Los Angeles Times
September 26, 2004
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Whether President Bush is reelected or Sen.
John F. Kerry prevails, the United States will be the most conservative
developed nation in the world. Its economy will remain the least regulated, its
welfare state the smallest, its military the strongest and its citizens the most
religious. According to data taken from the World Values Survey in the last
decade, 60% of Americans believe that the poor are lazy (only 26% of Europeans
share that view), and 30% believe that luck determines income (54% of Europeans
say so). About 60% of Europeans say the poor are trapped, while only 29% of
Americans believe they are. And roughly 30% of Europeans declare themselves to
be left wing, but only 17% of Americans do.
Why is the U.S. such an
exceptionally conservative nation?
It's tempting to think that American
conservatism is the natural result of exceptional economic mobility in the
country, but the odds of leaving poverty in Europe are higher than those in the
United States , in part because European social democrats enacted national
education policies that do a better job of looking after the poor than local
schools in the U.S. Instead, American conservatism stems from political
stability and ethnic heterogeneity.
The Constitution was designed with
checks to protect private property and to ensure that change happens slowly.
The U.S. elects its representatives by majority vote, which leads politicians
to cater to the voter in the middle, not the poorest. By contrast, proportional
representation in many European countries gives greater voice to politicians who
stand for minority groups like the poor. In most European countries,
proportional representation is also strongly related to spending on social
programs.
The sharp separation of powers in the U.S., as the Federalist
Papers predicted, has reduced the extension of government. Battles between
Congress and the presidency — such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
fights with the Senate in the late 1930s & #8212; have historically stymied the
growth of the welfare state. The powerful, unelected Supreme Court has
supported conservatism at many critical periods in our history. For example, in
the late-19th century, it declared the income tax unconstitutional; in the
1930s, the court ruled that the New Deal was unlawful; and in 2000, it
intervened to decide the presidential election. The nation's federalist
structure, furthermore, limits states' welfare spending because they fear the
flight of capital and wealthy residents.
One doesn't need to embrace
Beardian conspiracy theories to believe that the Constitution was designed to
limit the central government's ability to extract resources from wealthy
citizens. As a result, it has succeeded in checking the rise of an American
socialist state while all the larger countries in continental Europe have
socialism-friendly political institutions.
It wasn't always so. At the
start of the 20th century, the U.S. looked progressive compared with Europe's
empir es. The big difference between the U.S. and Europe is that the U.S.
kept its 18th century Constitution, while most European countries discarded
theirs. In a wave of revolutions and quasi-revolutionary general strikes,
European countries, one by one, replaced their older conservative constitutions
with ones often designed by socialist or labor leaders.
Some small
nations introduced proportional representation before World War I in response to
uprisings that threatened their governments' stability, but the war was a
watershed for great powers like Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary. These
nations' armies had traditionally checked militant labor unrest, just as in the
United States, but during World War I, mass mobilizations and steady
demoralization broke the armies' will to fire on rioters. As the armies'
policing power vanished, empires were upended by left-wing revolutions. The new
constitutions of these countries were written by socialist leaders like
Friedrich Ebert, who were determined to craft in stitutions, like proportional
representation, that would entrench socialist power. France had a constitution
drafted by a socialist-heavy group, but this had to wait until after its defeat
in World War II.
By contrast, the U.S. has not lost a war on its home
soil and thus has never faced the internal disruptions caused by such a
collapse. The U.S. military and private armies, like Pinkerton's, have always
been able to subdue agitators, such as the Homestead, Pa., strikers who faced
off against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 and the jobless World War I veterans who
marched to Washington in 1932 to ask for their bonus, and were dispersed —
with swords drawn — by Army troops.
The nation's racial
heterogeneity also partly explains its conservatism. U.S. heterogeneity
sharply contrasts with the much greater homogeneity in Canada, Britain and
continental Europe. People are much less likely to support income
redistribution to people who are members of different racial or ethnic groups.
Ethnic di visions make it easier for the enemies of welfare to vilify the poor,
by making them seem like parasites who could be rich but prefer to live on the
public dollar. The pro-redistribution populists were defeated in the South in
the 1890s by politicians who stressed that populism would help blacks (which was
true) and that blacks were dangerous criminals (which was not.) The enemies of
Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society also employed racial messages that conveyed
the idea that welfare recipients were dangerous outsiders who should not be
helped. The sharp racial division that runs through American society makes it
possible to castigate poor people in a way that would be impossible in a
homogeneous nation like Sweden, where the poor look the same as everyone
else.
Across countries, ethnic heterogeneity strongly predicts a smaller
welfare state. The U.S. states with larger populations of blacks have
historically been less generous to the poor (even controlling for state per
capita income). Work by Erzo Lut tmer, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government, shows that people who live around poor people of their own races say
they want the government to spend more on welfare. But people who live around
poor people of another race say they want the government to spend less on
welfare. Sympathy for the poor appears to be muted when the poor are seen as
outsiders.
Increased immigration to Europe is making those societies
more heterogeneous, and we have already seen opponents of social welfare, such
as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria and Pim Fortuyn in the
Netherlands, use inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric to discredit generous
welfare payments. We may like to believe that human beings are colorblind, but
the reality is that American diversity has always made redistribution less
popular here than in more ethnically and racially homogeneous places.