American Liberals and Dutch "Progressivism"

Note: While I am going to be talking mostly about the Netherlands since that is my main point of reference I think that a lot of what I am going to say would also apply to how a lot of American Liberals talk about the Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway or even other European countries like Germany.

Cw: None really but Pim is complaining about Liberals again

I watch quite a lot of YouTube videos. This is not necessarily a good thing since YouTube has a lot of issues as a platform and there is quite honestly a lot of misinformation and misdirection on that site. However it also offers me a lot of content that is way more varied and interesting then anything I could ever dream off back when I still watched television. The internet has become a ripe source of information for me about almost every subject and YouTube is no exception to this. One subsect of YouTube is the educational video. These are videos often made with flashy animations that often explain a subject in clear terms. On it's own are these videos not bad. They often serve as a good introduction to a subject and they can help people learn more about the world they live in or just pique the interest about something a lot of people had not thought about. However due to the decentralized nature of YouTube and the lack of peer reviewing are there also quite a lot of videos around that spread(often unintentionally) outdated information or are misleading due to the way that they are framed(history videos in particular are especially prone to this). 

One subject that often gets framed incorrectly in these types of videos are videos concerning the country I live in, The Netherlands. I have lived in the Netherlands for my entire life, I grew up over here, I speak Dutch as my native language and I know the ins and outs of almost every aspect of Dutch life. As such I am often very surprised whenever I watch a video made by Americans about the Netherlands. The impression I often get is that they glorify the Netherlands as this shining beacon of progressivism and that the Netherlands is a country America should strive to be. It should come as no surprise that my experience has been rather different from this fictionalized image painted by these American content creators. To the American Liberal it might come as a shock that the Netherlands might not be as progressive as they think it is. I am going to be taking some common talking points often made by American liberals about the Netherlands and compare them to my own experiences living here and see how they hold up. 

1. Glorification

Although I mentioned YouTube, I am not going to be calling out specific YouTube videos or specific content creators. Rather I am going to talk about some common talking points I have often heard from many videos or talking points I encountered while talking with American Liberals online. The main reason for this is because I don't want this article to be some callout where I put the metaphorical "dunk" on some online personalities. This only leads to unnecessary drama which distracts from the main points that I am trying to make. 

One of the main themes in a lot of American Liberal rhetoric when it comes to discourse regarding the Netherlands is the theme of glorification. They will often point to something the Netherlands does(or did in the past) and go "look at how they are handling that! I wish we handled stuff like that over here!. While I do think that we do certain things better then in the US, this claim is often exaggerated, the result of misdirection or just outdated information. I will list a few of these claims here:

-  The Dutch economy is great and this means that Dutch people are generally well off.

This is probably one of the most common claims I hear crop up when American Liberals talk about the Netherlands. And when you only look at statistics like GDP then this claim will hold water. The Netherlands does have a high GDP and in certain areas like agricultural exports we punch way above our weight class(1). However there is a problem with this measurement. GDP only measures the amount of capital or wealth in a country, it says nothing about the way this wealth is distributed or how this affects the average person living here. As a matter of fact the Netherlands actually has some of the highest wealth inequalities in Europe(2), with the wealthiest 10% of the country owning over 60% of all the wealth(Note that wealth inequality is different from income inequality. Wealth can mean money but also stuff like houses, property or company assets.). Now there are those liberals that claim that this inequality is good actually because the income inequality is low and that Dutch income tax is high but what they fail to realize is that the Dutch government has drastically different tax rates for companies and corporations as they do for individuals. The Dutch government has in the last 10 years done a lot to remove the barriers for large international companies to move over here and one of those measures was lowering the tax rates for companies and making it easier for them to do tax evasion. This means that the entire "wealth inequality is good actually!" argument is a moot point since a rich person can just dump their wealth into a company or tax shelter and avoid paying as much taxes as possible. As a matter of fact, this works so well that many large American companies often use this route to avoid paying taxes in either the United states as in the Netherlands!(3) The subject of the Dutch economy is truthfully a subject that I am not well versed in but I see so many American Liberals making grandiose statements that I know are just not true from my experiences living in this country. You don't need to be an economist to smell bullshit in this regard.

- The Netherlands has free healthcare and social services!

Again this is not entirely true. While it is true that the Netherlands has technically universal healthcare, it all comes with a big asterisk. Until 2006 was the majority of healthcare in the Netherlands paid by a "ziekenfonds"(Health Maintenance Organization). This was an organization(often arranged by sector) that a person would pay a low monthly fee to which would then be pooled collectively to pay for the healthcare costs of it's members(4). This had the upshot of being able to pay for good healthcare for even low income households, plus the organization would deal with the healthcare provider directly meaning that it took a lot of the bureaucratic work from the shoulders of the people. However this system has always been a bit of a thorn in the side of the employers since they(by virtue of having more wealth then their employees) often had to a pay a larger amount of money in this pool. So after years of lobbying did the Christian Democratic coalition governments in 2006 replace this system with a new health insurance system which we still have till this day. This health insurance system changed a few things up. First off the government made it mandatory for everyone to have a health insurance policy. Second off this also meant that the entire health insurance system was suddenly semi-privatized which meant that a profit motive was suddenly necessary which meant that monthly fees were driven up. Finally these insurances don't cover everything. Instead you have a so called "polis" that you can customize for your needs with a "base polis" for low income people. The problem is that this base polis is not exactly all encompassing, dentistry for example is not covered by this, as is a lot of mental healthcare. Instead of carrying the burden collectively as it used to be, they instead passed the bill down to the individual(and ironically the government itself since the government often has to provide funds for these insurance companies). This means that if your income is low and you need a certain type of healthcare then you either go to a government funded place and hope that it has not been austerity cut to hell so you don't need to wait for 5+ years, or you go to a private company that will most likely help you sooner but you cannot afford. So to say that the Netherlands has an universal healthcare system is not entirely true in my opinion since your income kind of limits the type of healthcare you can get and it sure is hell is not free, never has been(the same applies to social services).   

- The Netherlands is a socialist country!

This is a mistake I often see baby American leftists make to refer to the Netherlands or any other European country that had a strong welfare state at some point. They are still very early in their development of understanding left wing politics and so their understanding is based on biased American propaganda and media. This is the same place where the entire "socialism is when the government does stuff" rhetoric comes from. With that said just because it is a huge part of American political rhetoric does not make it true. The Netherlands(and so are most Scandinavian countries come to think of it) is a so called constitutional monarchy. This means that it is a monarchy with a parliament and a constitution. We have a king, queen and royal family whose role in governing the country is defined in the constitution(and secretly has more power then most people think). The Dutch economic system is also a free market capitalist one. The workers don't own the means of production(AKA the most basic requirement for socialism is not fulfilled) and almost every company is owned by private investors and shareholders. So to keep it really short, the Netherlands is not a socialist country nor has it ever been one. 

Now I could have gone on about how most American states that have legalized drugs have now more lenient drug laws then the Netherlands or how the government has been slowly destroying the former Dutch welfare state, or how the rate of homeless people has doubled in the last 10 years but I think that I have made my point. The Netherlands is not some kind of left wing wonderland nor is it "liberalism done right" and I am not a huge fan of American Liberals spreading these ideas since they paint a wrong picture of the Netherlands(and to a lesser extent Europe in general). With that said there is some more meaning to this rhetoric. Not all of these people are just making honest mistakes, others are spreading this for a different reason.. 

2. Where do these misconceptions come from?

To really understand these misconceptions we have to really understand the American political scene and more importantly, how the American politician views the world. A lot of the roots of this rhetoric lies in the cold war. During the cold war the American government spend a huge effort suppressing most left wing movements and thoughts. As a result became the word "socialist" a smear term for any political opponents(this is also why nowadays American conservatives, fascists and right wing libertarians often use the words liberal and socialist interchangeably, despite the fact that ideologically speaking this makes no sense). This is how the American Liberal establishment(what we would call the Democrats nowadays) became the de-facto "left", because there was no one to the left of them that could still form an opposition to either them or the conservatives. Because the liberals were essentially the "left" they also had to look for socially progressive goals and talking points(while at the same time ignoring others, see my video below for why Liberalism is not left wing(5)). And thus we ended up in Europe, specifically the Netherlands.   

Now the Netherlands was in an interesting place during the cold war. It is a constitutional monarchy but it still had a strong Social Democratic movement after WW2 and this movement (often in coalition with Dutch liberals) began building what would eventually become the Dutch welfare state. This welfare state and time period is also where most of myths about the Netherlands being some kind of drug legalizing, sex working, partying free state came from. As a matter of fact I think that some American Liberal rhetoric would be closer to reality if they were made in the 1970's or 80's. However here is the problem: This is not the 70's or 80's, this is 2021 and the Netherlands has changed a lot in these last 30 years so most of the rhetoric(if true at all) just doesn't hold up anymore. Dutch politics in general has regressed a lot to the right since the late 1980's and the Dutch left wing parties are nowhere near as strong as they used to be. The Dutch electoral left is essentially dead while Dutch social democracy is currently bleeding out. A lot of what used to be progressive policies either got reversed and their impact lessened or twisted in a way that they are essentially non functional thanks to 30 years of neoliberal policy. 

Now some American liberals(and conservatives) are aware of this all but don't see this as a problem, to the contrary to them it is exactly what they want since it means that they can use the Netherlands as an example for policy that could benefit them and the large corporate ruling class. This is also where such garbage takes as "Dutch wealth inequality is good actually" comes from. As for the conservatives, they have a nice fictionalized view of the Netherlands to use as an example to enforce their own points. "Look at those Dutch people! Their government forces them to pay health insurance! Vote on me: T.o.T allynotanazi to defend our American freedoms and protect against big government!".   

All in all is a lot of American discourse about the Netherlands and most other European countries just completely incorrect, either deliberately or unintentionally and I really wish that they would stop. Unfortunately this is something I cannot control so this article will serve as a testament to my disapproval of these proceedings. So remember, if a Dutch person tells you that your statement about their country is incorrect, maybe listen to them first before you start yelling at them(though honestly that goes for about every country). 

In Solidarity

- Pim

Sources:

1. https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/latest-news/weblog/blog-posts/2021/dutch-export-of-agricultural-goods-in-2020

 2. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/wealth-gap-in-the-netherlands-much-wider-than-previously-thought-say-experts/

3. https://nltimes.nl/2021/09/09/crocs-accused-using-new-strategy-dutch-tax-avoidance-report

4. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziekenfonds_(Nederland)

5. https://youtu.be/fu3IqJqovaI