Searching For a Hero Like Trump The Parallels of Right-Wing Politics in Brazil and the United States

The arrest of Brazil’s former president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. As a result of his twelve-year sentence for taking part in one of the biggest corruption scandals in Brazil’s history, Lula’s arrest opened the window for the opposing political party to rise to the occasion. The Social Liberal Party’s (PSL) candidate Jair Bolsonaro has done just that: garnering support for his far-right policies and winning the presidential election with a huge margin of victory.  His election is the first election of a candidate with far-right views since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985. Bolsonaro’s rise parallels that of U.S. President Donald Trump. Both candidates campaigned on fixing a broken political system and gained support around general dissatisfaction with the political status quo. In fact, pundits often refer to Bolsonaro as the “Trump of the Tropics”. With Trump in the White House and Bolsonaro at the helm in Brasilia, there exists the possibility of even stronger relations between the United States and Brazil on many fronts. However, with a right-wing president in charge of the world’s 8th largest economy, it should be questioned how the international community should respond to his ideas and the policies he wishes to advance. The international community should also be aware of how these election results will affect other nations whose elections are fast approaching especially in Latin America.

Despite Bolsonaro’s clear win over his competitor Fernando Haddad, his support base was not always so widespread.  The left-wing Workers Party (PT) - of which Lula and his successor, the impeached President Dilma Rousseff were members - was highly supported amongst Brazilians until the revelation of rampant government corruption under the so-called Operation Car Wash: a string of scandals involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras accepting bribes from contracting firms in exchanged for inflated prices as well as the left-wing Workers Party using funds in order to pay for the votes of politicians in order to strengthen their political campaign. Despite the numerous arrests, Lula’s charismatic personality, charm, and past political accomplishments and promises placed the corruption accusations on the back burner. When Lula entered office in 2002, it marked a turning point for a country where the political elite was controlled by upper-class white people despite more than half of the population being comprised of minorities and people below the poverty line. As a self-proclaimed “leader for the people,” he proclaimed “hope has finally defeated fear and the people have decided it [was] time to pave new roads,” in his inaugural speech. Similarly, Barack Obama’s election in the United States marked a turning point in a country that had only seen white presidents. He proclaimed that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” Both leaders marked the possibility of change for marginalized communities.

The Workers’ Party, both during Lula’s and his successor’s, made accomplishments that cannot go unnoticed. According to the left-leaning magazine The New Republic, some of the Worker’s Party greatest accomplishments include the establishment of different programs such as affirmative action policies which increased the attendance and retention rate of students at national universities, as well as the largest cash transfer program which gives families living under the poverty line a stable income as long as parents invest in their children’s education and health by ensuring attendance at school and regular visit respectively. Programs such as these elevated about forty million Brazilians above the poverty line. Brazil’s selection as the host of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and Rio de Janeiro’s selection as the host city for the 2016 Summer Olympics, a first for South America, signaled a dramatic improvement in the economic and political stature of the county. However, this boom was constructed on the shaky ground. Many large-scale development projects suffered significant pitfalls from pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and protests against government spending. These problems began to shed light on the poor practices and corruption within the Worker’s Party and its leaders.

Until recently, Jair Bolsonaro remained on the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity to appear. As a Congressman for the State of Rio De Janeiro, Bolsonaro made his political opinions clear in different interviews across Brazilian media. He once told a fellow female politician “I would not rape you because you are not worthy of it;” another controversial comment he made is “the lightest Afro-descendent there weighed seven ‘arrobas’. They don’t do anything. They are not even good for procreation.” Despite these, his most controversial opinions lie on how he believes Brazil should be run.  In a 1999 TV interview when asked about what changes he make if he was elected president, he responded with ideas such as “closing Congress” and bringing about change through a “civil war.” His consistent voice in politics allowed him to create a ground of support before announcing his candidacy.

Bolsonaro’s current policies are parallel to Trump’s policies in the United States. Bolsonaro’s most important policy (and most unique compared to other candidates) is ‘law and order.’ Being an ex-army captain, he believes in order to combat the rising violence is to decrease restrictions on gun laws and give police officers bonuses for the more criminals they kill. This policy platform has been the driving force behind Brazilian’s support for Bolsonaro.

Another policy reform he wishes to implement are environmental policies specifically within the Amazon. Bolsonaro has the desire to build a highway through the Amazon rainforest, which is vital for the filtration of carbon dioxide for the earth’s atmosphere.  With the intention as well to pull out of the Paris Climate agreement, this leads to the second parallel made between US and Brazil politics. Both candidates take on a moral position in the political reformation and use hot topics such as environmental regulations and law order as the basis for their campaigns. In times where many people craved change, Bolsonaro and Trump rose to the political sphere by being outspoken candidates making promises and statements the electorate wanted to hear from their political leaders who felt out by recent liberal administrations. Many Brazilians, especially the elite, have greatly supported this change of political figure in Brazil.

Bolsonaro represents hope for a Brazil that has been suffering numerous problems. At a rally for Bolsonaro supporters, individuals such as mother Cibley Lopes believe Bolsonaro is “the future of this country...He represents hope.” Brazil has undergone so much turmoil that some individuals are willing to support any candidate that is not of the Workers Party. Many individuals like Lopes are among the group of white elite who are rallying behind Bolsonaro for a new Brazil; these individuals are also of the belief that Bolsonaro is a leader for all people, marginalized or not. In some ways similar to Bolsonaro, the supporters of Trump are primarily either one of two groups of people: educated or uneducated white individuals. Both groups of citizens are unhappy with the political status quo and wish for a hero to emerge from the ashes of despair and turmoil. Since Bolsonaro has such similar policies with President Trump in the United States, the established relationship between Brazil and the United States will most likely only strengthen. While it may seem beneficial for both of these countries to engage in even more bilateral deals, it is important to recognize and address the response from the international community.

Before Bolsonaro was elected and The Working Party was primarily in office beforehand and  the United States and Brazil already had a strong and stable relationship. According to the United States’ State Department, Brazil is US’s second largest trading partner. Besides economic trade benefits such as these, the United States has invested in Brazil through educational, technological, and their space program which had yielded positive results. All of the investments the United States has made in Brazil simply proves that Brazil needs the United States more than the United States needs Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s election is yet another wake-up call for the international community with regards to the rise of right-wing politics. The parallels between Brazil and the United States shows the rising right-wing politics specifically in Latin America. If more countries such as Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia follow the path of Brazil it would not only affect the relationships of developed countries but will change the identity of Latin America politics.

Bolsonaro and the Far Right’s Arrival in South America

Introduction

In modern day studies of geopolitics and international relations, South America unfortunately lingers on the global backburner in comparison to regions such as Eurasia and the Middle East/North Africa (MENA). After centuries of colonialism and imperialist control by Western nations, many perceive South America as an underdeveloped continent with little political power.  This belief stems from racist rhetoric and inaccurate assumptions. While many countries within South America are not considered “developed” in the eyes of the Western world, this is due to years of political and economic destabilization by the west. Perhaps this very history of Western meddling provided the right conditions for a growing far-right movement, which has steadily been gaining traction in several South American countries. At the end of October 2018, Brazil, South America’s most populous country, elected the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro as president. Believers in democracy and human rights defenders alike were shocked and dismayed in his election, and fear for the changes that Bolsonaro will inevitably bring to the continent, and their lasting implications on relationships with other countries and the geopolitical balance.

Political History and Legacy of Brazil

Brazil, unlike the majority of South America, was claimed as a Portuguese colony from 1500 until its independence in 1822. One of Brazil’s most distinguishing sociopolitical features is its long established  history with slavery. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Brazil was noteworthy for having brought over more African slaves than would ever reach North America; in total, Brazil imported half of all the slaves that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Brazil was the last Western country to abolish slavery, in 1888, more than two decades after the United States did. The social repercussions of the slave trade meant that Brazil became a heavily ethnically mixed nation, with significant intermingling of African, indigenous, and Portuguese populations. While it may expected that a sizable mixed race population would foster societal equality and tolerance, to this day Brazil remains a deeply unequal society, especially in regards to the intersections of race and socioeconomic status. The roots of Brazil’s unequal society largely stem from a failure to restructure society post-slavery. Freed slaves were left without land, money, or education, and centuries later millions of their descendants continue living with these same circumstances. In the modern day, Afro-Brazilians make up two thirds of the 60,000 annual victims of crime and two thirds of the prison population. After the eradication of slavery, Afro-Brazilians often still worked in modern forms of slavery, which was not outlawed until 1995. Contemporaneously, most instances of modern slavery and forced labor occur in rural areas, often in industries tied to environmental destruction, such as the logging industry. In 2016, the Global Slavery Index estimated that there were over 300,000 people in conditions of modern slavery on any given day.

In addition to the brutal and bloody legacy of Brazil’s slave trade, corruption also plays a large role in Brazil’s political history from colony to present day. Like many other South American countries in the 20th century, a military dictatorship ruled Brazil from 1930 to 1945. After less than two decades of democracy following 1945, the military once again intervened in 1964, overthrowing the leftist Goulart administration, and established Castelo Branco as the newest dictator.  Following Branco’s regime, military governments ruled Brazil until 1985, and the country had its first democratic presidential elections in 1989. In the 21st century, Brazil’s many presidential administrations were marred by corruption and scandal, and a growing distrust in the Worker’s Party which had been in power for several decades. Both “Lula” da Silva and Dilma Vana Rousseff were criticized for reckless spending and corruption during their respective administrations. However, under these Workers’ Party-backed administrations, the government made combating and assuaging hunger and poverty one of their top priorities. On a social level, Brazil’s rural vs urban struggles also take on another dimension when considering the debate regarding the use of natural resources and sustainability. In present day, there exists little to no data on peoples living in the Amazon rainforest and little regard for their residency in the region.

Brazil’s society, like many around the world, found itself at a crossroads during its most recent election, with its people divided between leftist and right-wing movements. The left wing of Brazil’s politics has become fragile, weakened by widespread corruption, while the right came out as the party of reason, calling for the restoration of order at any cost. With Bolsonaro’s recent election, Brazil is waiting to see just how high the cost of order will be.

Bolsonaro’s Rise and Popularity

After suffering the frustration and betrayal of several leftist governments ending with corruption charges, a 2016 poll found that Brazilian society as a whole had become more conservative, with 54% of the respondents shifting their social and justice beliefs to the right. As a whole, this has been accompanied by a growing movement of conservative Christianity, both in the public sphere and in the national legislature. Later during the same election cycle, public-opinion polls demonstrated that one in three Brazilians would look favorably upon a military intervention to oust the leftist government. It is important to know these facts in order to properly contextualize the environment in which Bolsonaro’s administration was born.

Jair Bolsonaro is a figure that is mostly known to the Western world as a “tropical Trump.” In actuality, Bolsonaro’s political history and infamously controversial statements may prove him to be a much larger threat to democracy in the Southern cone. Bolsonaro rose in the public consciousness by serving as a seven-term congressman after his military career. During his congressional tenure, Bolsonaro became known as a hardlined believer in law and order, and for some of his more inflammatory statements. Beginning with Brazil’s military and dictatorial history, Bolsonaro gained attention for saying in 1999 that he believed the dictatorship should have killed 30,000 more people. Additionally, Bolsonaro became known for several misogynistic, homophobic, and racist statements, over the course of several years. Since the beginnings of his political career, Bolsonaro has established himself as an extreme member of the conservative party, with many cautioning his neo-fascist ideas.

Once Bolsonaro publically entered the presidential race, he advertised himself as the candidate who would defend democracy and uphold the constitution. To help him achieve these goals, Bolsonaro promised his policies would focus on relaxing gun laws, reducing state involvement in the economy, and leaving the 2015 Paris Agreement. Bolsonaro entered the race as the candidate of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), an anti-establishment party known for their combination of social conservatism and pro-market policies. Bolsonaro’s running mate, Mourãu, hinted that Bolsonaro’s administration would go as far as to redraft the 1988 constitution, taking away representative input, in order to stack the Supreme Court. One of Bolsonaro’s key campaign promises was to help address the growing violence in Brazil. Unlike most countries, Brazil’s biggest threat to national security is not terrorism, but the heavily growing homicide rate within cities, especially in the favelas. In 2017 alone, Brazil broke its own homicide record, with a 3% uptick in murders, resulting in the murder of 63,880 people. Bolsonaro promised to face security issues with no-nonsense iron fist policies, such as relaxing gun control laws, allowing police more freedom to use violent tactics, and employing military forces to occupy the notoriously violent favelas. In Brazil, the drug trade and the resulting war against drugs further contributed to a nation-wide increase in violence.

Bolsonaro’s supporters mainly come from the more conservative members of society, as well as those who have felt betrayed by the Workers Party (PT), including the middle class, small business owners, independent professionals, members of the police, and armed forces. While some poorer populations were motivated to support Bolsonaro due to the worsening public security situation, the majority of Bolsonaro’s supporters are the rich and educated-- members of society whose voices are seldom silenced. Many members of Brazil’s upper-middle classes and elite have been fueled by class hatred, aimed at the PT. Echoing the dictatorial roots of Chile, Bolsonaro’s chief economic advisor (also hailing from the University of Chicago) promises to focus on privatization, a policy very popular with financial markets as well as media representatives. Many political analysts have cautioned that much of Bolsonaro’s rise to power has followed traditional steps towards establishing a fascist regime; Bolsonaro has threatened political opponents, activists, and labeled leftist organizations as terrorist organizations.

Spread of Far Right Movements in a Post-Trump World

In a post-2016-election world, it has seemed like there has been an outcropping of far-right movements all over the Western world. In the last decade, new right-wing movements have combined neo-Nazi groups with traditional free-market conservatives. Under the Trump administration, right-wing political rhetoric, often stemming from the president himself, has begun to normalize these ideologies. In Western Europe, this same rise in right-wing thought is not necessarily attributed to the working-class’s response to the economic state, rather, according to Liz Fekete, it stems from reactionary prejudice surrounding the war on terror, and its resulting increase in refugee presence. In the last decade, Europe has experienced several stunning terror attacks, from the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices to last year’s attack on an Ariana Grande concert. These attacks, often attributed to young people of color, have led to a distrust in the growing immigrant population, and a resurgence of xenophobic and islamophobic attitudes. In many European countries, the uptick in immigrant populations has led to stricter policies, including media censorship and frequent raids on left-wing organizations. The purported stress on welfare states  brought on by an increase in immigration into Europe left many joining right-wing thinkers in criticizing the policies and norms as laid out by socialist states. As with the United States’ 2016 election, many who voted for right-wing parties did so out of frustration with the leftist parties and their governments.

Bolsonaro’s election is not only notable within the context of its impact in Brazil, but also the entire continent. His election seems to mark the arrival of the far-right wave into the Southern cone, after its spread to countries like Germany, France, and Sweden. Bolsonaro’s far right policies have two simultaneous effects: threatening Western-established democracy and following the Western neoliberal order. However, for some, fascism spells good business. Some Canadian and American businesses suggested that Bolsonaro’s presidency creates good business opportunities within the resource, finance, and infrastructure sectors.  As outlined in his campaign promises, Bolsonaro has promised to considerably weaken environmental regulations in the Amazon and also privatize government-owned companies. While Bolsonaro’s administration presents a threat to democracy throughout South America, for many Western nations, fascism pairs nicely with neoliberalist economic policies.

Conclusion

Bolsonaro’s election was met with strong emotions from members of Brazil’s left and right wings. Throughout Brazil’s recent election cycle, Bolsonaro quickly gained notoriety for his offensive statements involving women, the LGBTQ+ population, and Afro-brazilians. Since its very inception, Brazil has been a socioeconomically unequal society, with racial and class tensions existing to this day. Brazil’s swing to the right is due in part to the population’s disappointment in the Worker’s Party, but also has much to do with rising inequality and violence in the country. Bolsonaro’s election means Brazil now joined the ranks of the United States, Hungary, and the Philippines in its election of a right-wing populist leader. Based on Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric, Brazil’s newest president exhibits a commitment to erase what the left-wing sees as years of progress towards a more democratic and socialist society. Analysts concerned with human rights within South America argue that Bolsonaro’s administration poses a great threat to democracy within South America, as well as human rights concerns for Brazil’s indigenous populations. The world will see if these fears manifest into reality when Bolsonaro takes power beginning in January of 2019.

Why U.S. Foreign Policy Isn’t Ready for Hillary

Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential election. While Clinton is, without question, a better fit for the job than the GOP’s inevitable nominee, Donald Trump, she might have some explaining to do before she can rally the entire party behind her. Any pro-Hillary voters who prioritize moral plans for American foreign policy should probably look into the candidate’s past in Haiti. Last summer, the Pulitzer Center hosted journalist Jonathan M. Katz for a discussion about the Clintons’ influence and rather infamous legacy in Haiti. It’s surprising how little the failures and destruction of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presence in Haiti have been brought up so far. Hopefully by November, Clinton will have been pushed toward necessary change.

First, some background on the topic: on January 12, 2010, the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the hemisphere, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula and killed 100,000 to 316,000 people. Former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led the Haitian reconstruction effort and vowed to help the country “build back better,” so that if another disaster struck, Haiti would be able to respond more quickly and with more efficiency. Hillary described their efforts as a “road test” that would reveal “new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.”

The Clinton Foundation alone has directed $36 million to Haiti since 2010. Another $55 million has been spent through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and an additional $500 million has been made in commitments through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network. But what does Haiti have to show for all of these investments? Not much, according to Katz. “Haiti and its people are not in a better position now from when the earthquake struck,” he said. The hundreds of millions of dollars and the years of reconstruction efforts have yielded negligible results. For a project so expansive, Hillary has kept relatively quiet about Haiti thus far in her campaign. Her spokesman declined to comment on how Haiti has shaped her foreign policy, saying Hillary would address that “when the time comes to do so.”

Hillary’s big plan for how she would “rebuild” Haiti in the wake of desolation was characteristically American: through business. With big corporate plans on the horizon, Bill and Hillary became exceedingly familiar faces in Haiti leading up to the 2011 presidential elections. It’s not surprising that the candidate who vowed to make Haiti “open for business” was ultimately the victor. Former Haitian pop star Michel Martelly eventually won the race, after Hillary salvaged his candidacy when he was eliminated as the number 3 candidate by convincing the parties to accept him back into the race. Katz said that this vote was fraudulent. Martelly, a businessman and strong proponent of foreign investment in Haiti, was “attractive” to the State Department, Katz noted. He very much had a “Clinton view of Haiti and a Clinton view of the world.”

That’s how Caracol Industrial Park, a 600-acre garment factory geared toward making clothes for export to the U.S., was born in 2012. Bill lobbied the U.S. Congress to eliminate tariffs on textiles sewn in Haiti, and the couple pledged that through Caracol Park, Haitian-based producers would have comparative advantages that would balance the country’s low productivity, provide the U.S. with cheap textiles, and put money in Haitians’ pockets. The State Department promised that the park would create 60,000 jobs within five years of its opening, and Bill declared that 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order.” But Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. “The entire concept of building the Haitian economy through these low-wage jobs is kind of faulty,” Katz stated on Monday. Furthermore, working conditions in the park are decent, but far from what should be considered acceptable.

Not only did Caracol miss the mark on job creation, but it also took jobs away from indigenous farmers. Caracol was built on fertile farmland, which Haiti doesn’t have much of to begin with. According to Katz, Haitian farmers feel that they have been taken advantage of, their land taken away from them, and that they have not been compensated fairly. Hundreds of families have been forced off the land to make room for Caracol. The Clintons led the aggressive push to make garment factories to better Haiti’s economy, but what it really created was wealth for foreign companies. This trend was echoed when the Clintons helped launch a Marriott hotel in the capital, which has really only benefited wealthy foreigners and the Haitian elite.

Mark D’Sa, Senior Advisor for Industrial Development in Haiti at the U.S. Department of State, said that many of the Clintons’ promises remain unfulfilled and many more projects are “half-baked.” Haiti remains the most economically depressed country on the continent. If Hillary wins in 2016, U.S. policy geared toward Haiti will undoubtedly expand, meaning even more money will be funneled to the Caribbean nation to fund the Clintons’ projects, for better or for worse. According to Katz, the truth is that we don’t actually know how much money has been thrown into the Caribbean country to “rebuild” it, and that with economic growth stalling and the country’s politics heading for a shutdown, internal strife seems imminent.

The introduction of accountability for the foreign aid industry is the most important change that can be made, according to Katz. Humanitarian aid does nothing positive or productive if there are not institutions in place, managed by individuals who actually live in these countries, to oversee that aid is serving rather than hurting the people it is supposed to “help.” Hillary Clinton’s efforts in Haiti have fueled political corruption, destroyed arable farmland, and have forced hundreds of families to leave their homes and their jobs to make room for a factory that has not given even a fraction of the amount to Haiti as it has taken. If the introduction of accountability is the way to go, then we first need to start talking. So Hillary, what do you have to say about Haiti?

Taking Socialism Home to Meet Your Parents

So you come home from your first year at college. You wave goodbye to the rear fender of your friend’s beat up 1998 Toyota sedan as it drives away into the distance. You see your parents standing in your doorway smiling proudly, happy to have you back. You walk inside and sit down to a freshly cooked family dinner to reconnect after a year away. Your parents start to ask you about your life, how are the grades, have you locked down a job for the summer yet, do you remember your curfew is still midnight, and for god’s sakes do you have a boyfriend yet? “No,” you reply, no job and no boyfriend yet, but you have started to really like this idea you learned about in your introduction to political theory class; you’ve become a socialist.

Dad dramatically pushes his chair back and storms off to his study to drink scotch straight from the bottle and contemplate where he failed you, while your mother sobs into her apron, and your little brother runs off to alert the neighborhood watch that there’s a dangerous Marxist guerilla living in the area. The white-picket fence has caught on fire and all of the years of wholesome upbringing and money spent on college tuition have gone to waist…or not. Maybe it should not be so shocking that socialism is seeing a resurgence in popularity amongst many young college-age Americans. Now, this is not the socialism of the radical socialism of envisioned by dusty theorists where the government is in direct control of distributing wealth equally to all of its citizen. Instead, this article refers to democratic socialism, which is growing in popularity because it gives the government the tools it needs to administer economic policy and welfare programs, while still maintaining individual rights such as private land ownership and free markets. This allows the enhanced power of the government to be wielded by the larger populace. Indeed, to those who are educated, the ideas that drive socialism are not so foreign or exotic, but are actually reasonable and effective.

Now, in order to evaluate different forms of government, there must be some agreed upon metric by which to do so. For this article, an effective and efficient government is one that can most successfully carry out its laws and directives. Yet this comes with an important caveat, for a truly effective government must also take the best care of its citizens’ needs. In summary, an effective government must be accountable and responsive to its people, while still creating policy that is actually effective at accomplishing a government’s first job—to provide for its citizens—opposed to blindly following every brash impulse of its electorate. While an authoritarian government might be effective, it is not the most humane because large constituency of people are victim to the wants and choices of the small concentration of power in a ruling party or a dictator. A democracy, conversely, while the choices of the electorate might not always be the best or most humane, does have the largest portion of the total populace making the decisions, which is in theory the most humane form of government. Yet that large and theoretically humane electorate is slow to take action and thus is actually not the most responsive or effective in executing its policies. In this article, I posit that a socialist democracy is the best way to execute effective governmental action in the most egalitarian and humanitarian way.

A student of political theory might tell you that an authoritarian or autocratic government is one of the most effective at just directly carrying out its directives. In terms of the economy, a government that does not have to worry about any opposition, nor any approval, can make the changes it decides are the most beneficial for itself much more quickly than if it had to go through more widely accepted democratic routes. While other nations may make economic success more difficult for autocratic governments by punishing them for their system of rule, case in point the embargos that stood for decades against Cuba, authoritarian governments are some of the most capable in terms of implementing their own policy within the confines of their own economy. When speaking about economic development, Modernization theory puts forward the idea that democracy was something for rich and developed nations, and in order to achieve that affluence other less-developed nations had to go through a period of non-democratic rule. Indeed, this idea is supported by London School of Economics professors Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu, who illustrate it thus:

[A]utocratic government is not always a disaster in economic terms. Indeed, throughout history there has been growth and development in autocratic systems of government. For example, the British industrial revolution predates the introduction of free and fair elections with mass participation. Modern China is also a case in point with a spectacular growth performance in a non-democratic setting.

The example of modern China is especially pertinent here, for many other countries in Southeast Asia—Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore just to name a few—all experienced incredible economic growth and success under military dictatorships similar to that experienced by China under single party, autocratic rule. This is because of how efficiently they are able to administer their economic policy. Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati is quoted by G. William Dick to say that “No policy of economic development can be carried out unless the government has the capacity to adhere to it […] Quite often, however, democratic governments lose equanimity and determination in the face of opposition.” Yet, the ability to effectively orchestrate policy comes at a price, for few would disagree that authoritarian or autocratic systems are not the most beneficial to the average citizen, thus violating our second rule for effective governance. In China, the economic growth that the single-party government has fostered has not equally benefitted all of its subjects: the elite have become richer and the wealth is not shared equally. This leads us to one alternative to an authoritarian system: democracy.

Yet while democracies are typically far better for all of their constituents in terms of holding their governing figures accountable to the populace, the question remains: can they achieve the same economic success as authoritarian systems? As NYU professor Adam Przeworski notes, “The reason everyone opts for democracy in affluent societies is that too much is at stake in turning against it” because the alternative is so much worse for the average citizen, especially those not aligned with the ruling party. Furthermore, it is true that, as Pranab Bardhan says in the Financial Times, “Democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, (such as China’s […] massive mayhem in the […] Cultural Revolution), and have greater healing powers after difficult times. Democracies also experience more intense pressure to share the benefits of development among the people, thus making it sustainable.”

In essence, Bardhan is saying that democracies avoid dangerous blunders because all decisions must first come from the people or those who they elect to represent them. Yet while it might be better for the average citizen in terms of sharing the wealth, a democracy can prove to be painfully slow and inefficient when it comes to deciding upon and administering economic policy. One needs only to look at the struggle the American government goes through every year to pass a budget to simply keep itself operating, and the number of times it has shut itself down due to partisan differences, to see how cumbersome and lethargic a democracy such as our own can be. As Timothy Besley and Stephen Coate posit in the American Economic Review, “[W]hile political equilibrium does satisfy a certain efficiency property, this does not imply that policies are efficient according to standard economic criteria,” for even if we do manage to agree on an economic policy, there is no guarantee that all of the concessions made to reach that agreement have not stripped the policy of all actual effectiveness. This leaves us with one essential question: how do we maintain the economic efficiency of an autocratic government while imparting the social equity of a democratic one?

Our answer lies back in that one dirty word—socialism. A socialist government has a large federal government empowered by its electorate to be able to more directly implement its economic policies, while giving the fruits of its prosperity to its citizens equally instead of having it funneled directly to the top as an authoritarian system would. Cedric Muhammad of Forbes put it eloquently when he said of socialism that

[a] socialist system that is working well is one that is fully deploying the nation’s resources through a central plan that has the approval of the people. It would be superior to a capitalist system that is working so poorly that its adherents must find excuses for mass unemployment, widely diverging income classes, and deepening social pathologies.

Indeed, it is the effective implementation that is the crux of what makes democratic socialism the best choice for America. In post-WWII America, we had a massively powerful federal government that was able to capitalize on the economic success that the nation was experiencing and return it to the people in terms of social welfare programs. This union of the ability of the government to make decisive and responsive economic actions while still having a government by and for the people that makes socialism such a potent and attractive form of governance. I’ll leave you with another quote from Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University: “Another advantage of the socialist countries is their passionate conviction and dedication to the objective of economic growth—which contrasts visibly with the halting and hesitant beliefs and actions of democracies.” A socialist system gives the government the power it needs to enact successful policy, while still being accountable to and benefitting its people, and that’s an appealing concept.