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| The Living Hell of Spain* |
A question I
have posed to American conservatives over the years is fairly simple and
straightforward: can you point to the kind of society you are trying to build
with your policies? This isn’t a trick question but it seems to confound a lot
of people. If the study of economics has taught us a thing it’s that we
should learn from the past (economic history may be the only thing we know
about economics). We have already tried these economic plans being put forth by
modern American conservatives. We didn’t like the world back then and we spent
the better part of the last century working to correct some of the worst flaws
inherent in an unchecked capitalist system. At times Americans literally fought
in the streets of our country to make it a better, more just place to live. A
few more strokes of the pen, a few more regulations rolled back, a little more
power taken away from voters and given to a few wealthy oligarchs and we may
find ourselves right back where we started about 100 years ago.
With Ronald
Reagan conservatives finally had the muscle to turn America around and send us
hurtling back to the days of massive income disparity, insanely low taxes for
our wealthiest elite, and a relatively powerless underclass with increasingly
poor prospects to get ahead. Europe took the other path of increasing its
participation in social welfare programs, higher taxes, and the idea that a
democratically-elected government can solve many of society’s ills. In Ronald
Reagan’s worldview, government wasn’t the solution; it was the problem.
These days it’s hard to find a conservative that has anything good to say about
a government by, for, and of the people.
Can you
point to the kind of society you are trying to build with your policies? For
the most part conservatives tend to avoid this question. They will stutter and
mumble something about back when American had more freedom (oh how they love
the word “freedom”), when the government stayed out of the way of business,
when there were fewer pesky regulations. The problem with this answer is
that we can easily look back and see exactly what our society was like when
government held less sway. For the most part, it was pretty horrible
place to live unless you were rich. If you were to pose the same question to me
I would point to the social democracies of Europe over the past 30 years as an
example of the kind of place where America could take a few pointers.
Even the
most casual glance at most of the countries in Western Europe is enough to
realize that America has a lot to learn from their systems of health care,
public transportation, the integrated use of the bicycle in urban life, low
crime rate and almost complete absence of gun violence, and the strength and
vitality or their middle class. Yet to mention any praise for Europe is
tantamount to treason in American conservative circles. Saying anything the
least bit positive about Europe drives right-wingers crazy. They will
ignore statistics that rate American health care far below that of all European
countries while they point out anecdotal horror stories about someone waiting
for a kidney transplant in France. A single train accident in Germany is
enough for conservatives to completely discount this means of travel which
flies in the face of their core tenets of individualism and freedom (as if
sitting in a traffic jam in your Lexus is freedom). Europe is the enemy
for American conservatives. “France” is simply a conservative code word for
socialist hellhole. Of course, for anyone who has actually bothered to
visit France, one of America’s strongest and oldest allies, it’s plain to see
that it’s one of the most progressive and prosperous countries on the
planet.
America
(along with Britain, for the most part) and Europe have taken two very
different paths since America’s turn towards the ideals of the Chicago School
of Economics coopted by Reagan back in 1980. I was taught these ideals as a
young undergraduate economics major back at Indiana University. I doubt that I
had a single professor who had anything good to say about the role of
government in society. I wonder what those old stuffed-shirts would say
about the comparisons between the privatization
of British Rail since the Thatcher era and the government-backed train systems
in the rest of Europe. My professors motto and rallying cry was that the
private sector was always more efficient and more productive than the public
sector. Of course they were all on the government’s dime as public university
professors but that shouldn’t taint their politics.
The fact
that a person’s personal situation is completely at odds with their ridiculous
libertarian political stance hasn’t seemed to bother too many
conservatives. Ayn Rand accepted Social Security and Medicare after
spending her adult life bad-mouthing government aid. George Will blasts the
Public Broadcast System then praises one of their programs (Baseball by Ken
Burns) as the best thing to air on American TV. Consistent doesn’t seem to
belong in the vocabulary of the American far right. I could name a dozen or so former military
colleagues who went on to Air Force careers yet have taken an anti-government
stance in their politics.
In the
post-Reagan era one thing that certainly wasn’t consistent with American
conservatives’ worldview was the rise of the European social democracies and
their success in addressing a host of issues facing modern society. The
policies of Western Europe were almost directly in contrast to those of the
American right yet Europe wasn’t the socialist hellhole envisioned by Reagan’s
disciples. Many countries in Europe were way ahead of America in dozens
of categories in quality of life indexes. Call it an inconvenient truth.
About the only weapon in the conservatives’ arsenal were anecdotal stories
about how terrible life was in socialist Germany and even more socialist
Finland.
And then
came the 2008 world financial meltdown. Europe has been hit particularly
hard by the tremendous economic downturn—at least most of Europe although
Germany, partly because of better banking laws, came through with flying
colors. With unemployment levels reaching as high as 20% in some
countries American conservatives could finally condemn socialist Europe without
reservation, and condemn it they have. The suffering and misery of Europe
has taken top billing on all of the American right-wing propaganda mills. A
worldwide financial crisis instigated by reckless American banking laws is just
what conservatives needed to feel vindicated in their decades-long war against
the European left. The left’s failure was now plain for everyone to see. What
more proof did people need? There were protests in the streets and the limited
violence was always highlighted on the far-right news broadcasts. Violent
protests! It was too good to be true. Never mind the fact that you could find
more violence in a single Colorado movie theater than in all of the street
protests throughout Europe. Conservatives were claiming “Mission Accomplished.”
Ronald Regan had won!
Americans
conservatives have never had an example of the sort of laissez-faire paradise
they envisioned for themselves by cutting taxes for the hyper-rich and slashing
government regulations and services, but Europe for decades had shown just how
much societies can achieve with the strength of government planning.
Socialized medicine has been flourishing everywhere in Europe while America’s
private system excludes more and more of our citizens. European rail networks join
their cities with trains at speeds of 300 kph while we languish in traffic and
rely on heavy subsidies on gasoline and road construction. Because we
have allowed the private sector to dictate much of our urban planning (if you
can call it that) we lag decades behind the path to sustainability sought by
the urban centers of Europe where “sprawl” hardly enters the vocabulary.
But now
conservatives are certain that the grand example of the left is failing.
That is more important than the fact that conservatives still don’t have a
workable model for their ideas outside of Ayn Rand novels and the fantasies of
Milton Friedman. It also doesn’t matter that the United States is in full
economic crisis (they blame Obama), nor the fact that we had a much stronger economy
to begin with. From the news outlets dominated by the right you would think
that Europe is on the brink of total anarchy, that it is only a matter of time
before some sort of world war erupts again, that people will be slaughtering
each other in the streets as they fight over the last loaves of bread.
There is one
huge flaw in the thinking of American conservatives: things aren’t that bad in
Europe. Sure, unemployment here in Spain is at record levels and things aren’t
exactly rosy in Greece, Italy, and Portugal. But the Spanish have survived a
hell of lot tougher times than these and they will survive this crisis without
abandoning the social welfare network they have built in the last 30 years. No
one, and I mean no one has mentioned abandoning their excellent health care
system that covers every last citizen in the country. People here even rejected
a modest co-pay for doctor visits (something I actually favor). They rejected a
proposal to charge long-term hospital patients for meals. National health
care is in the Spanish Constitution and for them it is as important as gun
rights are for Americans.
I’ve had a
number of visitors from the States this summer and I have politely asked them
all to take a good look around as they visit Spain and the rest of Europe. I
have asked them if they think Europe is in the sort of desperate crisis
portrayed in much of the American media. I made a point of showing my
visitors the excellent mass transit systems here in Valencia, Madrid, and
Barcelona. I’ve asked them to bear witness to the fact that there isn’t
anything like ghettos here in Spain, at least not like the American version of
ghettos. These are hard times for many Spaniards but you don’t see
legions of miserable people or homeless as you do in America. There aren’t vast
swaths of the country languishing in poverty and crime. There are no Gary
Indianas or Detroits. Gun related murders are almost unheard of and any sort of
violent crime is rare. I live in a city whose size would rate among the top 15
in the United States and I wouldn’t hesitate to pass through a single
neighborhood in the middle of the night for fear of being a victim of crime.
I would
challenge anyone to show me an American city that compares to Valencia as far
as its service to the citizens. Valencia has a great network of bike paths; an
excellent public transportation system that includes buses, an underground
metro, trolleys, and a bike-share system that are all linked to the regional
and local train network; public hospitals that are rated among the best in the
world; and a gorgeous city filled with parks, squares, beaches, and a blend of
ancient and modern architecture. I have a front-row seat and I just don’t see
the chaos and horror depicted in the American media about the crisis in Europe.
This sentiment is further elaborated in a post on Andalucia.com:
Earlier this month, I saw a letter to The Daily
Telegraph,
the UK’s favourite Tory broadsheet rag, reprinted in my favourite news magazine
The
Week in
their “Pick of the week’s correspondence”. Since it was in praise of Malaga,
one of Andalucia’s most important cities, I thought it would be highly
appropriate to quote in this blog.
The writer, from Cheltenham, heartland of
solid English values, says this:
“I have just spent three days in Malaga. The
marble pavements sparkled and teams of smartly dressed workers cleaned and
polished the town. The flower beds around the trees in the squares were
lovingly tended and the rows of beautiful shops were packed with expensive
goods, with apparently no shortage of customers. Cafes and restaurants, full of
local people, were open until the early hours of the morning.”
Disgusted from Cheltenham then goes on to
compare his home town unfavourably with the Spanish city, citing dirty streets,
cracked pavements sprouting with weeds, no cleaners, overflowing bins,
boarded-up shops, cheap boutiques and run-down bars.
His closing comment is a corker:
“If austerity measures need to be taken
across Europe, it seems that the Spanish people will have to see a significant
reduction in their standard of living just to get down to British level. I
dread to think what further cuts will do to ours.”
While it seems to me that he is more
concerned with the superficial appearance of such a beautiful, historic
Cotswold town than the state of its libraries, education or health facilities,
his point is an interesting one.
American
conservatives are trying to cut public services as fast as they possibly can.
They have waged a war against public school teachers and local police. To
conservatives every penny we spend to improve the state of our cities is being
stolen from the (hyper-rich) tax payer. Republicans say that we can’t afford
these things, as if schools and police and fire departments are luxuries. Their
plan is to allow the hyper-rich to get even richer and somehow this will make
life better for all of us.
* The photo above was taken in the
city of Castellon, 40 minutes north of Valencia on the outstanding local train.
Its population is about 100,000 and it has been hit pretty hard by the
downturn. I’m sure that there are countless stories there of hardship and
struggle but the city itself looks fantastic. It is modern, clean, and very
pedestrian friendly. In short, it’s a great place to live. Even with the hard
times no one in Spain is talking about the drastic cuts everyone thinks are
inevitable in the United States. People here pay a lot of taxes (48% at the top
bracket) but they expect a lot for their money. They expect…they demand to live
in great cities. And this is Spain I’m talking about. If you want to see even
better examples of the gains of European social democracies take a look at Belgium,
or Holland, or Denmark.
