I am absolutely not convinced it is a good idea to port policies from one culture to another. Neither when US Neoliberalism gets exported to Latin America & Eastern Europe ("Washington Consensus") nor when Euro Social Democracy gets imported to the US ("Nordic Model"). Cultural differences can make every policy win or fail.

I mean, even in the EU it seems very similar tax-and-spend models work well for Scandinavia but abysmally for PIIGS. The cultural difference between the North and E̶s̶s̶o̶s̶ the Mediterrean is already too high.

I think homogenity/multiculturalism may also play a role... which predicts sooner or later we will see less Social Democracy in the EU. But the point is, tax-and-spend requires trust, and trust is based on things like similarity or making sure the other players in the prisoner's dilemma don't defect (don't cheat on taxes etc.) and it seems to suggest the need for cultural homogenity.

One useful way to model is that supra-national, EU-level redistribution does not really work due to the lack of trust which is due to the - thankful! - lack of cultural homogenity, and the US is so dishomogenous that it resembles the whole of the EU more than any individual nation. European nations stopped being ethnic too but there is at least still some kind of a default ethnicity & ethnic culture in each, which at least helps in coordination problems: a German-Turk and a German-Serb at least have a basic idea that their easiest way to cooperate in the game is to behave like a German-German, the "default" citizen. The US went way beyond the point where Scottish and German ethnicities could be considered default. And this is why there are constantly these coordination problems e.g. men no longer know how to behave with women without being creepy because there is not one default ethnic culture.

BTW before anyone misunderstands this comment, it is not a criticism of multiculturalism or some kind of a hidden racism. It is simply pointing out in the long run it cannot be combined with nationalism and the national level redistribution we commonly call Social Democracy. To cope with multiculturalism, nationalism needs to go the way of the dodo and nations reimagined as a loose confederation of communities, and redistribution happening only inside the communities but not overall in the nation. This is doable, for example Austria has universal healthcare but not single-payer, there are stuff like miners or railroad workers health insurance "cassa". This is workable. Similar institutions are possible to imagine on an ethnic-communitarian basis. Private business is aleady doing it, DenizBank is advertising in Vienna largely where Turks live because it is of course so that they trust it more than others. Time to go beyond the Westphalian period of (economic) nationalism.