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"We Have More Socialism Than It Looks"

HB: After the Clinton administration, seen from Europe, the whole transatlantic relationship seemed to change all of a sudden. The Europeans seem to have trouble even understanding American conservatism? Is it possible to describe the conceptual difference as two partially overlapping circles, where each represents the concept of politics in Europe and the United States respectively?

CC: On these questions I am not much of a defender of the American conservative point of view. On your idea of the overlapping circles, that is a good description. I mean: you don’t have the same kind of market-liberals that we do whereas we don’t have the same kind of socialism that you do. I do think we have more socialism than it looks. Because socialism has been a suspect ideology in this country, it has had to be pursued underground. So a lot of it is done by heavy-handed regulation; by the bullying of companies into compliance with hiring and health-care codes, by tax incentives … It doesn’t look like we have a government health plan – aside from Medicare and Medicaid – but the tax code is structured to punish companies that don’t offer medical plans to their employees. This leaves some people uninsured, but it also means that the government is exerting itself, behind the scenes, through the tax code and through regulation, to provide health care for 80-90% of the population.

HB: Some reporters placed the figure at around 40 million without health coverage?

CC: Yes around 40 million it is said don’t have it. But even if those numbers are accurate, it is tough to say who those people are. A lot of them are just starting out in their careers. They’re young, and thus in low risk categories. A lot of them are immigrants, which raises a lot of interesting constitutional problems. If your socialism comes out of regulation rather than out of legislation, then a person who is not constitutionally legal can be a sort of a non-citizen. Our system is – I don’t quite know how to put this – we take advantage of immigrants by keeping them outside of the realm of constitutional protection. So the socialism that operates through law does not reach them, it is kind of designed not to: it makes them more economically efficient. There’s some truth to the leftish sounding ideas about a two-tier system.

HB: That leads me to what seems to be a transatlantic value-gap – in terms of for example the different tolerance levels for income inequality?

CC: On the American-European value gap, I do not believe that we are more rugged and individualistic than the Europeans, even if that is what we like to tell ourselves. Like the Germans who like to think that they like to work hard. It is just a deep part of the national mythology. Americans do not love liberty. That is why you have to look all over Washington for a place where you can smoke at lunch! In most of this country, a guy who owns a bar does not have the right to allow you to smoke. If you have children you are not allowed to ride in your own car without a car-seat. In fact: if you have a baby, you are not allowed to take your own child out of hospital unless you can show that you have a car-seat installed in your car. This is not a liberty loving country!

You get these bidding wars for sentencing for tiny crimes in the heat of election campaigns. One candidate will say “Y’know the penalty for smoking marihuana ‘round ‘ere is only six months, and three weeks ago some kid got high on marihuana and he raped and killed a girl. I wanna raise the penalty for marihuana to 5 years.” And the other candidate goes: “I wanna raise it to ten years!”. So you get these absurd drug laws – this is not a freedom loving country. We do not have all this inequality because we love freedom so much.

There are a lot of explanations to this and I don’t want to be too simplistic about this. Our history of racial segregation means that this is a country that for much of its history has had overt stratification of — different levels of — citizenship. I don’t mean to say that that makes us accept today’s stratification, because it might just as well make you reject it more than in another country. I’m not sure how it works out, but this might have something to do with why we accept income inequality. This is not an answer, maybe it’s more an idea of where to look. The other is our history of integration and the churning mobility that that has caused in our class system. All immigrant groups…

HB: ...they come in at the bottom and then climb up, that’s the idea?

CC: There’s been some exceptions: the Dominicans are not doing very well now; the Hmong of Cambodia are not doing very well; the Irish took a long time to rise, and have still not arrived at where they should be. So you can’t say that it is automatic. An interesting metaphor of the difference is that in the United States we say “move up the social ladder”: in France they use the expression “l’ascenseur social” – you know what I mean, that it hasn’t got anything to do with the effort on the part of the citizen.

There is the belief that these inequalities aren’t permanent, but I do think that there is another factor. You know Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the closing of the American frontier; how after the closing of the frontier America became European. That’s true in a certain sense: there’s no more free land, there’s no more unknown land. But you know what? There’s still quite a lot of this country, which is uninhabited, and if it is uninhabited people don’t give a shit about it. An example: if you want to start a toy factory you are going to cause some disturbance. What does it take to make 5 million dollars as the owner of a toy factory? You got to build a big hideous building, to congest an area, to bring in 200 laborers who are probably illegal and poor and subject to the problems that illegal and poor people have; to pollute. You cannot really do that in a village in Denmark in the way that you can do it 50 miles outside of Dallas. If that place is 50 miles away no one cares about it, you can pollute it all you want. I think this is largely geographical: we have more leeway with the externalities that wealth creation creates. I know these are only partial answers and pretty incomplete.

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foto: Weekly Standard