American Individualism

Jonathan Cohn writes “I would concede that America’s strong individualistic streak makes the country inhospitable to government activism, at least relative to Western Europe.”

I think sometimes people are too quick to make concessions of this sort. It does seem to be the case that the Anglophone states have a systematically less expansive state in a way that makes it tempting to look for a cultural explanation. But at the same time, Canada and the UK have among the most heavy-handed government health care systems in the world. And when trying to understand why we differ so much from our Anglosphere cousins in that regard, I don’t think it’s very enlightening to talk about culture or individualistic streaks. FDR decided against making a big push for universal health care during the New Deal era not because of “individualism” but because of racism, it would raise a thicket of questions about integrating hospitals and so forth that he didn’t want to deal with. In later periods, efforts to create a universal health care system have been stymied by the institutions of American government which features a relatively large number of “veto points” at which organized interests can block legislative initiatives. If the United States had a Westminster-style political system we would almost certainly have implemented a universal health care program during one of our earlier periods of progressive ascendancy, the program wouldn’t have been dismantled.

In general, I don’t think people should overestimate the role of public opinion in constraining policymaking. People don’t generally have detailed opinions about policy issues, and politicians can “get away” with doing all kinds of stuff as long as it doesn’t wind up blowing up into some kind of obvious disaster down the road. By contrast, institutional factors create very real constraints on what people can do. A farm reform bill would need to go through the Agriculture Committees which are both chuck full ‘o congressfolk who represent the beneficiaries of current bad policies. Consequently, nothing can be done. One could look at all the grain-fed beef we eat in the United States and conclude that our cultural proclivity for grain-fed beef is causing our agricultural policies, but that’s almost certainly backwards — people come to think of the results of longstanding policies as “normal.”