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What is Social Democracy?

What is Social Democracy?

Last updated on: March 30, 2009 at 5:30 am by Gene Veith

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What is Social Democracy? 2009-03-30T05:30:00-04:00 Gene Veith

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It is widely being said–including approvingly by liberals–that the Obama administration is adopting the governmental and economic model known as “Social Democracy,” as practiced widely in Europe. If so, we should know more about this system. This is from the entry for “Social Democracy” in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia:

A political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes. Based on 19th-century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism but eschews its militancy and totalitarianism. Social democracy was originally known as revisionism because it represented a change in basic Marxist doctrine, primarily in the former’s repudiation of the use of revolution to establish a socialist society. . . .

The growth of German social democracy owed much to the influence of the German political theorist Eduard Bernstein. In his Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899; “The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy”; Eng. trans. Evolutionary Socialism), Bernstein challenged the Marxist orthodoxy that capitalism was doomed, pointing out that capitalism was overcoming many of its weaknesses, such as unemployment, overproduction, and the inequitable distribution of wealth. Ownership of industry was becoming more widely diffused, rather than more concentrated in the hands of a few. Whereas Marx had declared that the subjugation of the working class would inevitably culminate in socialist revolution, Bernstein argued that success for socialism depended not on the continued and intensifying misery of the working class but rather on eliminating that misery. He further noted that social conditions were improving and that with universal suffrage the working class could establish socialism by electing socialist representatives. The violence of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and its aftermath precipitated the final schism between the social-democratic parties and the communist parties.

After World War II, social-democratic parties came to power in several nations of western Europe—e.g., West Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain (in the Labour Party)—and laid the foundations for modern European social-welfare programs. With its ascendancy, social democracy changed gradually, most notably in West Germany. These changes generally reflected a moderation of the 19th-century socialist doctrine of wholesale nationalization of business and industry. Although the principles of the various social-democratic parties began to diverge somewhat, certain common fundamental principles emerged. In addition to abandoning violence and revolution as tools of social change, social democracy took a stand in opposition to totalitarianism. The Marxist view of democracy as a “bourgeois” facade for class rule was abandoned, and democracy was proclaimed essential for socialist ideals. Increasingly, social democracy adopted the goal of state regulation, but not state ownership, of business and industry as sufficient to further economic growth and equitable income.

Here is the dictionary definition: “1 : a political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means 2 : a democratic welfare state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practices.”

Is this what the American people intended when they elected a Democratic president and congress? Shouldn’t there be a constitutional convention or at least a congressional action or at the very minimum some sort of public debate before we change our entire system of government into this offshoot of Marxism?

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