy and the Allied forces of France, Britain, and Russia to bring Italy into World War I, and in exchange, Italy was promised Trieste, southern Tyrol, northern Dalmatia, and other territories in return for a pledge to enter the war within a month.
So perhaps there is more to it than that.
At p.183 of “World Wars And Revolutions” by Walter Phelps Hall, PhD, of Princeton, copyrighted 1943, which I think is an excellent history on the subject of Europe after WWI, gives us this following to think about:
The term geopolitics was invented by a Swedish professor of history and it dates back to 1916, when in the midst of the first World War he defined geopolitics as “the science which conceives the state as a geographical organism or as a phenomena in space”.
The state, according to the professor, must either grow or wither, and that, too, in a geographic sense.
Geographic space, and plenty of it, is politically essential.
This was true, he wrote, of England and is today (1943) the position of Japan and Germany.
It is clearly a case not of the lust of conquest but of “natural and necessary growth….”
The ideas of the Swedish savant received a setback after the war.
When it was over, however, they caught the imagination of Major General Doktor Karl Haushofer, professor of geography and military science at Munich, an intimate friend of Rudolph Hess, in turn an intimate friend of Hitler and his most trusted confidant.
After Hitler became chancellor he made Haushofer president of the German Academy and set his approval on the new science of space relationship.
What the latter really amounted to was a new rationalization of an old idea – imperial conquest.
The Romans never heard of geopolitics, nor did anyone else, for that matter, before the twentieth century, but they did know what conquest meant.
Economics, psychology, anthropology, politics, sociology, all were lumped together by Haushofer and fused in geopolitics as a justification for the seizure of land occupied by non-Germans.
Certain new and poetic expressions were coined to give an emotional overtone to these ideas.
Thus Europe and Asia became the “Island Continent,” and the central plains of Eurasia, “The Heartland”.
It was the destiny of the Island Continent to be dominated by one integrated racial group, presumably the German volk.
Once under its control, global supremacy would be within its grasp because the Island Continent, owing to its space, resources, numerous inhabitants, would easily hold the world balance of power.
Land power was held more important than sea power (thus reversing Mahan), provided there was sufficient land.
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I’m uncertain how you factor that into your model, but I don’t think it can be disregarded.
And World War One ended at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918 when Germany signed an armistice, an agreement for peace and no more fighting, that had been prepared by Britain and France.
The unconditional surrender of Germany was at the end of WWII, not WWI.
According to an official release by the German Government, published in the Kreuz-Zeitung on November 11, 1918, the Conditions of an Armistice with Germany were as follows:
10 November, 1918
The following terms were set by the Allied powers for the Armistice.
1. Effective six hours after signing.
2. Immediate clearing of Belgium, France, Alsace-Lorraine, to be concluded within 14 days.
Any troops remaining in these areas to be interned or taken as prisoners of war.
3. Surrender 5000 cannon (chiefly heavy), 30,000 machine guns, 3000 trench mortars, 2000 planes.
4. Evacuation of the left bank of the Rhine, Mayence, Coblence, Cologne, occupied by the enemy to a radius of 30 kilometers deep.
5. On the right bank of the Rhine a neutral zone from 30 to 40 kilometers deep, evacuation within 11 days.
6. Nothing to be removed from the territory on the left bank of the Rhine, all factories, railroads, etc. to be left intact.
7. Surrender of 5000 locomotives, 150,000 railway coaches, 10,000 trucks.
8. Maintenance of enemy occupation troops through Germany.
9. In the East all troops to withdraw behind the boundaries of August 1, 1914, fixed time not given.
10. Renunciation of the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest.
11. Unconditional surrender of East Africa.
12. Return of the property of the Belgian Bank, Russian and Rumanian gold.
13. Return of prisoners of war without reciprocity.
14. Surrender of 160 U-boats, 8 light cruisers, 6 Dreadnoughts; the rest of the fleet to be disarmed and controlled by the Allies in neutral or Allied harbors.
15. Assurance of free trade through the Cattegat Sound; clearance of mine fields and occupation of all forts and batteries, through which transit could be hindered.
16. The blockade remains in effect.
All German ships to be captured.
17. All limitations by Germany on neutral shipping to be removed.
18. Armistice lasts 30 days.
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In the Guardian article “Nigel Farage: the armistice was the biggest mistake of the 20th century – Ukip leader believes Germany should have been forced to unconditionally surrender, even if it cost 100,000 more casualties” by Ben Quinn on 11 Nov. 2014, we are told as follows:
Britain and its allies should have continued the first world war for another six weeks in order to achieve an unconditional German surrender, even at the cost of another 100,000 casualties, according to the leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage.
Describing the armistice that ended the first world war as the biggest mistake of the entire 20th century, he claimed that a slightly longer conflict would have prevented the conditions which led to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis coming to power in Germany some 15 years after the Treaty of Versailles.
“I believe we should have continued with the advance,” Farage said as he delivering the annual Tom Olsen Lecture at London’s St Bride’s Church on Monday night, hours before Armistice Day was due to be marked across Britain, parts of Europe and the Commonwealth.
“We should have pursued the war for a further six weeks, and gone for an unconditional surrender.”
“Yes, the last six weeks of the war cost us 100,000 casualties, and I’m prepared to accept that a further six weeks of war might have cost us another 100,000.”
“But had we driven the German army completely out of France and Belgium, forced them into unconditional surrender, Herr Hitler would never have got his political army off the ground.”
“He couldn’t have claimed Germany had been stabbed in the back by the politicians in Berlin, or that Germany had never been beaten in the field.”
The Ukip leader said that the reason why Hitler had been able to get his party off the ground in Germany – drawing on “the myth of the stab in the back” at the treaty of Versailles – was because one of those marching through the streets in support of him in 1923 was Erich Ludendorff, a commander of the German army during the first world war.
He added: “It was Ludendorff who gave Hitler credibility.”
“Yet none of this would happened if someone had made Ludendorff surrender unconditionally.”
Farage, lecturing on “the effects of the Great War and the legacy to contemporary Europe”, was this year’s speaker in the Tom Olsen lecture series, which dates back to 1991 and is named after the distinguished Fleet Street journalist.
The Ukip leader, whose hobbies have included touring first world war battlefields with a group of friends, said: “The consensus is that the treaty of Versailles was too punitive.”
“It led directly to German hyper-inflation, which in turn led to seven million unemployed, and which in turn led to National Socialism.”
“But I don’t actually think Versailles was the mistake.”
“I believe the real mistake, the anniversary of which we remember today, was the armistice.”
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That’s another view of it, anyway.
And informative and thought-provoking article, thanks for posting it and making it available.
As to socialism and the Nazis in Germany, in 1938, Adolph Hitler was Time magazine Man of the Year, and this is what Time had to say on the subject of socialism German-style, or Nazi-style, to wit:
What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less than six years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans.
He lifted the nation from post-War defeatism.
Under the swastika Germany was unified.
His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning.
The “socialist” part of National Socialism might be scoffed at by hard-&-fast Marxists, but the Nazi movement nevertheless had a mass basis.
The 1,500 miles of magnificent highways built, schemes for cheap cars and simple workers’ benefits, grandiose plans for rebuilding German cities made Germans burst with pride.
Germans might eat many substitute foods or wear ersatz clothes but they did eat.
*****
Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany’s bourgeois economic structure from radicalism.
The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business.
Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on others what amounts to a capital tax has been levied.
Profits have been strictly controlled.
Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government.
Hard-pressed for foodstuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.
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It seems to me, having studied the history of that period between WWI and WWII that it was the times themselves that produced both Hitler and national socialism in Germany back then.
Without that special set of circumstances, could it have happened?
And what set of circumstances would have that kind of “socialism” happening here?
As to that, pp.152,153 of World Wars And Revolutions by Walter Phelps Hall, PhD, of Princeton, copyrighted 1943, provides us with the following:
Fascism is an all-embracing doctrine which demands a one hundred percent surrender of the individual will in the name of mystical nationalism – with ends not clearly defined.
This nationalism is beyond good and evil, and thus is deified.
Therefore, fascism properly should be classed as a kind of religion like communism, the latter based on class-consciousness, the former on nationalism.
As such, fascism is compounded of three elements – violence, state socialism, totalitarianism.
Direct and clear is its repudiation of the Sermon on the Mount, for the Fascist insists that he only is blessed who smites and smites again.
Emphatic is its assertion that the economic life of the people must be controlled by governmental agencies.
And furthermore, since the be-all and the end-all of life is the exaltation of the state, all members of it must act alike, think alike, obey alike.
Such, in general outline, is the Spartan-like philosophy of twentieth century fascism.
How explain its origin?
Such an extreme reversal of the main currents of European culture, especially since the Renaissance, could only come about through revolutionary unheavals produced by disillusionment, sharp suffering, social anarchy.
This was the case in both Italy and Germany.
Both countries felt that they had been cheated by the peace treaties (end of WWI); both suffered enormously from economic maladjustment; both were at the mercy of politicians, unable to bring order out of chaos; and, what is more important, in both there were large numbers of ex-soldiers, young but toughened by war, unemployed, bitter, finding after four years in the trenches that back home there was “greed in the saddle, disorder in the street, and poverty on the hearth.”
Staying with the subject of “socialism” in Germany and Italy after WWI, we have the underlying causes or factors explained to us beginning at p.153 of “World Wars And Revolutions” by Walter Phelps Hall, PhD, of Princeton, copyrighted 1943, which I think is an excellent history on the subject of Europe after WWI, as follows:
Rise of Italian Fascism
Since this greed, disorder, and poverty characterized Russia as well as Italy and Germany, the question naturally arises why those two countries did not turn towards communism.
end quotes
As an aside, I would hold that question up as an example of the type of critical thinking which once existed in this country, but does no more, as people in this country have lost the ability to think in tandem with them losing the ability to read once television came into being.
With that question asked back then, a similar question for our times, which is never asked nor answered, is why would the United States go socialist today?
The only possible answer is that today, people want a government that is going to give them all kinds of free stuff, and if you want to score some votes, then by God, you need to cater your political spiel to what they want.
Getting back to “World Wars And Revolutions”:
Several reasons explain why.
In the first place, the bourgeoisie (the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes; in Marxist contexts, the capitalist class who own most of society’s wealth and means of production) were too powerful too numerous, too well led to be driven to the wall by Communist uprisings.
In both countries, such revolts occurred; in both they were snuffed out by the enraged bourgeoisie.
Secondly, in both countries, but especially in Germany, there was a tradition of discipline and order and of national cohesiveness which militated strongly against the Communist world revolution.
end quotes
In this country today, we are totally lacking in a tradition of national cohesiveness, along with discipline and order.
Getting back to “World Wars And Revolutions”:
And thirdly, one is confronted with that insoluble equation, the personal factor, the adroit cunning of Benito Mussolini in Italy, the mystical appeal to Germans latent in the raucous vocal cords of Adolph Hitler.
Of these two fiery ex-corporals, the Italian is by far the easier to understand.
Benito Mussolini, ex-school-teacher, ex-journalist, ex-laborer, and so forth, was an influential young Italian Socialist when the first Work War broke.
In his father’s smithy he had absorbed “The Prince” of Machiavelli, with its cynical assertion that most men are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous . . .”governed by fear rather than by affection.
Sorel, the French syndicalist (a movement for transferring the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution to workers’ unions influenced by Proudhon and by the French social philosopher Georges Sorel (1847–1922), syndicalism developed in French labor unions during the late 19th century and was at its most vigorous between 1900 and 1914, particularly in France, Italy, Spain, and the US.), with his philosophy of strikes and violence, had been a favorite author of his youth, and Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychology of the Crowd,” with its teaching that the mob is ever unreasoning, moved hither and yon by passionate exaggeration, had left its impression upon him.
Indeed, Mussolini never evinced any interest in the more scientific and theoretical aspects of socialism.
He was not that kind of socialist; rather, by nature, he was inclined to masterful assertiveness, to stress will rather than reason, to frighten rather than conciliate, to bluff and to bluster, but always with shrewd finesse and instinctive feeling as to just how far it would be safe for him to go.
Under ordinary circumstances Mussolini would not have risen to fame; but circumstances were not ordinary in post-War Italy.
That country smarted from a sense of frustration; it had not really distinguished itself in the War; it had been saved from disaster only by Allied help and had won victory in the end only through French and British aid.
Having sold herself to the highest bidder in 1915, Italy was now dissatisfied with her bargain,
And she had not received all that she had bargained for!
The Tyrol, Trieste, a part of the Dalmatian coast, and islands in the Adriatic and the Aegean she did obtain; but when France and England divided the German colonial empire between them, there was for Italy only the suggestion of a rectification of the boundaries of Tripoli (now Libya) and of Italian Somaliland.
The Italians felt slighted.
True, the German colonies were only being held in trust by France and Britain for civilization and the League of Nations.
But why did Italy receive no mandates?
Furthermore, in addition to the letter of the bond, the Italians had asked for Fiume at the peace conference; Fiume was not given them.
Then again, economic conditions in Italy were peculiarly distressing.
Since Italy was a poor country, she had felt the strain of the war more than had France or England.
Her finances after it were in terrible plight, and her currency had depreciated more than a third of its value.
The well-intentioned but weak and purposeless men in charge of her government in 1919 had no plan, no program, by which the situation might be bettered.
Brigandage broke out in the South, and the homes of landlords were burned; communism raised its head in the industrial North, and workingmen seized factories and announced they would operate them.
Their experience was brief and unprofitable, and they gave back the factories to the former owners of their own free will.
But anything might happen, apparently, in Italy, and if ever an affirmative voice was called for it was then.
Mussolini provided that voice.
end quotes
That story will continue, and as it does, we see that socialism in Italy after WWI really did not exist, so we cannot really hold up Italy after WWI as an example of a socialist country.
And I further submit that the circumstances in Italy after WWI have no similarity to circumstances in America today.
Or do they?
Stay tuned, more is yet to come.
And getting back to the subject of “socialism” in Italy after WWI, we go back to p.154 of “World Wars And Revolutions” by Walter Phelps Hall, PhD, of Princeton, copyrighted 1943, which I think is an excellent history on the subject of Italy after WWI, as follows:
After the commencement of the war (WWI) he (Mussolini) had deserted his erstwhile friends, the Social Democrats, who opposed Italy’s participation.
Wounded, he was discharged from the army and founded in Milan a radical, pro-war newspaper.
With the coming of peace he gathered around him a number of former soldiers and organized a small group, the Fascio di combattimento.
Its program, like the original program of the Nazis, was a hybrid mixture of radical economic theory and extreme nationalism.
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I see no comparison there myself to the Democratic Socialists of America today and their “economic theories,” whatever in fact they may be, beyond ending capitalism and making everything free.
Apples and oranges, in fact.
The alleged socialism of the one is not at all the socialism of the other.
As to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as opposed to Mussolini’s Fascio di combattimento, Wikipedia tells us they are an organization of democratic socialist and left-social democratic and labor-oriented members in the United States, often affiliated with other political parties and/or organizations, such as the Democrat party of Nancy Pelosi, Charley “Chuck” Schumer and governor of New York and prospective Democrat party presidential contender in 2020, Young Andy Cuomo, who incidentally recently stated America was never that great, implying that it will only become great when he is president to make it that way.
A member of the Socialist International (SI) from its founding in 1982, the DSA voted to leave SI in August 2017 over the SI’s acceptance of what the DSA perceived as neoliberal economic policies.
As to neoliberal economic policies, Wikipedia tells us that neoliberalism or neo-liberalism refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism, which takes us back to the Roaring Twenties and the laissez-faire polices of American president Calvin “Cool Cal” Coolidge, which preceded the Great Depression.
Interestingly, those neo-liberal economic policies embraced by the Socialist International that caused the DSA to vote to leave SI in August 2017 included economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.
Those market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constituted a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980.
Of interest to this discussion are these two sentences, to wit:
“Modern advocates of free market policies avoid the term “neoliberal” and some scholars have described the term as meaning different things to different people as neoliberalism “mutated” into geopolitically distinct hybrids as it travelled around the world.”
“As such, neoliberalism shares many attributes with other concepts that have contested meanings, including democracy.”
There is our problem in this country today clearly stated – we posses a vocabulary of words with no concrete meanings so that meaningful conversation on these subjects is becoming impossible, the “Tower of Babel Syndrome” where nobody speaks a common language.
Getting back to neo-liberal economic policies, the definition and usage of the term have changed over time.
For example, as an economic philosophy, neoliberalism emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s as they attempted to trace a so-called “third” or “middle” way between the conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and socialist planning.
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There one can see an underlying cause of the split between the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist International, because the Democratic Socialists of America are all about socialist planning of our economy along the lines of the five and ten year plans of the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Staying with that thought as a cause for split between the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist International, the impetus for neoliberalism emerging among European liberal scholars in the 1930s as they attempted to trace a so-called “third” or “middle” way between the conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and socialist planning arose from a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, which neoliberals mostly blamed on the economic policy of classical liberalism.
It was those same economic failures. of course, that led to the rise of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy and fascism in both countries in the years leading up to WWII.
Getting back to neo-liberal economic theories, in the decades that followed yhr great Depression years, the use of the term “neoliberal” tended to refer to theories which diverged from the more laissez-faire doctrine of classical liberalism and which promoted instead a market economy under the guidance and rules of a strong state, a model which came to be known as the social market economy.
And that is a very important distinction to understand, as we see from the following:
The social market economy, also called Rhine capitalism, is a socioeconomic model combining a free market capitalist economic system alongside social policies that establish both fair competition within the market and a welfare state.
It is sometimes classified as a coordinated market economy.
The social market economy was originally promoted and implemented in West Germany by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949.
Its origins can be traced to the interwar Freiburg school of economic thought.
The social market economy was designed to be a third way between laissez-faire economic liberalism and socialist economics.
It was strongly inspired by ordoliberalism, social democratic ideas, and the political ideology of Christian democracy or, more generally, the tradition of Christian ethics.
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As to ordoliberalism, it is the German variant of social liberalism that emphasizes the need for the state to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential, and ordoliberal ideals became the foundation of the creation of the post-World War II German social market economy and its attendant Wirtschaftswunder.
Getting back to the social market economy, it refrains from attempts to plan and guide production, the workforce, or sales, but it does support planned efforts to influence the economy through the organic means of a comprehensive economic policy coupled with flexible adaptation to market studies.
Effectively combining monetary, credit, trade, tax, customs, investment, and social policies, as well as other measures, this type of economic policy creates an economy that serves the welfare and needs of the entire population, thereby fulfilling its ultimate goal.
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I would say myself that that is what we truly need in this country, not the socialism of the Democratic Socialists of America, for these following reasons:
The “social” segment is often wrongly confused with socialism and democratic socialism, and although aspects were inspired by the latter, the social market approach rejects the socialist ideas of replacing private property and markets with social ownership and economic planning.
The “social” element to the model instead refers to support for the provision of equal opportunity and protection of those unable to enter the free market labor force because of old-age, disability, or unemployment.
Some authors use the term “social capitalism” with roughly the same meaning as social market economy.
It is also called “Rhine capitalism”, typically when contrasting it with the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.
Rather than see it as an antithesis, some authors describe Rhine capitalism as a successful synthesis of the Anglo-American model with social democracy.
The German model is also contrasted and compared with other economic models, some of which are also described as “third ways” or regional forms of capitalism, including Tony Blair’s Third Way, French dirigisme, the Dutch polder model, the Nordic model, Japanese corporate capitalism and the contemporary Chinese model.
A 2012 comparative politics textbook distinguishes however between the “conservative-corporatist welfare state” (arising from the German social market economy) and the “labor-led social democratic welfare state”.
The concept of the model has since been expanded upon into the idea of an eco-social market economy; not only taking into account the social responsibility of humanity, but also the sustainable use and protection of natural resources.