To add to this point, how do you get 45 states, each zealously guarding their rights, to agree to hand over enough power to the federal government in order to establish a centralized, bureaucratic state? How would you even create this state, ignoring constitutionality and local resistance?How do you form a homogenous ethnic-national State from 1900? Yes, of course, but genocide (at home) lies outside the SSM.
As I understand, the Scandinavian Model is a loosey-goosey form of socialism, pretty much where labor gets a built-in seat at the table?What if the USA had the "Scandinavian Economic Model' from 1900?
As I understand, the Scandinavian Model is a loosey-goosey form of socialism, pretty much where labor gets a built-in seat at the table?
The IWW had tons of Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns.How do you form a homogenous ethnic-national State from 1900? Yes, of course, but genocide (at home) lies outside the SSM.
How do you liquidate the immediatist left (IWW, etc) into labourism?
How do you liquidate the anti-labourist bourgeoisie without a general liquidation of existing bourgeois and their replacement with a nomenklatura?
Scaring the US elite sufficiently without replacing them is too damn hard. Even in 1936-1946 labourism wasn’t incorporated institutionally. Honestly I think Big Bill as interim workplace coordinating committee (all-American) is more likely than an agreement by bosses that labourism keeps a lid on class discontent.
What if the USA had the "Scandinavian Economic Model' from 1900?
How would have the US economy be improved or not?
What would the GDP/Income of US citizens be like?
How would this change domestic politics?
What other changes in the USA would be caused by this?
Regards filers
Scaring the US elite sufficiently without replacing them is too damn hard. Even in 1936-1946 labourism wasn’t incorporated institutionally
To add to this point, how do you get 45 states, each zealously guarding their rights, to agree to hand over enough power to the federal government in order to establish a centralized, bureaucratic state? How would you even create this state, ignoring constitutionality and local resistance?
Depends how you define Scandinavian (or Nordic) economic model. I would say you should, for starters, redefine the period from 1950's onwards, as 1900 Scandinavian countries did not have any vestige of the welfare state, or on the contrary.
But it all depends on how do you like the people to conduct their everyday lifes and how would that do with the American ethos? There would be much less rich people and much less poor people?
What party would hope for that? What kind of parties would surface if the voting reached Nordic levels, ca. 75-90%?
Similar development in a country like US is not impossible, but the indegrients, reasons and end result would all be rather different.
One of the key differences the author highlighted was how the Swedish unions and business organizations had evolved something much more like a symbiotic relationship over the first half of the century, while the US union-management relationship was very antagonistic.
This was baked into the NLRB, provided by National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Company Supported Unions, common in Europe and a few in the USA, were now illegal.
The very setup of that new Act made for only adversarial relations between Labor and Management, as well as a blind eye toward corruption and outright criminal control of some Unions(looking at you, Teamsters)
I mean, the fundamentals definitely were there, the US just went in a different direction sometime in the first part of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civic_Federation
I read, some time ago, a paper from perhaps the 1950's that compared the social models of the United States and Sweden and it spent quite a bit of time highlighting the great differences. And this was from a time when most people would think of them as the most comparable! This was before the great liberal swing of the US in the 1980's and 1990's, before the real meaty part of the social democratic swing of the Swedes in the 1970's and 1980's, but they were still quite different. One of the key differences the author highlighted was how the Swedish unions and business organizations had evolved something much more like a symbiotic relationship over the first half of the century, while the US union-management relationship was very antagonistic. The decline and collapse of the NCF in the US is a good place to look for points of departure for a timeline where the US moves in a much more Scandinavian direction. A US where unions are mostly thought of as business partners by employer organizations is going to be much more likely to grow towards the levels of unionization seen in Sweden, for example (the US peaked at ~30 some % in the 1950's, Sweden has been over 80% union for most of the 20th century).
One of the main reasons for the different history of unions in the US stems from the fact that during the first decades of previous century, the unions in Scandinavian were able to create nation-wide organizations that in turn led to creation of nation-wide employer organizations. The result of this consolidation was a political situation that made wide-ranging legislation and negotiations easier.
Taft-Hartley is indeed a watershed - before that, the unionization level in US was comparable to Western European countries that later on developed social models that were often close to the Nordic model.
EDIT: in fact, one of the butterfly of the TL i am writing is a labourist SCotUS who repeal Taft-Hartley on commerce and free-speech clauses and, then, a full unionized welfare state instead of Big Society.
It's been decades since the lecture course about the history of labour unions in the US, so these are more personal views than carefully studied facts. But in my view the forces that were arrayed against unionizing in the US were both formidable and influential. The wider geopolitical situation also had a strong effect to the political atmosphere in the US. I'd go as far as argue that WW1 and its aftermath were the primary reasons for Taft-Hartley. Without the wartime and postwar repressions, the wider labour movement would have had better chances to consolidate themselves and most importantly gain enough allies in the Congress to secure their position against anti-union legislation.May I ask your palusibility check / WI about this: - a labourist SCotUS who repeal Taft-Hartley on commerce and free-speech clauses and, then, a full unionized welfare state instead of Big Society.