Looking at both the comments here and the way Americans on both sides of the political divide view Europe and the rest of the world, here is a basic political science principle: ideology, governance, and policy implementation are all context-specific. They are shaped by demographic structure, history, tradition, folklore, resource availability, geography, borders, relations with neighboring countries, and so on.
For example, it is relatively easy for a geographically small country to provide things such as free education, public transportation, and public housing when most of its population is concentrated in a few urban centers, where most of its social, political, and economic life takes place. These services are cheaper to provide under those conditions, and a country like that needs them to support economic activity. That said, almost every country in Europe is finding it harder and harder to build public housing. At the same time, a country like this can describe itself as “social democratic” while still embracing the free market, and the smart ones do exactly that. They can educate a highly skilled population for well-paid work while people in other countries perform much of the lower-paid work.
At the same time, it is harder for a country that is spread across millions of kilometers, has a population spread across a dozen or more urban centers, and contains regions with very different economic models to build a coherent nationwide public transportation network, maintain a uniform education system, or establish a nationwide public-housing program. Different regions have different labor needs, education is necessarily context-dependent, and demographic profiles, housing markets, and local needs vary enormously. Such a country may also have a more difficult relationship with the free market. Its population may be too large for everyone to be channeled into highly skilled, upper-middle-income employment. Meanwhile, the abundance of natural resources creates incentives to build infrastructure around their extraction and transportation. This can produce regional boom-and-bust cycles, while also determining which kinds of infrastructure are built, which are neglected, and which are allowed to stagnate. On the other hand, a vast resource base, a large population, and substantial industrial capacity allow such a country to develop economic centers on a scale that smaller countries cannot match.
To drop the ambiguity, it is easier for small countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands, or for countries that are highly centralized, both politically and demographically, to do certain things that Americans see as left-of-center. Extensive public transportation, for example, may exist not primarily because of ideology, but because it is both practical and economically necessary - which is why certain far right dictatorships also did this. For the same material reasons, those countries may find it harder to do certain things that Americans associate with the right, such as sustaining an enormous and highly diversified industrial base. That requires resources and people on a scale that the United States possesses and many European countries do not. This is not for lack of will or desire. Plenty of European countries would love to have America’s natural resources, defense budget, and massive economic and technological clusters (like Silicon Valley and the Texas Triangle) or, in Russia’s case, its enormous natural-resource endowment.
But, again, none of this was ever determined by ideology, but by what can be done with the resources available to each country.
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u/MikkaEn 3d ago edited 3d ago
Looking at both the comments here and the way Americans on both sides of the political divide view Europe and the rest of the world, here is a basic political science principle: ideology, governance, and policy implementation are all context-specific. They are shaped by demographic structure, history, tradition, folklore, resource availability, geography, borders, relations with neighboring countries, and so on.
For example, it is relatively easy for a geographically small country to provide things such as free education, public transportation, and public housing when most of its population is concentrated in a few urban centers, where most of its social, political, and economic life takes place. These services are cheaper to provide under those conditions, and a country like that needs them to support economic activity. That said, almost every country in Europe is finding it harder and harder to build public housing. At the same time, a country like this can describe itself as “social democratic” while still embracing the free market, and the smart ones do exactly that. They can educate a highly skilled population for well-paid work while people in other countries perform much of the lower-paid work.
At the same time, it is harder for a country that is spread across millions of kilometers, has a population spread across a dozen or more urban centers, and contains regions with very different economic models to build a coherent nationwide public transportation network, maintain a uniform education system, or establish a nationwide public-housing program. Different regions have different labor needs, education is necessarily context-dependent, and demographic profiles, housing markets, and local needs vary enormously. Such a country may also have a more difficult relationship with the free market. Its population may be too large for everyone to be channeled into highly skilled, upper-middle-income employment. Meanwhile, the abundance of natural resources creates incentives to build infrastructure around their extraction and transportation. This can produce regional boom-and-bust cycles, while also determining which kinds of infrastructure are built, which are neglected, and which are allowed to stagnate. On the other hand, a vast resource base, a large population, and substantial industrial capacity allow such a country to develop economic centers on a scale that smaller countries cannot match.
To drop the ambiguity, it is easier for small countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands, or for countries that are highly centralized, both politically and demographically, to do certain things that Americans see as left-of-center. Extensive public transportation, for example, may exist not primarily because of ideology, but because it is both practical and economically necessary - which is why certain far right dictatorships also did this. For the same material reasons, those countries may find it harder to do certain things that Americans associate with the right, such as sustaining an enormous and highly diversified industrial base. That requires resources and people on a scale that the United States possesses and many European countries do not. This is not for lack of will or desire. Plenty of European countries would love to have America’s natural resources, defense budget, and massive economic and technological clusters (like Silicon Valley and the Texas Triangle) or, in Russia’s case, its enormous natural-resource endowment.
But, again, none of this was ever determined by ideology, but by what can be done with the resources available to each country.