339
The Politics
of
American Social Policy, Past and Future
liberalism, now sometimes referred to as libertarianism, favors a weak govern-
ment, is suspicious of or fears the state. It subsumes Jefferson’s dictum, that
government is best which governs least. This antistatist doctrine defines the
conservative or national tradition of the United States. Conversely, in Europe
and Canada the dominant organizing principles have been statist. Conserva-
tism in many of these countries has meant Toryism, an emphasis on mercantil-
ism, a powerful activist state, elitism, noblesse oblige, and communitarianism.
Harold Macmillan, who served as a Tory prime minister of Britain, defined
Toryism, the ideology of his branch of the Conservative Party, as “paternalistic
socialism.” The argument derivative from Wells and Hartz suggests that, where
national traditions legitimate statism, both the egalitarian left and the hierarchi-
cal right endorse welfare policies. Europe produced a statist right and a statist
left, while the liberals, squeezed between them, were the politically weak back-
ers of antistatist ideology and policies. In America, Wells argued, two parties
were missing, the socialists and the conservatives. He contended as of
1906
that both American major parties would be wings of the Liberal Party in Brit-
ain, the left and the right.
In various writings in Canada and the United States,
I
have emphasized, as
have many Canadian scholars, that Canada is the country of the countenevolu-
tion, which, retaining the monarchy and state-related church, produced respect
for the mercantilist state, while the United States is the country of the Whig
revolution, and therefore has been antistatist and classically liberal (Lipset
1990).
The different outcomes of the American Revolution produced varying
receptivities to state intervention. Canada, though never electing a socialist
party to national office, has two, the New Democrats (NDP), and the separatist
Parti Qukbkcois (PQ), which have been strong in most of its provinces. Four,
Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, have been governed
by the NDP; Quebec has a PQ government. And the country has been much
more receptive to welfare state measures than the United States. Brian Mulro-
ney, who served as Conservative prime minister for most of the
1980s,
de-
scribed the welfare state as Canada’s “sacred heritage” in the
1988
election
campaign. His successor, Kim Campbell, who held office briefly after Mulro-
ney retired, noted that Canada is basically a social democratic country. The
leader of what has sometimes been described as the Reaganite right in Canada,
Preston Manning, of the Reform Party, said in
1994
that Canadians owe a debt
of gratitude to the social democrats
of
the country, the NDP, who are respon-
sible for Canada’s health plan, its system of family allowances, its more exten-
sive provisions for the unemployed than the American, and many other welfare
measures. Clearly the orientation of Canada toward welfare policies is quite
different from that of Republicans. The latter are the only major anti-statist
party in the developed world.
This brief comparative look does not mean that Skocpol is wrong in her
analyses, or in her contention that there has been considerable support for
so-
cial welfare policies in the United States. She prefers to explain their relative