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Social democracy "works" very well actually. Having the moderate wing of fascism, redistributing some of the spoils of empire to the labour aristocracy of the imperial core bribing enough of the population off to defuse any threat of revolution worked very well for capital. It also created a class of consumers to buy the stuff produced by capitalists.

For the workers that were let into the social democrat "people's home" it worked very well too. They experienced getting healthcare, pensions, childcare, elder care and sharply rising standards of living. Suddenly they got a level of material safety and comfort that their parents and grandparents could only have dreamt about.

It didn't work for workers in the periphery who were being exploited brutally to provide the material basis for all of those nice stuffs. It also didn't work that well for those in the core ergo were excluded from the social democrat idea of "the people", like ethnic minorities and indigenous people.

I get why American liberals wants to be more like the Nordic countries, of course they want to have healthcare and all of the other nice things from the social democratic welfare state. Who wouldn't want that? It is a completely reasonable demand to make.

The Nordic nations have also been very good at branding themselves as being all welfare and knit sweaters and candles and hygge. Very few westerners thinks of the actual mechanics of how social democracy squares the circle of maintaining capitalism and also providing a relatively high standard of living for the broad population.

All of this is what you could call "classic social democracy", the nice glossy version that Nordic succdems (and lots of self-identified leftists) likes to congratulate themselves for pulling off. But actually existing social democracy, the ideology and politics of social democrats wielding actual power in the imperial core, is a very different beast.

While still stubbornly insisting on being the only legitimate political voice of organised labour and of working class in general, they have departed from the ideas of "lifting from the bottom" and improving living conditions generally. They have been fully complicit in neoliberalism and more often than not the gutting of the social democrat welfare states has happened with social democrats in charge.

Modern social democrats are more concerned with a conservative preservation of past achievements for an increasingly more narrowly defined "people". Ignoring the enormous diversity of the actual working class, modern social democrats only represent white cishet workers with steady employment, preferably down at the sparks and steam factory. This butchering of the concept of the proletariat has been made possible by the social democratic movement's distancing themselves from Marxist theory as part of the class collaboration policy that enabled the welfare state and lacking any serious class analysis they are now able to define workers by all sorts of whimsical cultural and educational markers rather than by their relationship to the means of production.

This ideological decline has enabled modern social democrats to pivot to a deeply reactionary ideology, promoting racism, class hierarchies, nationalism and imperialism. In large parts of the imperial core this kind of social democracy still "works" as the not-so-moderate wing of fascism. It still sucks out the air of attempts at progressive labour politics and it distracts the labour aristocracy by blaming immigrants, the unemployed, the woke cultural elite etc. fire everything that's wrong while still offering a hope, although a fake one, that they can provide material improvements.