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U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney recently released a bold proposal for a cash family benefit that breaks with decades of Republican Party orthodox: markets good, government bad. Romneys proposal has sparked an extensive debate about how best to design a family benefit, with the Biden administration releasing a rival plan.

The policy world will fight over the merits of these different bills. But together they register a shift in the public debate about the U.S. welfare state. What Romneys proposal embodies is essentially an effort to remodel the American welfare stateand, by extension, the Republican Partyalong the lines of European Christian democracy.

Romneys Family Security Act would provide a monthly cash benefit of $350 for young children and $250 for school-aged children, paid by the Social Security Administration. Families would be eligible for the benefit up to four months before their childs due date. To create this benefit, Romney proposes eliminating the targeted anti-poverty program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); the Earned Income Tax Credit, a means-tested tax credit that varies depending on the size of your family; and the State and Local Tax Deduction, which largely benefits better-off voters in states that regularly vote Democrat.

Children and family benefits are a staple of European welfare states. But while much of what we associate with the European welfare state was built by robust labor movements and allied social democratic parties, family benefits are a legacy of Christian democracy. Germanys child benefit system was created in the 1950s under Christian Democratic Union head Konrad Adenauers leadership, while Frances was shaped by the Christian democratic Popular Republican Movement in the postwar provisional government.

This reflects an underappreciated fact about conservative visions of the free market: The market is often imagined as a meeting place of the heads of families rather than of isolated individuals. When then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared that theres no such thing as society, she added that there are individual men and women and there are families. From Edmund Burke to Joseph Schumpeter, conservative thinkers argued that the family created, for its (male) leader, a sense of responsibility and a longer time horizon, things capitalism needs but cannot itself create. Thus, government financial support for families would complement, not undermine, a market order. Family benefits could establish the family as the key mediating institution between the state and the market, as opposed to socialist demands for politicizing wage labor. Romneys plan is summoning this conservative attitude.

Yet family benefits have also had more troubling associations with natalismthe idea that the government has a responsibility to ensure a certain birth rate. As a result, family benefit proposals were often greeted with caution by more left-wing parties, which were reluctant to focus social policy around expanding the size of families. Where social democrats were in power, the question of family benefits created unease. For example, in Sweden, the debate over family policies was sparked by an influential book Crisis in the Population Question, by Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal (co-recipient of the first Nobel Prize in economics). Their argument mixed egalitarian concerns about supporting families with an explicit focus on the importance of a high birth rate for economic growth and national defense. Even as the Swedish Social Democratic Party embraced the need to expand material support for the worst-off in society, they worried about treating the family as just another economic variable.

Nonetheless, the overlap between conservative concerns about the family and liberal and socialist worries about poverty marks family policy as an important arena of cross-ideological welfare state building.Could the same be true in the United States? Given the surprisingly warm welcome for Romneys plan from a variety of ideological corners, and President Joe Bidens similar plan, there are some early signs pointing to yes. But Romneys plan or a similar family proposal would not just mark an expansion of social welfare benefits in the United Statesit could also mark a more fundamental shift in the structure of the U.S. welfare state.

Why doesnt the United States have a European-style welfare state? This has been the topic of perennial academic debate going back to Werner Sombarts 1906 work Why is there No Socialism in the United States? Even compared to its relatively market-oriented liberal peers like the United Kingdom, the United States has always stood out for its underdeveloped social safety net. The development of social policies in the United States has always been constrained by a toxic brew of racism, federalism, and constitutional barriers to enacting ambitious political programs. Given the associations of welfare and race, the American poor relief state is miserly and means-tested. Federalism means that programs are run by states with incentives to gut them and divert federal funds elsewhere. Legislative gridlock incentivized politicians to disguise government programs as tax cuts, which are easier to pass.

A federal family benefit would strike at all three pathologies of the U.S. welfare state. Few programs embody the destructive combination of race and federalism as much as TANF. American family policies have always been stigmatized because of the association between welfare and race. The-President Bill Clintons 1996 welfare reform bill, which created TANF, was the product of decades of sexist and racist moral panic about welfare queenssupposedly undeserving Black mothers taking advantage of hard-working Americans. Clintons reform both transferred responsibility for family relief to the states and enabled states to introduce work requirements and other administrative burdens for those seeking assistance. The result is a tattered safety net for Americas poorest citizens.

By eliminating TANF and replacing it with a much more generous program that will also serve middle-class recipients, a monthly cash family benefit would prove more politically sustainable. For the past several decades, the policy consensus in the United States has been that targeted programs avoid what is termed upward redistribution toward less needy middle-class recipients. But even if the spending is less targeted, the broader political support can mean the program will be more generous. By creating a broader constituency of beneficiaries, more inclusive programs tend to be more redistributive and more sustainable over the long run.

Most significantly, Romney proposes eliminating a welfare program disguised as a tax cut, turning it into a straightforward cash benefit. This has caused the most backlash from his fellow Republicans. Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee attacked Romneys idea for turning tax relief for working parents into welfare assistance. From the perspective of a familys budget, this is all semantics. But it has political significance. Americans tend to believe they are not receiving any government benefits even when they are, leading to Americas peculiar submerged state, in the expert Suzanne Mettlers phrase. And this is because, as the political scientist Jacob Hacker shows, the U.S. welfare state has been built through backdoor tax rebates rather than direct benefits.

A federal child benefit, paid in cash each month, could do more than just lift millions of Americans out of poverty. It could also more fundamentally shift Americans attitudes toward the welfare state. The political scientist Ethan Porter recently gathered a great deal of evidence that Americans can become much less anti-government than commonly thought. Rather than being straightforwardly anti-government, they want to feel like they are getting a good deal. Having a cash benefit hit their bank account every month would encourage such a feeling. Yet Romneys plan may also be cunning in securing a conservative welfare state equilibrium, where popular government programs are focused on strong families rather than strong unions and workers protections.

Along with organizations like the never Trump think tank the Niskanen Center, Romneys proposal reflects the rise of a broader welfare-state-curious tendency on the U.S. right. After a decade of slow growth and rising inequality, American political debate has shifted markedly toward the value of government intervention in the economy and society. Given the divides within the Republican Party, it will be up to a Democratic presidency to embody that shift in new policies. Romney has a knack for crafting the landmark policies of Democratic presidencies, and his family benefit may be no exception.

Continue reading here:
Mitt Romney and Other US Conservatives Are Finally Learning to Love the Welfare State - Foreign Policy

Meghan McCain delivered a heated argument on this mornings episode ofThe Viewin defense of her political party, but her comments left plenty of viewers scratching their heads. During todays Hot Topics segment, McCain chimed in with her own views on cancel culture, abortion, and socialism in a conversation about Donald Trumps impeachment acquittal, and ended her speech with an exasperated plea.

When asked by her co-host Whoopi Goldberg about her response to Trumps acquittal, McCain explained that she had a lot of different thoughts, but launched into a comparison between the two parties. I think its easy to say that the Republican party is only the party of QAnon and all these things, she began. If thats the truth, then the Democratic party is the party of socialism, and late-term abortion, and cancel culture, and no responsibility or ramifications for any of your actions, and you can burn down cities like Kenosha and its finethese are broad stroke platitudes.

She continued, I dont believe either are true. I dont think Republicans are simply QAnon supporters, I dont think Democrats are simply socialists. McCain then cautioned against shaming the crazy, QAnon Trump supporters into non-existence, citing recent polls showing high approval ratings for Trump, despite his second impeachment. As much as the left wants to act like Republicans are only QAnon supporters, part of the problem is for someone like me, when I hear that I automatically get very tribal and Im like, Well, I dont want the left, because for me I am the most intensely pro-life person that I know of, particularly on mainstream TV.

I believe that abortion is murder, I believe that life begins at conception, and I know that the opposite party says that, Oh, theres some people that dont agree with me, that think that its different, that abortions should happen up to late term,' she continued. So I think the idea that the Republican party is one swath, its just not nuanced, and the problem I have is, the only way to become a good Republican is to be become a Democrat, according to the media, and I dont know what to do anymore, because I cant keep coming on TV everyday saying that were all Nazis and you know, Hitler salutes and whatever. Its just not intellectually honest.

After McCains lengthy speech, Goldberg added her own impassioned take in response. The Republicans have brought this on themselves. Theyve brought this view of them on themselves, she said, adding, You should be a little uncomfortable, because we sort of went through this and now were going to be going through it again. You brought this on yourself. Youre thought of this way because of what youve shown everybody.

Watch Meghan McCains full speech in the clip above.

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Meghan McCain Says If Republicans are the "Party of QAnon" Then Democrats Are the Party of "Socialism and Late-Term Abortion" -...

Socialism, according to dictionary.com, is defined as: an ideology or system based on the collective, public ownership and control of the resources used to make and distribute goods or provide services.

Is socialism bad or good?

Conservatives rant against the evils of big government. During last Novembers elections, they used fear to warn voters that progressive Democrats would bring in socialism if they won. In most of the U.S. House of Representatives races I researched last fall, that was the common accusation.

These races were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. If properly administered, socialism can be a good thing, as in the case of stopping the spread of a pandemic or avoiding another Great Depression. Last years round of unemployment checks and government payments kept millions of people from dropping below the poverty line and not being able to feed their children or themselves.

Development of the COVID-19 vaccines that could end our isolation and improve the U.S. economy came in great part because the U.S. government worked in cooperation with the pharmaceuticals. President Biden just ordered the manufacture of 200,000,000 more doses. Distribution of vaccines has been organized by the state governments. The vaccine is free.

My wife and I just received a debit cash card with $1200 on it as part of the second round of financial aid authorized by both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress and signed by the previous president. All of you either have received or will soon receive similar cash cards.

If you object to socialism, perhaps you should send it back, unless of course, it means you can now feed your family or fix your car or pay your rent or mortgage.

People are now getting vaccinated based upon priorities determined by both state and federal officials. Many are clamoring to be able to get their shots as soon as possible, complaining that their group is being forgotten or ignored. In a news article in our local paper, one woman complained that people over 70 were being bumped by teachers in the order of priority for shots. Perhaps they are, but someone has to set those priorities based upon the common good. Perhaps the importance of getting our children back into school is a higher priority to help the economy overall than the impatience of a few individuals. Making those life and death decisions is never easy, or often appreciated

All of these actions can be defined as socialism.

Small businesses have now received federal and state grants to keep their employees working and their businesses open. Most of those business owners are conservative.

So, is all this government aid a bad thing or a good thing?

Conservatives might respond by saying that the state government has put too many restrictions on the movement and actions of its citizens, using the pandemic as an excuse to gain control of power.

In some cases, they may be correct. Its difficult to make good decisions under a great deal of pressure, but the overall concern has been to save lives and return the economy to normality as soon as possible. Mask wearing is promoted for the common good, whether or not you object to your individual rights being violated. Its not only about you.

For those of you who listened to conservative candidates who told you to avoid electing socialists to office, did those conservatives speak out of concern for you, or did they accuse progressives, using fear to manipulate you into voting for them?

Socialism is not good for people if it causes them to avoid working hard and being independent. Its not good if it takes away some freedoms that are necessary for a properly functioning society. As in all major issues, we as individuals and our government officials must seek a balance between individual rights and the common good, between the freedom that capitalism offers versus helping those who dont have the capacity to take care of themselves.

COVID-19 should have taught us the necessity of socialism in keeping a society functioning in times of health catastrophes and economic downturns. Socialism is not all bad in the midst of crises. Think of vaccines, unemployment checks, and federal debit cards the next time you consider the evils of socialism.

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Socialism and COVID-19 | In Focus - Enumclaw Courier-Herald

Labour stands a long way from power, with a leadership off chasing the will o the wisp of phony patriotism authentic values alignment, in the horrible consultant-speak of the day while the crisis in the country deepens. In the absence of real opposition, the worst government in living memory coasts along at 40% in the opinion polls. With Covid, climate change and economic calamity, the future can look bleak.

But it doesnt have to be that way. Up and down the country, Labour is in power in many local authorities. We are going to have to fight hard to preserve this in the May local elections, with so little vision and leadership at the top and the Tories counting on a vaccine bounce. Unless something changes, the only tools and powers we have at our disposal are at the local level. We must use them. Its time to make the Covid recovery a new era of municipal socialism.

This is partly where our movement began. Sidney Webb, the Fabian thinker, was among six socialists elected to the London County Council in the 1892 elections. Of the first hundred Fabian pamphlets published between 1884 and 1900, 43 were about local government. In What About The Rates?, Webbs 1913 tract on the financial autonomy of municipalities, he argued for a socialist strategy for local government. We, as socialists, much cherish local government, he wrote, and aim always at its expansion, not its contraction.

Municipal socialism was a deliberate process of shifting ownership and power whilst raising local living standards something we in the Labour Party could learn from again, as we struggle with the need to balance long-term economic change with delivering immediate real benefits for ordinary people. Municipal socialism was a means of using local political and economic success to build further success, expanding socialist strategy both horizontally, to other municipalities and sectors, and vertically, to larger enterprises and services, and higher levels of government. It both blazed the trail and laid the pathway for national-level economic and political change.

Today we are back in a situation akin to that of the municipal socialists. Like theirs, our methods public ownership, local control, self-help and mutual aid are those required to chart a path through the pandemic and economic crisis and to confront the looming climate emergency. We must harness the available powers of local government to rebuild our shattered economies and our communities. Local government should be our most democratic and accountable level of government and it can be again, if we work to take it back.

This will not be easy. To begin with, local government powers have been eviscerated by 40 years of neoliberal rule and available resources slashed through central government cuts to council budgets. And the Labour Party itself is too often full of know-nothings and naysayers at the local level, people who claim that nothing can be done and are all too quick to fall into line delivering Tory austerity.

But difficulty is not the same as impossibility. We can see this in the innovative approaches being taken by an emerging generation of visionary political leaders at the local level in Labour councils and local authorities up and down the country. These include Jamie Driscoll in North of Tyne, Jan Williamson in Wirral, Paul Dennett in Salford, Joe Cullinane in North Ayrshire, and last but not least Matthew Brown in Preston, and many more.

These leaders are all pursuing innovative strategies municipal ownership, mutual aid, community organising, community wealth building, participatory budgeting, local Green New Deals to improve their local economies and communities and the lives of their residents. They show what can be done even under constrained conditions and during a pandemic and economic crisis. There is no reason why we cant build on these examples to create a new era of municipal socialism from the bottom up no reason except political will and the need to organise to build political power.

Nobody is coming to save us. But we dont need to wait for help from outside. Instead, we can get to work ourselves, building the local economies we want and need, starting from our base in local government. At a time when national politics is failing us, we should return to our roots and re-hoist the banner of municipal socialism in Britain.

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Lets see the Covid recovery bring in a new era of municipal socialism - LabourList

(Left to right: Andrew T Warman; courtesy of Marian Jones)

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Sarah Leonard and Marian Jones met at the Democratic Socialists of Americas socialist-feminist reading group (held in The Nations conference room!) in 2017, after Donald Trumps election prompted a surge in membership in the 40-year-old organization. Now, along with several other editors and an art director, they are members of the Lux collective, named for the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. The first issue of its print magazine hits mailboxes this month. I spoke with Leonard and Jones about the future of left feminism, solidarity versus sisterhood, and why Lux is a glossy.

Emily Douglas

ED: Your mission statement argues that girlboss ideology has failed. Why did feminists let go of girlboss ideology?

SL: The girlboss model just doesnt work for most people. The way American inequality looks now, there are a few people at the top, then those peoples lawyers and doctors, and then theres a massive gap, and then theres everybody else. The aspirational character of girlboss-ism is not as true to peoples lives at this point, if it ever was.

ED: Is Lux trying to elevate womens class consciousness?

MJ: There were periods within the feminist movement when people would try to adopt the slogan Sisterhood is powerful and [the idea that] were all in this together, but Black women and other women of color felt like their own needs were getting erased. One of the ways that Black feminists have historically pushed back on sisterhood is the idea that were all victims of the same thing. If youre a white woman, solidarity calls on you to be aware of the way that youre victimized by white supremacy, but also of the way that youre complicit in it.

SL: As feminists, we think in terms of solidarity rather than sisterhood, because we dont necessarily think theres anything organic about all women coming together. You have to build solidarity with intent and build relationships. We refer often in our editorial note to the Combahee River Collective Statement, and one of the reasons we refer to it constantly is that they wereand remain, for that mattervery serious about building points of solidarity with different groups who they had political goals in common with but were different from.Current Issue

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This magazine is designed to be part of that project. We imagine a particular kind of constituency thats made up of all of these solidarities that are feminist, abolitionist, queer, and socialist. And to us, that creates an extremely big world, a very big constituency [with] lots of alliances. Different pieces of identity [act] as bridges to other groups rather than barriers.

Womenand Im going to say women, but Im always anxious about hammering too hard on women because we have a very queer and expansive definition of our constituencyare an under-organized constituency. You see that in the fact that this country has an absolute childcare and eldercare crisis. Basically, all of that work is done by women. Everybody knows this as a crisis, and its not a priority anywhere.

ED: For the past decade or more, progressives and leftists have been repositioning issues like abortion, child care, and reproductive health as economic issues. What is still missing from that conversation?

SL: Whenever the Koch brothers put money behind an opponent of abortion and get that person elected, they get a tax cut, because thats what Republicans do. And we pay for that with our bodies and our lives. And to be clear, obviously, the people whose bodies are being sacrificed are poor and working-class women and, disproportionately, women of color.

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Ideas about morality in the family serve capital in very specific ways. All of the things that politicians dont want to pay for, they say, Its a family problem. So, unless we push back against the idea that the nuclear family is the home of all morality, were never going to win on economics.

Why did Sandra Fluke get called a slut? It was to defeat a universal health care program.

ED: The family is always the prop that has to stand in when social policy fails.

SL: Socialist feminists have always been big on problematizing labors of love. [The feminist campaign] Wages for Housework is all about trying to provoke people into thinking: What is love? What is work? When does one disguise the other?

We have this incredible piece in the first issue thats a new translation of a manifesto about abortion from one of the founders of Wages for Housework, Maria Rosa de la Costa. It is just dripping with contempt for the state and its institutions that are so neglectful and unable to support the society and, especially, women and children. And they say things like, We will put as many children on this earth if we want to, but only when we want to. And we want to raise them in beautiful, comfortable circumstances.

So, theyre making a demand, which is that its sort of pathetic to run a society on bare survival. And, in fact, there should be a level of abundance and pleasure and the ability to raise a family however you want. It has a lot in common in with some language of the reproductive justice movement in the States, some years later.

Wages for Housework is pointing out that if women, in their case, in the household were not doing the reproductive labor of cooking, cleaning, having children, the capitalist system would cease to function. It would end. Capitalism owes a debt to all these unwaged workers who are half the population.

ED: You write that Luxs vision of feminism is fighting for a world in which everyone has access to food and shelter, to beauty and pleasure. What excites you about launching a feminist magazine at this moment?

SL: Weve gotten very good at criticizing the inadequacies of the right and certain forms of liberal feminism. We also want to be constructing a vision of what we want. The pieces were working on are all addressing questions that we have about the world we want to live in and the organizing that we are doing. We are very interested in putting forward the idea that the purpose of politics is for people to have a good life. And we should think about what that good life would consist of.

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MJ: There isnt a Lux that already exists. Lux is going to be a really pretty magazineit has to be.

ED: Why is it important to you that Lux looks good?

SL: To me, it was important [that Lux be a glossy] because I grew up reading glossy womens magazines. I wanted to build this thing that I had always enjoyed reading, but fill it with socialism.

Publications on the left often take the form of journals that suggest in their tone or their style that you should already be in the know. I want the opposite of that. I want it to be a gate flung open that people feel free to walk through.

Theres something radical in the strategic pursuit of pleasure. Weve spent decades talking about whether women can have it all, which is actually this kind of depressing idea of working all the time but also doing domestic work all the time. In a sense, it is very unambitious: Can you contort yourself to conform to the unreasonable expectations of this society? One of our taglines is We want it all, with the idea being, if we really want a good life, fundamental things about how our society is structured would have to be transformed.

ED:It sounds like your approach is not just about the look; its also about the kinds of features and content youll be running.

MJ: Ive always been really excited to be involved in a project where the goal is to convert people. Our magazine is definitely for someone who hasnt read Marx yetor any kind of leftist or feminist theorists.

ED: Lux was born out of the connections you made doing political organizing. Do you see it going the other way? Do you intend to use Lux as an organizing tool?

MJ: I really hope for it to be both an organizing and consciousness-raising tool. I think a lot of organizing can come out of reading groups. After you read about all this stuff, youre energized to organize around it. Were all organizers. Were all really connected to the movement. So I definitely hope that we do more political stuff.

SL: Were all volunteering to do Lux as a political project.

MJ: I dont want to use the term labor of love, because we talked about thisI view it as an organizing project.

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The Socialist Glossy That Wants You to Have It All - The Nation