"The standards for "developed nation" are rapidly changing" - translation, Europe has moved to the left, so the US should as well. Not all change is good. Europe politics has created a ton of problems that the left-leaning media will not talk about.
Europe hasn't moved to the left at all - in fact, it's been quite the reverse (look at the austerity measures they've been pushing since the financial crisis). Besides, if you're thinking about it in terms of "left" and "right" then you're living in the past - it's not about political dogma, it's about improving peoples' lives. Sure, Europe does have problems, but none of those policies have anything to do with them.
Let's take Britain as an example. The National Health Service was founded in 1948 - nearly 70 years ago, and only 3 years after WW2 ended! It's not 'new', and the idea of guaranteed universal healthcare is not just theoretical but actually exists. People have been born and lived to a ripe old age in Britain without ever knowing a time where professional healthcare was something you might not have access to.
Access to higher education was guaranteed with the Education Act 1962, which mandated grants to cover tuition fees for those who could not afford them. That's kind of misleading though, since the government had already been doing that since the end of WW2; that law just cemented it in place.
The UK also introduced Statutory Sick Pay in the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992. The USA later introduced a comparable law (Family and Medical Leave Act 1993), but only guaranteed the employee couldn't be fired - it didn't provision for any family or medical leave to be paid.
So these are not really new policies. Most of them predate the EU. They are not to blame for things like the sovereign debt crisis (Germany, for example, offers all of these things and wasn't in the debt-crisis Greece or Italy were in), the refugee crisis, or anything like that. I can't think of any major problems any of these policies have caused in Europe.
The USA needs somebody like Tony Blair to snap them out of this ideology fetish. His legacy has been destroyed by the Iraq war, but in most other respects he was a groundbreaking politician:
Tony Blair in 2001 said:
Our values are the right ones for this age: the power of community, solidarity, the collective ability to further the individual's interests.
People ask me if I think ideology is dead. My answer is:
In the sense of rigid forms of economic and social theory, yes.
The 20th century killed those ideologies and their passing causes little regret. But, in the sense of a governing idea in politics, based on values, no. The governing idea of modern social democracy is community. Founded on the principles of social justice. That people should rise according to merit not birth; that the test of any decent society is not the contentment of the wealthy and strong, but the commitment to the poor and weak.
But values aren't enough. The mantle of leadership comes at a price: the courage to learn and change; to show how values that stand for all ages, can be applied in a way relevant to each age.
Our politics only succeed when the realism is as clear as the idealism.
The USA still lives in terms of "rigid forms of economic and social theory" - the idea that you either have unbridled free-market capitalism or totally centrally-planned Marxism, and that there is no "third way". Somebody needs to wake the country up to the idea of
realism.
