Brilliant, thickly textured article.
Red flag warning right there whenever someone starts talking about "social systems"...
...we inhabit and the one we now need...
Skating dangerously close to liberal idealism, talking about what we need...
...failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging...
Uh oh, failures of the old system are mostly just perceived failures by liberals because life doesn't meet their idealistic expectations.
...stuck in a bygone age...
Ah, the good old cliches, so comfortable.
...a career civil service administered a growing state...
And no-one saw a problem with this?
...an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable...
Again, no-one sees a problem with this? Serving yet another master?
...government-brokered arrangements with large corporations...
Yet another warning sign of a government becoming too powerful, too entrenched in our lives.
Not much different from rejection he’ll find from conservatives. He basically argues that both ideologies are out of date and neither is what American public wants.
It’s a long one (a whole beer’s worth), and there are some things in there that rub me the wrong way, BUT it makes a good point that most of today’s ‘progressives’ are really just reactionaries that are trying to hang on to some really broken ideas.
While I find many of the elements of the “New Deal”, unions etc to be philosophically bankrupt, I feel comfortable in capitulating that these things like Social Security used to work better than they do now; and that’s good common coalition ground. I also think it’s interesting to see that nuanced argument that the ‘blue model’ was an alternative to socialism rather than a route to it. There are certainly those that can argue well some of those earlier 20th century Dems were still bloody communists; but they did at least sometimes appear to peddle a limit, even if that’s not what they believed.
But far too many Americans still have lives that are poor in meaning, in part because the blue social model separates production and consumption in ways that are ultimately dehumanizing and demeaning. A rich and rewarding human life neither comes from nor depends on consumption, even lots of consumption; it comes from producing goods and services of value through the integration of technique with a vision of social and personal meaning. Being fully human is about doing good work that means something. Is a blue society with our level of drug and alcohol abuse, and in which the average American watches 151 hours of television a month, really the happiest conceivable human living arrangement?
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Third, government must reconcile itself to its declining ability to manage a post-blue economy with regulatory models and instincts rooted in the past. We need to be thinking about structural changes based on properly aligned incentive architecture, not regulatory systems based on command protocols.
[...]
Since that time, the American political terrain has shifted several times, but it never came to as firm an equipoise as during the quarter century following World War II. From 1968 through 2010 we seem to have been in another era, one in which blue liberal candidates lost more elections than they won. During these years, however, Republican gains have not been consolidated like Democratic gains were during and after the Depression. And the basic reason is that the blue social model of rising living standards based on stable manufacturing jobs for blue collar workers doesn’t work anymore. Automation and outsourcing mean that manufacturing sheds jobs in good times and bad. Rapid technological change and tough international competition force companies to innovate aggressively, and to stay lean. In such circumstances, no party can keep the American people happy for long.
[...]
Now it has happened again. The success of our institutions and ideas has so changed the world that they don’t work any more. We cannot turn back the clock, nor should we try. America’s job is to boldly go where none have gone before, not to consume our energies in vain attempts to recreate the glories of an unattainable past. We need to do for our times and circumstances what other Americans have done before us: Recast classic Anglo-American liberal thought, still the cultural and moral foundation of American life and the source of the commonsense reasoning that guides most Americans as they evaluate policy ideas and party programs, in ways that address the challenges before us.
For those blue Democrats clinging to liberalism 4.1, this is a time of doom and gloom. For those red Republicans longing for a return to liberalism 3.0, it is a time of angry nostalgia: Ron Paul making a stump speech. This should be a time of adventure, innovation and creativity in the building of liberalism 5.0. America is ready for an upgrade to a new and higher level; indeed, we are overdue for a project that can capture the best energies of our rising generations, those who will lead the United States and the world to new and richer ways of living that will make the “advanced” societies of the 20th century look primitive, backward and unfulfilled.
We’ve wasted too many years arguing over how to retrieve the irretrievable; can we please now get on with the actual business of this great, liberal, unapologetically forward-looking nation?
If at least some perspicacious observers could see when the New Deal began that it would inevitably lead to our current predicament, can it properly be said ever to have worked?
That's a point I've been trying to make for 20 years. While they love to label themselves "progressives," there is nothing progressive, innovative, or even enlightened about the liberal agenda. It is stale, outmoded, and has been obsolete for probably half a century. And it has always been at odds with the founding vision of this nation.
If you're looking for a philosophy that works, one that measures the future as a function of a successful past, conservatism is your only real choice. Liberalism is nothing more than yesterday's leftovers.
I read Mead’s blog every day. Good stuff.
I’ve just copied and pasted that paragraph about the sheer amount of stuff people have and the impoverishment of their lives, and my intent is presenting it to my freshmen and sophomores tomorrow in their English class as their reflection prompt. Most of my students are Alaska Native students, and most of them have a seemingly endless supply of electronic toys and new snowmachines, and many of them come to class without any apparent habit of work. It’ll be another interesting day in my class.
Not this guy. Heap big CFR elitist with huge RiNO horn .... in fact, his horn is so big, he gets to decide whether he wants to be a Democrat RiNO or a GOP RiNO. This is one of the guys who are supplying the deepthink to the Masters of the Universe. From his bio on Politico:
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy. His book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), was widely hailed by reviewers, historians, and diplomats as an important study that will change the way Americans and others think about American foreign policy. ....
He is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and the translation of New Testament Greek. Mr. Mead has traveled widely in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and often speaks at conferences in the United States and abroad. He is a founding board member of the New America Foundation and the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale. He is a native of South Carolina and lives in Jackson Heights, New York.....
...Mr. Mead writes regularly on international affairs for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and Esquire. He serves as a regular reviewer of books for Foreign Affairs and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. <snip>
Heap big deepthinker, author, lecturer, and -- the important part -- Way Better Than You.
Have talking head, will travel.
Everybody, drink rat poison and die. Walter Russell Mead hath spoken.