Social Democracy as the Politics of White Supremacy

Early 20th century progressive authors were explicitly and avowedly racist and eugenist. We don't have to alter their quotations or invent untraceable connections to agrarian poets to claim this. They were up front. 

For instance, Keynes was the director of the Eugenics Society of London and the treasurer of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society. Many of the policies which soi-disant progressives advocate today, they used to advocate for quite different explicit purposes. For instance, in the early 20th century, they advocated using minimum wage laws because they hoped such laws would disemploy and starve the people and races they regarded as undesirable. In the mid-twentieth century, when intellectuals stopped championing racism as a mark of good scientific sense but instead viewed it correctly as moral corrupt, progressives oddly did not change their favored policies; they instead kept advocating the same policies, but switched the arguments. Policies they had once championed because they were racist they now championed in opposition to racism. 

Now, to be clear, I don't think many modern-day progressives are secretly racist. I do think many of them believe they care about racism more than they in fact do, and, further, that many of them co-opt legitimate anti-racist sentiments in order to promote their narrow self-interest at the expense of social justice. And, of course, progressives in power frequently create and impose rules and social structures which harm blacks and Latinos.

We commonly hear today that a structure can be racist if it promotes racist outcomes, even if the people defending that structure do not intend to promote those racist outcomes, and even if the people in fact intend to promote anti-racist outcomes. 

If so, then by that reasoning, social democracy is a political system which maintains and reinforces white supremacy. The argument is simple: Empirical work on immigration overwhelming shows that free immigration would greatly benefit the world's poorest people (who tend to be people of color), and would more strongly equalize world incomes than either internal or cross-national redistribution. It's not even a close comparison. (See, e.g., this piece.) 

Social democracy is not a kinder, gentler form of capitalism, one that shares and spreads the wealth. Rather, social democracy serves the rich. It mostly provides social insurance to help the rich insulate themselves from some of the risks of markets. It “spreads the wealth” not the poor, but from the very rich to the merely rich. The amount of genuine redistribution is small.

If we want to help the genuinely poor, we would strongly favor open borders and rules which foster increased world-wide economic growth over the fortress welfare states. We would weakly favor international redistribution over the kind of internal redistribution we see (in surprisingly small amounts) in Sweden, Denmark, or the US. Social democracies may be the best places to live right now. That should not blind us to how close-border welfare states hurt the world’s poor and help perpetuate global poverty and inequality.