Livin’ Bernie Sanders’s Danish Dream
By David Brooks, Feb 12 2016 (LINK to article)
Bernie Sanders's Danish dream will not work in America, any more than it will continue to work for much longer in Europe, and this is why:
Britain's welfare state, which, as a British citizen, I know most about, was founded in the aftermath of WW2 when there was a very strong sense of national identity and social solidarity.
It follows that if the state represents a nation, its citizen SHARE with one another, rather than everyone simply seeking their own personal advantage. It was by sharing the costs, dangers and hardships of the total war against Nazi Germany that, once joined by two powerful allies, it was able to triumph.
We continue to live very much in the aftermath of that war and the overreaction* to Nazism, but the sense of shared national identity and social solidarity has all but disappeared, undermined by a socio-economic system and ethos that priorities personal advantage over social solidarity (thus the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor) and by mass poor-world immigration, which has destroyed the natural ethnic basis of national identity and genuine nationhood. This seems an odd thing for the state to do, but not in view of its true nature, since it serves its age-old strategy of divide and rule (see BLOG in which I elaborate).
Britain has revealed itself for what really is - and always was, of course - which is a mercenary "patron state" deceitfully posing as a nation, in order to legitimise itself, its ruling elites and the immense power they wield and abuse, to their own and favoured (especially wealthy and academic) clients personal advantage, at the expense, and ultimate self-destruction, of society at large.
* The West's Overreaction to Nazism
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