If Liberals are so smart why do they lose so goddam always?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Another key factor IMO is there was no American leader that ever tried to take us truly left. FDR is vilified by many on the right for introducing a number of social welfare reforms, but the truth is FDR probably more than any other man of the 20th century insured that socialism would never have political sway in the United States. Most likely given his popularity if FDR had been more of a David Lloyd George type the entire country's Overton Window would be much further left now, probably as much as Canada's. At the same time some of that goes back to land--the radical branch of Liberal party politics Lloyd George emerged from had as a major focus land ownership reform--a hallmark of leftist policy, and there was just never any serious need for that in the United States. We have lots of land and it was historically usually quite cheap.

The counter example though is Canada. Lots of land but the CCF was born on the prairies. Right in the heart of where the available land is located.  Left-wing politics appealed to the farmers. Which is I think dramatically different from what happened in your country.

Eh, the Democratic Farmer-Labor movement was huge in the late 19th/early 20th century.

[Josquius]

The clue is right there. Because there are more than 2 parties, the centrist Liberal party can claim to be paty of moderates, seeing off challenges from both the left and the right. The problem the Democrats face is that they have no such leftwing equivalent. So they need to create one by disowning/throwing out the progressives from their party. By doing, they stand to gain more than they lose. Because right now, many Republicans think the progessives in the Democratic party ARE the party. By splitting into two, they can at least show waverers they are not the same.

This is a terrible idea. I don't even know where to start.

The success of the Liberal Party of Canada is quite an outlier though around the world.  Name me one country with a large "centrist" party that wins a lot of elections.

In the UK the rise of Labour quickly ate into the support for the centrist Liberals, who themselves are now the third party after merging to form the LibDems.

Maybe a product of Canada doing pretty well this past decade?
I'd say it did used to be the case in the UK sort of, with every party fighting for the centre, the tories only finally winning an election when they abandoned their unpopular right wing policy and elected a Blair clone as leader, entering into a coalition with the lib dems with the help of the global economic crisis.
They then gradually drove the country into the ground which helped to make politics far more divided again.

The Liberal party dominance in Canada has occurred for many many decades. 

You miss my point.
The point isn't it has suddenly happened in Canada, rather that it survived in Canada where 2008 killed it elsewhere.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I also kinda think Canada and the United States are a lot closer in terms of how much leftism they adopted than many might think. For the obvious reasons, healthcare stands out as being of paramount importance. However, it is mostly a "historical fluke" that the United States didn't adopt some national healthcare system in the 1940s, politically speaking there wasn't much difference on that topic between the United States and Canada, or other Western countries.

To the point think about this--in the election of 1948 Harry S. Truman promised that if he was re-elected he would pass a national health plan. And his opponent Thomas Dewey? He promised if he was elected...he would pass some form of national health plan. Literally both party Presidential candidates (one of them a sitting President) were running with that as part of their platform, and Truman obviously won.

There was basically just a really savvy lobbying push by the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association that killed the legislation--and at the time it actually was not a big deal, that's something that is often somewhat forgotten historically. When most Western countries passed these plans, healthcare just wasn't the big deal it is today. That isn't to say people's health wasn't a big deal, but rather that health spending as a total percentage of GDP was fairly small for a host of reasons--chief among them less specialization in the medical field, fewer advanced treatments for serious disease, fewer long term chronic diseases with expensive treatment regiments etc. Additionally because of the WWII era wage freeze, the vast majority of employers, blue collar and white collar, were offering very generous health plans at the time, and thus it was seen as not that big of a problem.

Add about 40 years to the timeline and you get to the 1980s where most blue collar workers no longer have a union and are now employed by "race to the bottom" employers in terms of employee compensation and benefits, and health care as a percentage of GDP has soared in cost, and suddenly it's a huge fucking problem. And then you start getting hardcore ideological antithesis to public healthcare among the right, largely fueled by a mixture of genuine anti-government sentiment on the right and obviously the massive pocketbooks of the vested special interests. In that climate it would be difficult for any country to nationalize their health system.

I'm a lot rustier on my Canadian history than I should be, but aside from healthcare wasn't Canada a lot closer to the American model in the mid-20th century than say, the British? I.e. I don't think Canada had all these nationalized pet industries that the government was running essentially as some sort of convoluted scheme to keep people employed in various industries (i.e. British Coal, Iron & Steel, Railways, Airways etc etc.) But maybe they did, as I say I am not as up to date on my Canadian political history as I ought be.

[Berkut]

That is interesting.

I've always thought public healthcare was no different, really, then public education. A rich society like ours can afford to have pretty much as much of either as they choose to pay for. We chose to pay for public education, and that isn't at all controversial anymore (if it ever was?). We argue about the details, sure, but nobody serious actually advocates for getting rid of public schools or privatizing state university systems.

But the same thing is true - we started public education when it was relatively inexpensive to do so. Most people didn't go to school beyond 6th or 8th grade, and the cost of those schools was low (a building, some books, and some poorly paid female teachers) since in many places the rural nature of that nation meant that there was no need for large, multi-room schools with staffs and overhead, much less sophisticated curriculums.

It's funny how much of our "ideology" is really just entrenched historical chance.

[ulmont]

Interesting

How did the 60s turn farmers from socialist into reactionaries?

Let's ask Lyndon Baines Johnson from 1964, after signing the Civil Rights Act:  "We have lost the South for a generation."

...in retrospect, he was an optimist.

[crazy canuck]

Interesting

How did the 60s turn farmers from socialist into reactionaries?

It's a good question. Same thing seems to have happened in Canada.

I think that happened later.  Saskatchewan and Manitoba particularly.  Alberta as always is an outlier and because of oil and the social credit movement in that province.

But we may be getting closer to the answer - religion and the rise of the religious right as access to abortion became an issue in this country. 

But that still does not explain what happened a couple decades earlier in the US.

[Sheilbh]

I'm a lot rustier on my Canadian history than I should be, but aside from healthcare wasn't Canada a lot closer to the American model in the mid-20th century than say, the British? I.e. I don't think Canada had all these nationalized pet industries that the government was running essentially as some sort of convoluted scheme to keep people employed in various industries (i.e. British Coal, Iron & Steel, Railways, Airways etc etc.) But maybe they did, as I say I am not as up to date on my Canadian political history as I ought be.

Just on the British comparison - I think Britain is an outlier though because I think we are probably the country that came closest to trying full-blown democratic socialism.

Labour leaders at the time all deeply believed in a planned economy. There's the welfare state which, in the UK, was universal and non-contributory and covered a lot, plus nationalising about 20% of the economy (in particular the "commanding heights" of steel, rail, coal). At the time there was always a sense that crises - balance of payments, Korea, the winter of 1947 etc - meant they couldn't build the planned economy as they wanted because they had to respond to events which always made it challenging. But that was absolutely the intent.

But also the big difference between the US and Canada with the rest of the democratic world is that you weren't re-building from war. Labour in the UK believed in a planned economy in the 40s - but they also believed it was essential for Britain's recovery from the war and it was, in large part, based on Britain's wartime command economy (the NHS is arguably the longest lasting legacy of that wartime, centralised, command economy, rationed system). That also goes for almost every other European country - whether it's Enarques running big companies and government cooperatively, or cooperation between employers and workers, or pillarised institutions. I think all of them have their roots in the need to reconstruct and rebuild their countries after the war. The US and Canada do not have that experience of more or less year zero.

I also know far less about Canada but that point is a bit of a mythical golden age for the US economically. It's the mass consumption economy. While in Europe it's aperiod of building various forms of mixed economies to rebuild, because there was a sense that could not be left to the market (as it had been in the inter-war period).  While also trying to contain political risks: communism on the one hand and fascism on the other. The models vary but that challenge, I don't think, existed in the US or Canada. In the US it's the triumph of New Deal economic model and politics until Reagan rather than something new starting after 1945.

[crazy canuck]

I also kinda think Canada and the United States are a lot closer in terms of how much leftism they adopted than many might think. For the obvious reasons, healthcare stands out as being of paramount importance. However, it is mostly a "historical fluke" that the United States didn't adopt some national healthcare system in the 1940s, politically speaking there wasn't much difference on that topic between the United States and Canada, or other Western countries.

To the point think about this--in the election of 1948 Harry S. Truman promised that if he was re-elected he would pass a national health plan. And his opponent Thomas Dewey? He promised if he was elected...he would pass some form of national health plan. Literally both party Presidential candidates (one of them a sitting President) were running with that as part of their platform, and Truman obviously won.

There was basically just a really savvy lobbying push by the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association that killed the legislation--and at the time it actually was not a big deal, that's something that is often somewhat forgotten historically. When most Western countries passed these plans, healthcare just wasn't the big deal it is today. That isn't to say people's health wasn't a big deal, but rather that health spending as a total percentage of GDP was fairly small for a host of reasons--chief among them less specialization in the medical field, fewer advanced treatments for serious disease, fewer long term chronic diseases with expensive treatment regiments etc. Additionally because of the WWII era wage freeze, the vast majority of employers, blue collar and white collar, were offering very generous health plans at the time, and thus it was seen as not that big of a problem.

Add about 40 years to the timeline and you get to the 1980s where most blue collar workers no longer have a union and are now employed by "race to the bottom" employers in terms of employee compensation and benefits, and health care as a percentage of GDP has soared in cost, and suddenly it's a huge fucking problem. And then you start getting hardcore ideological antithesis to public healthcare among the right, largely fueled by a mixture of genuine anti-government sentiment on the right and obviously the massive pocketbooks of the vested special interests. In that climate it would be difficult for any country to nationalize their health system.

I'm a lot rustier on my Canadian history than I should be, but aside from healthcare wasn't Canada a lot closer to the American model in the mid-20th century than say, the British? I.e. I don't think Canada had all these nationalized pet industries that the government was running essentially as some sort of convoluted scheme to keep people employed in various industries (i.e. British Coal, Iron & Steel, Railways, Airways etc etc.) But maybe they did, as I say I am not as up to date on my Canadian political history as I ought be.

Canadian Crown corporations actively involved involved in the economy were a  key feature of our history and did not start to be privatized into roughly the 80s.

In some sectors we have realized that was a mistake.

[Grey Fox]

Interesting

How did the 60s turn farmers from socialist into reactionaries?

It's a good question. Same thing seems to have happened in Canada.

I think that happened later.  Saskatchewan and Manitoba particularly.  Alberta as always is an outlier and because of oil and the social credit movement in that province.

But we may be getting closer to the answer - religion and the rise of the religious right as access to abortion became an issue in this country. 

But that still does not explain what happened a couple decades earlier in the US.

The unionization of Eastern farmers and the continuation of wheat board contributed to turning Western farmers into reactionary from the failures of their Social credit movement. Also influx of post-communism immigrants.

[crazy canuck]

Interesting

How did the 60s turn farmers from socialist into reactionaries?

Let's ask Lyndon Baines Johnson from 1964, after signing the Civil Rights Act:  "We have lost the South for a generation."

...in retrospect, he was an optimist.

That explains the South, but what explains farmers in Northern States?

[crazy canuck]

Interesting

How did the 60s turn farmers from socialist into reactionaries?

It's a good question. Same thing seems to have happened in Canada.

I think that happened later.  Saskatchewan and Manitoba particularly.  Alberta as always is an outlier and because of oil and the social credit movement in that province.

But we may be getting closer to the answer - religion and the rise of the religious right as access to abortion became an issue in this country. 

But that still does not explain what happened a couple decades earlier in the US.

The unionization of Eastern farmers and the continuation of wheat board contributed to turning Western farmers into reactionary from the failures of their Social credit movement. Also influx of post-communism immigrants.

That's a good point.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Canadian Crown corporations actively involved involved in the economy were a  key feature of our history and did not start to be privatized into roughly the 80s.

In some sectors we have realized that was a mistake.

That's interesting, I'll have to read more on them when I get a chance.

[crazy canuck]

One good

Canadian Crown corporations actively involved involved in the economy were a  key feature of our history and did not start to be privatized into roughly the 80s.

In some sectors we have realized that was a mistake.

That's interesting, I'll have to read more on them when I get a chance.

One good case study is the provincial utility crown corps.   Looking at the history of the BC electrical company will give you a good snap shot.

[ulmont]

That explains the South, but what explains farmers in Northern States?

In part industrialization turning farmers into corporations and/or small businessowners, which generally aligned them against low-wage workers such as farm employees.  There are some notes in here regarding California and the Midwest: https://food.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2019_Montenegro-de-Wit-et-al_Agrarian-origins-of-authoritarian-populism-in-the-United-States_-What-canwe-learn-from-20th-century-struggles-in-California-and-the-Midwest_.pdf

[Grey Fox]

Canadian Crown corporations actively involved involved in the economy were a  key feature of our history and did not start to be privatized into roughly the 80s.

In some sectors we have realized that was a mistake.

That's interesting, I'll have to read more on them when I get a chance.

I'm not sure it's wise to fall into this particular well but do check out this history of Bell Canada for a company that had a monopoly for the longest time & still think it has one.