Social democracy:
Going by the track record of the actually existing social democracies of Europe, social democracy, as distinct from socialism, does work better than anything else that has yet been tried. Certainly it works better than America's plutocracy-ruled version of capitalism. Social democracy has proven to be the surest path to broadly shared prosperity. Economic libertarianism/neoliberalism/supply-side never accomplishes anything but its true intended goal, which is to make the rich richer.
"]Those damn socialist Scandinavians keep outperforming everyone in everything."
—Rick Eichhorn[1]
Social democracy is a political ideology that advocates for state intervention to fulfill social, financial, and political security, justice, and equality of opportunity for people and actively reorder society in a way that is conducive to such developments. Such changes should be achieved with respect to the democratic and republican institutions and practices. It is common but not unique to Europe, where social democrats regularly feature as one of the major parties and have governed (or at least participated in governments) in many states, most notably in Northern Europe (up to being nicknamed the "Nordic model", which is effectively a blend of social liberalism and social democracy). Social democrats traditionally regard government intervention as a force for good, regulating markets and engaging in redistributive efforts to benefit disadvantaged groups and consumers to establish a more equitable society. Among the intellectual fathers of the modern social democratic ideology, we can mention the sociologist Anthony Giddens, the couple Gunnarand Alva Myrdal
(who were respectively laureated with Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and Nobel Peace Prize), politician William Beveridge, among others.
Somewhat confusingly, social democracy is not the same thing as democratic socialism, nearly identical names notwithstanding. Modern social democrats believe in maintaining a market economy with varying (but, as discussed below, often dwindling) degrees of regulation and with a welfare state — democratic socialists do not (liberal socialists are the only nominally "socialists" who do), as they seek to abolish those goodies.
In American discourse, the leftiness of contemporary social democrats in Europe is often greatly overestimated. European social democratic parties are primarily moderate establishment parties, only and mostly symbolically slightly to the left. They have been marked by over a century of reformism since they split from revolutionary socialism, including a neoliberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s.
Going by the track record of the actually existing social democracies of Europe, social democracy, as distinct from socialism, does work better than anything else that has yet been tried. Certainly it works better than America's plutocracy-ruled version of capitalism. Social democracy has proven to be the surest path to broadly shared prosperity. Economic libertarianism/neoliberalism/supply-side never accomplishes anything but its true intended goal, which is to make the rich richer.
