The Red and the Blue
I want to recommend some essential reading from Walter Russell Mead. The Bard professor, author, and blogger at the American Interest has been penning a fantastic series of web essays on what he calls the "blue social model." That's a model of large institutions—big business, big government, big labor—that organizes society and provides for human welfare from the cradle to the grave. Mead's point is that this type of social organization has been undergoing a slow-motion demolition for more than three decades. The blue social model is not only broke, it's not equipped to deal with the challenges of our postmodern, technologically advanced, globalized world.
What makes the most recent entry in this series so interesting is how it suggests that the blue social model is old—very, very old. Here's Mead:
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations. The Calvinist orthodoxy of the seventeenth century yielded increasingly to Deism and Unitarianism in the eighteenth — and Harvard officially became Unitarian in 1803, dropping its belief in the divinity of Christ. In the nineteenth century literary and intellectual New England hedged its bets, backing a range of horses from Emersonian transcendentalism to the more evangelically flavored Calvinism of the Victorian years. During the second half of the twentieth century the mind of New England became more secular than in past generations– but nothing has ever changed the deep belief in this cultural stream that, however defined, morality exists and that it is the job of the state to enforce true morals and uphold right thinking.
We too often forget that our contemporary political debates are tied to cultural and geographical factors that are centuries old. Kudos to Walter Russell Mead for reminding us that American politics is a set of recurring debates over big issues—the nature of the best state, the tension between central and peripheral authority, individual liberty versus social equality, free enterprise versus progressive leveling. Only the names of the participants change.
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Nov '10
Re: The Red and the Blue
New England has a president that whole-heartedly agrees with them, that it is the job of the state to “enforce true morals” and “uphold right thinking.” I guess that means, “force the peculiar morals and thinking of an elite cadre of narcissistic jerks on everybody.” But much of the rest of the country believes what a different sort of president said:
"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"— Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981
Edited on Jan 25, 2011 at 9:36amMay '10
Re: The Red and the Blue
"Government enforcing morals. . . ." So much of our political debate becomes clear when we remember that, for the Left, the politics is the religion.