In his latest Washington Post column, E.J. Dionne compares contemporary American political paralysis to postwar Germany's "consensual, problem-solving politics
for which we were once famous":
... [let’s focus] on public policy inside Germany, which has proved that capitalism with strong social protections works. The Christian Democrats call it “the social market,” a system that has been enhanced and reformed over the years by both Merkel’s party and the center-left Social Democrats.
This moderate form of progressive, bring-people-together politics was what the United States and its allies had in mind for Germany when they worked with German leaders, especially Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, to create a post-Nazi state. The goal was to avoid the extremism and polarization that destroyed the pre-World War II Weimar Republic and led to Hitler’s seizure of power.
“The institutions of postwar Germany were deliberately shaped so as to minimize the risk of a rerun of Weimar,” wrote Tony Judt in “Postwar,” his monumental history of Europe after 1945.
One of the keys, said Charles Maier, a professor of history at Harvard, is that the country’s broad conservative party, Merkel’s Christian Democrats, “from the beginning had a strong welfare notion based on the idea of solidarity” drawn from Catholic social teaching.
“The Germans don’t buy the zero-sum thinking that government and markets — or liberty and equality — can’t be pursued jointly,” observed Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. “They argue about the same issues we face — how much social, how much market and how much government do we want? — but their starting point is that all three should be working together: capitalism with a strong welfare dimension steered by a government which is an ally, not the enemy.”
That used to be us.
