America's forgotten formula for economic equality.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

A signature moment in the first Democratic presidential debate was when CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asked Bernie Sanders how he could hope to win the general election as an avowed "democratic socialist." The Vermont senator had a ready answer. Being a democratic socialist, he said, is about "saying that it is immoral and wrong" that "57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent" and that millions of working families lack paid family leave. America, he said, should "look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people." He can win, he told Cooper, by bringing to the polls "huge turnouts" of hitherto alienated voters who agree with him.

Hillary Clinton also had a ready response. "What Senator Sanders says certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have," she agreed. But, she continued,

we are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America. And it's our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn't run amok and doesn't cause the kind of inequities were seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world. What is that special American something that built "the greatest middle class in the history of the world" but that makes us different from Scandinavian Europe? Clinton didn't really say, and Cooper didn't press her.

The closest she came was stating that America affords the opportunity and freedom to start small businesses. But Sanders also professed support for entrepreneurialism. Indeed, on a range of issues, her policy prescriptions aren't that different than his. She's at least as big an advocate of paid family leave as he is. He'd probably demand higher taxes on the rich and a bigger expansion of the federal government. She'd probably settle for less-steep tax increases on the rich and a greater role for the private sector in the delivery of services. But both would tackle inequality by strengthening Washington's hand.

Republicans, of course, would do the opposite. "Doesn't it make more sense to shift power away from Washington," Jeb Bush asked an Iowa crowd, and "back to communities and states so that we can grow at a rate where median income in Washington, Iowa, is growing and maybe median income in Washington, D.C., starts to shrink?"

Here's the thing, though. Jeb's right to focus on narrowing the...