Walter Russell Mead: The Once and Future Liberalism

We need to get beyond the dysfunctional and outdated ideas of 20th-century liberalism.

Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.

The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing “social dividend”, meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

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.

The rats might excommunicate this apostate!

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.

Frankly, I think he's trying to talk to Obammunists by sounding like one, as in this paragraph:

Fordism was once a term of abuse hurled at the factory system by Marxist critics who, rightly, deplored the alienation and anomie that mass production for mass consumption entailed. Has the Fordist factory system and the big box consumerism that goes with it now become our ideal, the highest form of social life our minds can conceive? Social critics also denounced our school system, justifiably, as a mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting system that trained kids to sit still, follow directions and move with the herd. The blue model built big-box schools where the children of factory workers could get the standardized social and intellectual training necessary to enable most of them to graduate into the big-box Ford plant and shop in the big-box store. Maybe that was a huge social advance at one time, but is that something to aspire to or be proud of today? Don’t we want to teach our children to do something smarter than move in large groups by the clock and the bell, follow directions and always color between the lines?

So working on an assembly line or a "big-box store", and shopping in "big-box stores" is demeaning, and everything bad that Communists said about them?

One, does he really mean that? Two, is it true? Or is it more true, that big companies like that employed millions, negotiated with workers for a 40-hour workweek, and did not lay claim to 100% of a person's life the way the Communists and other Obama supporters do?

Conformism? That let women stay home and take care of the kids, instead of having to go out and find work and juggle latchkey kids and let them stay at home instead of being "socialized" by left-wing social workers and teachers? "Stultifying" what? Housework? Instead of daywork, and a demanding boss who wants 50 hours' work for 40 hours' pay? That's too tough on her?

What is more true about “Fordism” (which is an Antonio Gramsci term, check out Wikipedia for more) is that it increased the wealth of the world to a point where we stood looking out upon a “land of immeasurable plenty”. Man for the first time in history would be able to truly enjoy the fruits of his labor rather than just eking out a bare existence. Talk about your hope and change! With a little work, leisure time became available to many and poverty and starvation was becoming a thing of the past while the old empires of Europe whose wealth came from the exploitation of “captive” peoples were destined to die. And die they did in World War I, never to recover. And in their death throes they threw up the most evil ideologies ever conceived.

At least, that’s the way I see it. ;-)

The problem with people like Meade is that they think a future (for mankind) can be planned and, of course, they want to do the planning.

He may interpret history differently than I but he has a remarkably clear sight of some of the broad sweeps of that history and how it relates to the present day, IMHO.

Today, we are past “Fordism” as the computer revolution is overtaking the assembly line. What would Gramsci say or, for that matter, what does Meade say? Meade is silent because he doesn’t know, yet he still wants to plan. Telling.

>>>Do you mean Eskimos, or Alaskan Na-Dene Indians, distant cousins of the Apache and Navajo?<<<

Up here, the Indians in the Alaskan Interior are Athabascans. Most who attend our school are Koyukon or Gwitchin, although there are few Ahtna people here and there. The Eskimos are more properly known as Yup’ik, Chup’ik, or Inupiaq - all of which mean “the real people” or “the human beings” in their languages.

I’m Jewish, which means that I get to play with xenophobic Native snottiness when it comes up. For instance: I once had this kid tell me (in class), “Our culture is 10,000 years old.” I smiled and responded, “It’s nice to see that someone else has been around as long as the Jews.” This same kid then said a few hours later, “White people push us around,” to which I respond, “Yeah, the same thing happened to us.”

For my son, who is half Italian, we go far out of our way to make sure he know that he has a proud tradition, too - Romans, Italians, the good things done by the Catholics.

I also go way, way out of my way to uphold and praise American culture, especially the concepts of rule of law, limited government, and God-given rights. When we’ve read Solzhenitsyn in class (”One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”), one of the local sidelights we explore is what would have happened to Alaskan Native people if this place was still Russian America under the control of the Communists. Suddenly those sad little moments in the BIA schools long ago seem like a minor problem compared to what could have happened.

Anyone still thinking Mead has something to say to conservatives and the Tea Party, can pretty well leave the room after he says (quoting the article again),

“Liberal” and “progressive” are two of the noblest and most important words in the English dictionary. They describe essential qualities of the American mind and essential values in American politics in a country born in reaction against oligarchy and concentrated autocracy. They sum up in a nutshell what this country is all about.

That should about do it.

I wasn't aware that "Fordism" is a coinage of Gramsci's, and it's interesting that Mead should track it into his new books and essays. It tells us either where he's coming from, or to whom he thinks he ought to direct his argument.

Up here, the Indians in the Alaskan Interior are Athabascans.

We're talking about the same thing, per the Wiki article on Athabaskan (Athabascan, Athapaskan). Their article says the Ahtna dialect is one of the most conservative and closest to "Proto-Athabaskan".

I noticed that the Kiowa Apache (term in use as recently as 20 years ago) are now called "Plains Apache".

“It’s nice to see that someone else has been around as long as the Jews.”

Hmm, I figure about 4200 since Avram left Ur of the Chaldees for Canaan .... figure a couple hundred more, since the Amoritic Habiru and their kinsmen the Shubiru of hated name, who were so abashed by the ill repute of their tribal name that they took instead the name of their tutelary god Ashur, came up out of the slowly desertifying Arabian Peninsula (once truly "Arabia Felix" and "the land of milk and honey"), to be reviled by the settled Akkadians of Bab-Ili ("Gate of God") as "the hateful Amurru".

So figure 4500 years, tops.

For my son, who is half Italian, we go far out of our way to make sure he know that he has a proud tradition, too.....

Goes back to about the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, when the Proto-Italic people lived in Pannonia, in the Plains of Hungary, speaking real Proto-Italic before it became differentiated, about the time they decided to cross the Alps and descend into Italy. (The name "Vitellius", btw, is Italic, = Lat. "Italus". And further back I think I saw an etymology having to do with young bulls.)

Yes, they "did good", too. <cue Miklos Rozsa>

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