The concessions obtained through SocDem goverments in European countries came about because all those countries had thousands of actual communists in varying posts in the government and the concessions were to reduce class consciousness and weaken the communists.
To understand the magnitude of difference, imagine if the US House of Reps (total seats 435) had 40 honest-to-god Communists in power, with another 80 left-of-Bernie SocDems : thats what the French legislature was like in the 60s and 70s.
Instead the US has 3 extremely mild SocDems who may or may not be grifters.
I hope you see the magnitude of difference here, there is no real way of moving the admin left and whatever minor leftward shift you may see is what the ruling class themselves, by their own accord, decide is necessary to keep the threat of civil unrest from getting too high.
So whenever you see any liberals IRL or online talk about how we need to become like Norway or whatever, remind them No Communists in govt = No European style Social Democracy
In my country (Denmark) this was very explicit. Oddly it's not something that is general historical knowledge, which I can only guess is because the topic isn't of much interest here.
I was reading political considerations from social democrats following WWII, and they were concerned with raising wages or providing housing since it would "damage the recovery process" but they felt it necessary to do to avoid an increase in communist popularity which was at an all time high.
In general, the massive increase in public spending in the period between WWII and the seventies went almost uncontested, even though the increase in public spending increased faster than the total growth in GDP. Since then however, public spending compared to growth has remained almost unchanged, but these actual numbers are ignored in the discourse.
Things like universal health care, large scale social security and free universities were barely contested in their creation, compared to what even suggesting a tenth of such projects would have led to had this been done today.
This is also to say that the kind of social democracy we have here is completely stagnant. There is enough love of the welfare state that politicians can't remove the institutions, but it is also completely impossible to establish further such things. That we have the public institutions that we do is purely a matter of historical circumstances; the threat of communism and particularly the Soviet Union. Anything scaled back is never recovered, unless it happens to become the main focus of the left coalition for an election and they win.
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Since the 70s there's always been some kind of ultraliberal fringe that want US conditions with basically no social programs, but the parties specifically for these people like Fremskridtspartiet or Liberal Alliance don't do any better than the "socialist" party, which is to say they have influence but only so far as the two big centre parties want to court them for support over others.
There's old school communists around, but usually older urban workers or things like a small maoist fisherman groups. Class is not a serious political topic because most people are relatively well off, and the "socialist" party has become more centre-left over time.
Unless you want the ultra liberal voters, which aren't that many, you don't say that you want to privatise healthcare or university, since even centre-right people want these things done by the state, though they would also support having private alternatives. What the less radical right leaning parties support are typically budget cuts and sometimes tax cuts, but in actuality they can't do much because the left parties just fight them in parliament and they need to get the votes from either the ultra liberals or the centre-left parties, and getting the latter votes for some concessions is usually easiest.
It's actually the centre-left that ends up privatising the most, since the right leaning parties won't stop them when they're in power and propose this, and third way style social democracy has been a thing since the early 90s. Denmark will be one of the last countries in the world to have a revolution, the status quo simply dominates both in politics and in the minds of the majority of people.
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