The Once and Future Liberalism

Good day all. Now that I have taken care of the Angry Systems Administrator’s caffeine fix, it’s time to look at other things. In this case, it’s an article in The American Interest that someone sent me to look at.

The article is titled “The Once and Future Liberalism” by Walter Russell Mead and is a very detailed and scholarly study of Liberalism down through the centuries. I did something similar¹ a while back, but it was nowhere near as well researched and written as this piece. Here are some of the highlights:

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.

Mr. Mead then goes on to explain the various stages of Liberalism over the centuries. He refers to the current version as the “Blue Model.” He uses John Kenneth Gailbraith’s description of “The Iron Triangle” as the guide:

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.

Mr. Mead goes into greater and greater detail, far to much for me to write about here without basically copying the entire article. It took me about 40 minutes to read and I strongly recommend that you do. It is the best explanation I’ve seen on the current political divide and why it is happening.
The long story short is, the current form of liberalism is hopelessly obsolete and has been for a good 25 or more years.

Today liberalism 4.1, blue liberalism, is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect.
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.

Now I’ve taken the quotes out of context. I had to in order to try and convey some of what Mr. Mead was writing about, basically to give you a taste and have you visit the site and read the article for yourself. It will make you think and reflect on what is happening today.
That is all
~The Angry Webmaster~