Caring About Childcare

Who seriously thinks centrists support free universal childcare more than Scandinavian-style socialists do?

It seems to be becoming an odd talking point among Sanders-bashers. In my previous post, I wrote about Sally Albright's strange claim that free universal college was racist. She insisted it would only benefit the privileged and implied that childcare was not on Bernie Sanders' radar. Of course, she's wrong.

Recently, Jill Filipovic tweaked Alright's argument in a tweet, albeit not enough to realign it with reality:

Feminists have been calling for universal child care for a very long time. It's the men in charge who have decided free college is more important than free child care. Another reason having women in power and at the table is so crucial.

There's a lot to unpack here. Certainly socialist feminists have been calling for universal childcare. Centrist feminists less so. Centrists generally aren't in favor of free universal anything - not college, childcare, or healthcare. Ditto with "the men in charge." They don't want free stuff either. Go figure. While we unquestionably live in a patriarchy, it is also a capitalist one. In short, the men who favor free college are not the same men who are in charge. Otherwise, we would already have free college.

Conservatives love posing false trade offs whether it it liberty against equality or the economy against the ecology. Even if they are not presented as mutually exclusive, one can only progress at the other's expense. Centrists are not much different. Except when they do it, they totally torpedo their stereotype of leftists.

First and foremost, it cannot escape comment that Bernie Sanders put free universal childcare in his economic platform. Item eleven in his thirteen point plan demands, "Enacting a universal childcare and prekindergarten program." Indeed, Sanders had introduced a Senate bill for it in 2011 called the Foundations for Success Act. That was one of the so-called "ponies" he promised. Is Jill Filipovic suggesting that socialists suddenly don't want ponies anymore? The new memo is confusing.

Second, during the campaign, it was learned that Sanders supporters were more in favor of such feminist initiatives than Clinton supporters were. After digging into American National Elections Studies (ANES) Jacobin had discovered much that contradicted the centrist narrative:

Sanders backers, for instance, were more likely to strongly endorse requiring employers to pay men and women equally for the same work. They were also much more assertive in their support for mandatory paid parental leave:

I thought it was pretty interesting that, among those who favored paid leave "a great deal," Sanders men passed Clinton women by one percentage point - 53% to 52%. (Maybe it was a rounding error.) But overall, Sanders supporters favored it more than Clinton ones by almost ten points - 88% to 79%.

That may sound counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you think about it. As I keep saying, centrists like to pretend to be feminists as long as it does not cost anything or inconvenience corporations in any way. By contrast, Sanders’ socialist supporters don’t have such strange hang ups. Different priorities, I suppose.

Finally, Hillary Clinton’s “We are not Denmark” comment in the Democratic Party debates illustrates who really wants what. She was dismissing the Scandinavian-style socialism that Sanders advocates. As leaked audio of those Wall Street fundraising luncheons revealed, she was even more patronizing behind closed doors. Shortly before saying Sanders supporters live in their "parents' basements," she said:

And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.

Well, few things say “Scandinavian-style socialism” quite like “free universal childcare.” Hence Margaret Thatcher’s disdainful description: the "Nanny State.” You could argue that free universal healthcare is more core or springs to mind before because it is often a matter of life and death. But Thatcher did not call it “the Nurse State.” Perhaps she should have. But the point here is that Thatcher's shorthand sums up the stereotype of such benevolent feminist, child-friendly governments whether you admire them or not. Indeed, providing free universal childcare is damn near definitional for Scandinavian-style socialism.

Yes, I know that Hillary Clinton had a childcare plank in her platform too. As Time magazine noted, her "European-Style" proposal "arrived late in the election cycle" (less than two months before she won the nomination) and the article cautioned "There aren’t details yet exactly how it could work" (which would be considered a fatal flaw if Sanders proposed it). Sounds like another issue where Sanders pushed her to the left. I should add that Clinton's program was just a subsidy to reduce the cost by capping it at 10% of family income. It did not make childcare free, so wealthy families would still get better childcare.

And what does it say about centrist feminists who totally ignore free universal childcare right up until they need a rhetorical truncheon to use against free college?

In short, Jill Filipovic's tweet is a straw man argument that presents a false trade-off and flies in the face of both easily-discovered documentation and longstanding stereotype. That's quite an accomplishment! It's as absurd as saying conservatives are pro-choice and liberals are anti-choice. It's like conservatives saying "Liberals are the REAL racists," which is incidentally exactly what centrists say about progressives. The comparison ain't hyperbole. Warts an all, the left has always been exponentially better than the center on race, sex, and gender. But that's for another post.

The point is a lot of centrists think leftists don't care about free universal childcare. It's phenomenally wrong, but it’s something that they deeply feel.

Still, it is nice to see centrists supporting free universal something even as a pawn in their zero sum game.


EDIT 6/12/18:

Things seem dark now, but I am cautiously optimistic. I can imagine an America, maybe a decade away, that has free universal college, childcare, and healthcare as well.

And no doubt that era's centrists will claim credit and patiently explain how progressive somehow opposed each of these things - perhaps the way conservatives now co-opt Rosa Parks or the way some centrists insist that corporations - and not protests - had won gay rights.

That's okay. We want them to steal our ideas. As Mark Twain wrote, "The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." After fighting against them, of course.

SECOND EDIT - 10/28/18:

One last comment on "We are not Denmark." When visiting Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King unfavorably contrasted America with Scandinavian nations, suggesting we had no excuse for poverty given our great wealth: "In both Norway and Sweden, whose economies are literally dwarfed by the size of our affluence and the extent of our technology, they have no unemployment and no slums. There, men, women and children have long enjoyed free medical care and quality education. This contrast to the limited, halting steps taken by our rich nation deeply troubled me." Elsewhere, he suggested democratic socialism was the way we must go. (See same link.)