Can Big Red Deal With Big Blue?

Walter Russell Mead has written two pieces of work that explains the current political situation. In his first piece, he writes about the "Blue Model," the American Social Contract that governed America from the end of World War II until the 1970s.

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ’social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure.

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed.

But things didn't get better and better. By the 1970s, the Blue Model broke down and it has been dying a slow death since. This is a problem for the Democrats, since this model benefited them the most. You can basically see the end of the Democratic majority with the beginning of the end of the Blue Model.

In the next essay, Mead talks about "Feeding the Blue Beast." He picks up where he left off and notes how this breakdown is problematic for the Democrats:

The blue social model was a triumph of progressive social imagination and political organizing; for two generations it effectively reconciled capitalism with the demand for a better living standard and more security for the population at large.

The breakdown of the blue model is the core problem of American society today and the key to the troubles of the Democratic party. Blue states really are blue; the ‘progressive imagination’ remains staunchly blue, and blue model interest groups like public school teachers, government employees, the remnants of the private union movement and the much healthier labor movement among public employees shape and mostly fund what Howard Dean famously called ‘the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’

Most Americans would like the blue model to stick around and are nostalgic for the security it once provided, but they understand that the great task of our times isn’t to save the blue model but to move on. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party believes exactly the opposite: that the blue social model is the only way to go. If our city and state governments are groaning under the dead weight of inflated labor and pension costs, the only solution is to pump federal money into them somehow. If public schools aren’t working, they need more money — but seriously restructuring the system is out of bounds. If college and university tuition is exploding as the costs of education rapidly and continuously outpaces the general level of inflation, the only solution is to pump more money into the system while leaving it to operate much as it does.

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that’s what it’s all about.

Three problems: we can’t afford it, people know that, and we desperately need the things that Big Blue can’t give us.

So, we need the services that Big Blue once gave us. We still need good schools. People also want to be able to afford health care. We want our elderly to not be impoverished. We want clean water, good highways and the like. But we can't pay for them in the way we used to. We can't just tax our way to prosperity when as Mead notes, people are no longer in secure jobs. And yet we need them.

Mead goes on to note that one of the reasons that we have a Tea Party movement is because we are worried as a public about how to pay for government services. But the Tea Party fails in that it proposes nothing as an alternative.

Mead ends his second essay with a pointed question for the Dems, but it is also a question aimed at Republicans:

Can the Democrats unshackle themselves from their degrading and destructive servitude to the blue beast before the Republicans build a new cohort of smart policy wonks with a practical vision for the future? Can either party develop the capacity for innovative leadership before the social and economic dysfunction of the current system drives us into a massive social and financial crisis?

So, here is my question: can the Republicans come up with a new social contract, a "Red Model?" Can we design a social model that is suited for this time and age?

I think Paul Ryan's "Roadmap" is a start. I have some issues with it, but he is trying to create a new social model based on conservative principles. He is building up instead of just tearing down as the Tea Partiers are wont to do.

But there needs to be more conservative thinkers out there who can think about these issues. Opposition to Obama and the Democrats can only go so far. We need to propose our own vision for a new social contract.

How Do You Say 'Google' In French?

I like France.

My partner and I went to Paris last year. It was my partner's third trip to France and my second. I love the old buildings, the cathedrals, the food and just the life of the City of Lights. I know that we will go back to Paris again, and maybe see even more of France.

While I love going to France, I don't want to be France.

The land of wine, champagne, Citroen and the Effiel Tower seems to be on the tip on many tounges as of late. In the wake of the first Obama budget, France seems to keep coming up. France has become a way of talking about European-style social democracy, where government has a large role in the economy. Why France and not say, Sweden, I don't know. Many of my liberal friends seem long for a goverment that offers care from womb-to-tomb.

For many of us in the center or the center-right, we look at the President's budget with some trepidation. Of course, we need to find a way to deal with health care in the United States. Government needs to find ways to help solve this and other issues. But having a role doesn't always mean running the whole show.

Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times that he fears the United States might become like our Gaullist neighbors and in his mind is not a good idea:

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

Churn is the American way. Companies are born, rise, fall and die. Others come along to replace them. The country’s remarkable capacity for innovation, for reinvention, is tied to its acceptance of failure. Or always has been. Without failure, the culture of risk fades. Without risk, creativity withers. Save the zombies and you sabotage the vital.

If America loses sight of these truths, it will cease to be itself.

Clive Crook, a British expat, has written an extensive essay on his own fears that we might become like France. He agrees with Cohen that adopting a Euro-style social welfare system, could be done- but it would mean sacrificing who we are as Americans.

To put it mildly, I admire this country's instinctive suspicion of concentrated state power, its anti-collectivism, its veneration of the individual spirit and individual enterprise. At different times and in different ways, Democrats and Republicans alike have been at war with aspects of that mind-set, but as an admiring foreigner, I am here to tell you that this culture survives, that the American exception is alive and well, and that it is more than likely the secret of this country's awesome success...

This promised transformation is not a move into unexplored territory, after all. The policies that Obama is proposing have all been tried elsewhere. Ideas that look bold and new in this country are old hat across the Atlantic. And we know something about how well they work.

A strong case can be made for many of Obama's proposals, taken one at a time. I admire his ambition to mend the country's failing, unjust, and needlessly expensive health care system. I also applaud his focus on raising the incomes of the working poor, through tax cuts and wage subsidies (such as his "make work pay" tax credits). But trade-offs need to be faced. A good hard look at Europe makes this plain.

Bigger government requires higher taxes -- in the end, for most taxpayers and not just the rich. Europe shows that tax systems tilted too far against high earners stifle the incentives that spur economic growth. Welfare systems that are more generous and have fewer strings tend to raise unemployment. Stricter regulation can and does retard innovation. Stronger unions can raise unemployment and, in the aggregate, lower incomes.

America is not a perfect society. I am not one of those conservatives that like to talk about the United States being the greatest country on earth and then ignore some glaring problems like health care. But I also think that what is so great about this country is that we are a dynamic culture. We have always been a nation of strivers. Yes, the recent crisis shows that there are some negative effects at times, but on the whole, it has made America a world leader. As I am wont to saying, there is a reason that we don't see a French version of Google, or a German version of Apple. Because of the high taxation and strict regulation, there is less room for entrepeneurs. Yes, European societies tend to be "safe" in that there are generous government policies, but there is little room for innovation.

I agree with Crook that such changes have a chance to shape American character for good or for ill. I am not arguing that no changes need to be made. After the whole mortgage problems, there is need for greater regulation. There is need for reform of the unemployment system or definitely health care. But it seems to me that instead of looking to Europe for the answer, shouldn't we be looking here in America?

Like I said, I like France, but I don't want to live there.