This post presents a personal opinion about the environment around Sen. Bernie Sanders and his strife to win the electoral fight.
Since I live in the U.S., I've perceived a common denominator of the U.S. society: ignorance of what does not produce direct utility.
Despite that most americans are very hard workers and entrepreneurs, they often oversight the value of education and details. For instance, in international negotiation, american entrepreneurs are considered very paramedic. They like closing deals as soon as possible. Most americans consider as waste of time getting to know the culture of the people they make business with whenever they are the strongest piece of the deal; they simply want to see statistics with higher and higher peaks. On the other hand, american customers love fast tracks, fast past, fast food and anything that starts with the word fast. The fast culture is so rooted in the american life because "time is money".
They like their ways. In the most conservative spectrum of the american society lays a strong sense of nationalism: "the american way". Most americans may easily turn down any foreign influence to a bucket list of countries to visit. How can they be blamed if they live in the best nation on Earth?
As a consequence of all this patriotism, anything that does not resemble to their identity is unwanted. Taking driving as example, I once invited a colleague friend of mine to my house to work, and after a few hours, I asked him if he felt like going for some pizza to a place less than quarter of a mile from my home. His answer after I told him that I rather walk than drive was"it's not the way we do things in this country"; he was serious. Another more vile example is Islam. It's common to see astonishment on americans when they see the news talking about muslim men who marry more than one woman. Their family model is entrenched in their set of beliefs that even the gay marriage movement struggled to succeed in the U.S.
And this common pattern appears in every aspect of their lives such as politics and economics. Despite that most american voters see themselves as liberals and progressives, words like socialism are unfairly marked as "anti-american", so the benefits of an active government are often neglected.
Among the most conservative and lesser conservative media, socialism is used as an adjective for rhetoric purposes. Obama is considered a socialist, so is obamacare. Hillary Clinton is a socialist for supporting reforms to improve education. Taxes are socialist; regulations are socialist; any kind of government intervention is socialism. In other words, anything that differs from the conservative conception that a rightist politician may support is rapidly tag as socialism to unbalance the debate.
As foreign influences, americans separate themselves from the word socialism because they believe that the american dream was achieved individually instead of collectively.
However, most americans don't know that the golden age of the U.S. would be considered as socialism on today's standards. The age between the end of the WWII and the implementation of the economic reforms commonly known as Reaganomics is characterized for a strong government intervention. The U.S. government based on a then-prominent economic doctrine, keynesianism, regulated many aspects of the markets and offered several social services to its citizens. During this period of time, wages raised and economic social mobility was higher than now while unemployment was low.
This trend of economic welfare exists among other countries and periods of time represented by strong government intervention. Some Latin American governments took a similar path like their american counterparts that happened to be during the same period of time. Latin American governments enacted several economic reforms with the only purpose of promoting the industrialization of their countries. The end result: a huge improvement of the socio-economic conditions of their citizens. On a more current example, the countries that have the highest standards of living in terms of education and social mobility have also a strong government: Denmark, Finland and Sweden for instance.
Although many americans might not want to accept that this positive improvement what's now known as socialism, they really would like to live in this period.
Bernie Sanders offers this period back for the americans. He's seeking a 180 degrees change in political economics. He considers himself a Scandinavian socialist. He also knows that the influence of big businesses have favored the rich over the poor, and it has resulted in the decline of the living conditions of the americans despite the grow that GDP has had in the last couple of decades. In essence, Sanders offers a change from a deregulated country to a one that promotes government intervention in similar ways to the golden age.
However, Sanders' main barrier is cultural rather than political. Americans don't understand what socialism really is because their culture dictates that socialism is anti-american. But, if americans want a prosperous age again, they have look beyond the common knowledge.
References:
[1]. http://economics.csusb.edu/studentsAlumni/Coyote%20Economist%20Spring%202015.pdf
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