Beyond Blue 6: The Great Divorce

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Walter Russell Mead

2/28/12

 

The decline of the blue social model is a subject I’ve been thinking about for the last thirty years. My first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition was written in the mid 1980s from the standpoint of someone who still believed that the blue model was synonymous with progress and civilization. In that book, I looked at how globalization was dismantling the social compact not just in the United States but throughout the developed world, and argued that the decline of consensual social market capitalism wasn’t just a challenge to the American domestic system. It was a challenge to America’s global leadership — the model and ideal we proposed for life under social capitalism was falling apart. Our argument against the communists had been that capitalism could produce more wealth and more justice than communism, and the social welfare state of the western world was Exhibit A for that proposition. At a time when the Soviet Union still stood, and the ideological competition with communism was still real in parts of the developing world, the thought that the capitalist welfare states of the west would soon be coming under immense pressure was an unsettling one.

 

It was also unsettling to think about what the decline of what I now think of as the blue social model would mean in the United States. We looked to be headed for a generation of wage stagnation among blue collar workers. The decline of manufacturing as a source of high wages and secure jobs in the United States had already begun by then; my reflections on globalization suggested that the decline would go on for quite a while — as it has. Our society was going to become less equal, and less able to provide the kinds of growing social insurance and welfare payments that it had done in the past.

 

(Snip)

 

We are seeing those changes now. Competition from low wage labor overseas and automation at home is forcing millions of people to face life on new terms. The low rent cocoons of the welfare state — warehousing “surplus” people for generations at a time — are becoming unaffordable. We are being called — driven — to a new kind of life and a new social model that gives us another chance to get the balance between consumption and production right.

 

(Snip)

 

A. The Blue Social Model I recommend people read this series. Long, dense, and well worth the time.

 

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