MAYBE HE CAN ATTRACT DISAFFECTED SANDERS VOTERS AFTER HILLARY GETS THE NOMINATION: Donald Trump Wants To Make America More Like Denmark.
Well, actually, the package Trump offers — “save Social Security without cuts,” a vaguely pro-single-payer position on health care, plus temporarily banning Muslims and walling off Mexico — bears an eerie resemblance to the Danish government’s current policy mix.
His astonishing success selling it to the Republican base may portend ideological convergence between the U.S. right and Europe’s.
Like many American admirers of Scandinavian welfare states, Sanders lacks detailed knowledge of how those systems work, or an appreciation for certain cultural peculiarities that make cradle-to-grave welfarism politically sustainable there but not, so far, here. . . .
Denmark, tolerant and generous toward the Danes among its 5.6 million people, is deeply anxious about its 260,000 Muslims — so much so that a left-right parliamentary coalition recently authorized police to seize cash and valuables from refugees, ostensibly to help pay for their accommodation but also to deter them from coming at all.
You probably won’t hear Sanders urging imitation of that Danish policy at his next college-town rally, but Trump would surely approve of it.
Next: Trump pushes a proposal to make American abortion laws “more European.” Time to make popcorn.
Related: Tavis Smiley: Black America Could Get On The Trump Train. “Second, the number of everyday black voters who we assume will dismiss Trump because of his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attacks might well be inflated. . . . I have been taken by myriad conversations I’ve had with black folk who don’t find those comments by Trump necessarily or automatically disqualifying.”