Narratives, popularized by the elite, like the very large and highly paid public sector bureaucracy, are irrelevant to the truth. The truth is revealed by scientific evidence, which in the social sciences, constitutes socioeconomic statistics. What are your thoughts on the statistics I provided earlier, which I'll reproduce here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
?
>>proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism
You should ask yourself why you are so angry and so intent on trying to discredit my completely reasonable effort to support my position, while the evidence you yourself provided is so absurdly flimsy, like minimum wage (which only affects 4% of jobs) not rising fast enough, and social mobility decreasing (which could very plausibly be due to any number of anti-free-market developments, like 1. growing regulatory restrictions stratifying the position of incumbents in the market, 2. growing government spending creating a more nepotistic economy that favors elite interests, like public sector unions, who tend to have the strongest political connections).
I have to ask, given around 40% of the economy now consists of the state, or those funded by it: do you perhaps have a financial conflict of interest in this debate? Do you work in the public sector, or otherwise hold a unionized job, which would make you a direct beneficiary of the state growing its control over the economy?
But to your point: the share of the economy that is forcefully redistributed by the state, for the purpose of funding social welfare programs, is in fact a completely reasonable proxy for the extent to which social democracy plays a role in a society. Do you have a more direct proxy?
As an aside, trying to gaslight critics of the social democratic establishment with this kind of bad-faith response profoundly damages the public discourse, and I urge you to stop doing it.