I’ve been thinking about why welfare style state economics worked in Northern Europe but didn’t work here. At first, I thought it was because we had less of an appetite for socialism than our European counterparts and I think there’s still some truth in that but I also think Nordic style socialism was able to work because it was harder for the Nordic right to point to an “other” who would be receiving those benefits. Americans by and large loved the New Deal. Not all but the period was called the New Deal Consensus for a reason since much of its policies were embraced by Republicans as well. It really only to me seems that Americans turned against “big government” programs when LBJ proposed the Great Society which would have expanded a lot of those programs to America’s racial minorities.