There's a certain irony to the website named Big Tent Review, with its photograph of a big top as its masthead. Orginially envisioned as a group blog for second-tier "less crazy" conservatives, the group slowly dwindled as it became progressively clear that the ongoing madness gripping conservatism was metastasizing into a somewhat permanent Southern-fried state of conscience. There was no big tent, there was only a circus.
"Ironic" because every time I see it, I'm reminded of David Frum's observation that conservatives like capitalism because it keeps people afraid. Fear of losing employer-provided health care, fear of losing one's home and one's family, or as Frum puts it: "Risk disciplines and teachs self control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top." Frum wrings his hands at people willing to leave the nest and strike out on their own as artists and innovators. That's conservatism, of a sort.
Sander's essay today is about the "red social model" and "blue social model" for success. He talks about the blue social model as being essentially the Chinese fascist model: the government set prices and conditions for core industries (transportation, agriculture, data infrastructure, heavy manufacturing), and the industries in response guaranteed lifelong employement, retirement pensions, and health care coverage.
Sanders goes on to say that Japan and Europe started to degrade this model by introducing technological innovations the US had to match to keep up. In some ways reading Sanders's version of history is a lot like reading Spuffords Red Plenty (brilliant, brilliant book, BTW) set in the time of polyester and disco instead of wool and bebop.
Sanders ignores a key element of the story: it was those Americans with the strongest oligarchal impulses that brought down the post-WWII blue social model. Japanese automotive and electronic imports were allowed because the people with the most money leveraged the US Chamber of Commerce and related institutions into a lobbying effort to make more money, the US's own manufacturing base be damned. To be sure, there was envy from average citizens eager to get their hands on a sexy European import and the latest Sony Walkman, but without relaxation of tarrifs they US could have remained a Soviet-style walled garden, and the wealthy could have kept those tarrifs in place if they wished.
Sanders points out that there's a push now to create a new "red social model," but that it's going to be years before it becomes established, and that the base is really, really not going to like it. For one thing, it has to take into account that minority business owners, especially Latinos and Asians, actually understand that government-purchased infrastructure supplies roads, supplies power and water, as well as healthy and educated labor capable of doing the job, and the Southern Strategy will have to be truly dead to sell that to the base.
In the meantime, there's already a New Blue Social Model rolling out. It looks a lot like the New Red Social Model but with a twist: the New Blue Social Model actually cares about the social part, about society. The current blue social model is messy and individualistic: it lets people be people. It says that to be successful, we must be capable of operating the levers of power. We must have full educations; we must not have those educations terminated early by parental responsibilities; we will take on parental responsibilities when we are fully capable of doing so; we see all responsibile people of all sexes as full partners in making these decisions. We must be free from fear, especially the fears at which the David Frums of the right rub their hands in eager pleasure. This is one of the reasons why birth control was such a big deal in the past election; for every Phyllis Schafly wringing her hands over the burdens women "were forced to accept without being asked" there were hundreds of women who wanted to keep their responsibilities and the rights that came with them.
Until and unless the New Red Social Model encompasses the reality that a low-skilled man cannot through pluck and determination make his way in a post-Internet world, it's doomed to failure.
I'm genuinely happy to see that Frum, at least, is starting to see the inherent cruelty in the Republican vision. In a conversation on Fox News with other talking heads, he said, sounding a lot like Andrew Sullivan: "All of us who are allowed to participate in this conversation, we all have health insurance. And the fact that millions of Americans don't have health insurance, they don't get to be on television. And it is maybe a symptom of a broader problem, not just the Republican problem, that the economic anxieties of so many Americans are just not part of the national discussion at all."
We're down once again to two competing visions: one that is boring because it uses cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment and aversion, a very technocratic vision. It's the Blue Social Model. The Red Social Model is about feeling: "The safety net makes people too happy, too free, too easy with their lives. Whatever happened to hardscrabble, can-do Americanism? How do we force Americans back into that mould, and the rest into the closet?"
What the Red Social Modellers haven't demonstrated, here in the most innovative time in American history yet, is that it has disappeared. Yet the New Red Social Model is being built around the feeling that it has. And that's why it's doomed.
"Ironic" because every time I see it, I'm reminded of David Frum's observation that conservatives like capitalism because it keeps people afraid. Fear of losing employer-provided health care, fear of losing one's home and one's family, or as Frum puts it: "Risk disciplines and teachs self control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top." Frum wrings his hands at people willing to leave the nest and strike out on their own as artists and innovators. That's conservatism, of a sort.
Sander's essay today is about the "red social model" and "blue social model" for success. He talks about the blue social model as being essentially the Chinese fascist model: the government set prices and conditions for core industries (transportation, agriculture, data infrastructure, heavy manufacturing), and the industries in response guaranteed lifelong employement, retirement pensions, and health care coverage.
Sanders goes on to say that Japan and Europe started to degrade this model by introducing technological innovations the US had to match to keep up. In some ways reading Sanders's version of history is a lot like reading Spuffords Red Plenty (brilliant, brilliant book, BTW) set in the time of polyester and disco instead of wool and bebop.
Sanders ignores a key element of the story: it was those Americans with the strongest oligarchal impulses that brought down the post-WWII blue social model. Japanese automotive and electronic imports were allowed because the people with the most money leveraged the US Chamber of Commerce and related institutions into a lobbying effort to make more money, the US's own manufacturing base be damned. To be sure, there was envy from average citizens eager to get their hands on a sexy European import and the latest Sony Walkman, but without relaxation of tarrifs they US could have remained a Soviet-style walled garden, and the wealthy could have kept those tarrifs in place if they wished.
Sanders points out that there's a push now to create a new "red social model," but that it's going to be years before it becomes established, and that the base is really, really not going to like it. For one thing, it has to take into account that minority business owners, especially Latinos and Asians, actually understand that government-purchased infrastructure supplies roads, supplies power and water, as well as healthy and educated labor capable of doing the job, and the Southern Strategy will have to be truly dead to sell that to the base.
In the meantime, there's already a New Blue Social Model rolling out. It looks a lot like the New Red Social Model but with a twist: the New Blue Social Model actually cares about the social part, about society. The current blue social model is messy and individualistic: it lets people be people. It says that to be successful, we must be capable of operating the levers of power. We must have full educations; we must not have those educations terminated early by parental responsibilities; we will take on parental responsibilities when we are fully capable of doing so; we see all responsibile people of all sexes as full partners in making these decisions. We must be free from fear, especially the fears at which the David Frums of the right rub their hands in eager pleasure. This is one of the reasons why birth control was such a big deal in the past election; for every Phyllis Schafly wringing her hands over the burdens women "were forced to accept without being asked" there were hundreds of women who wanted to keep their responsibilities and the rights that came with them.
Until and unless the New Red Social Model encompasses the reality that a low-skilled man cannot through pluck and determination make his way in a post-Internet world, it's doomed to failure.
I'm genuinely happy to see that Frum, at least, is starting to see the inherent cruelty in the Republican vision. In a conversation on Fox News with other talking heads, he said, sounding a lot like Andrew Sullivan: "All of us who are allowed to participate in this conversation, we all have health insurance. And the fact that millions of Americans don't have health insurance, they don't get to be on television. And it is maybe a symptom of a broader problem, not just the Republican problem, that the economic anxieties of so many Americans are just not part of the national discussion at all."
We're down once again to two competing visions: one that is boring because it uses cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment and aversion, a very technocratic vision. It's the Blue Social Model. The Red Social Model is about feeling: "The safety net makes people too happy, too free, too easy with their lives. Whatever happened to hardscrabble, can-do Americanism? How do we force Americans back into that mould, and the rest into the closet?"
What the Red Social Modellers haven't demonstrated, here in the most innovative time in American history yet, is that it has disappeared. Yet the New Red Social Model is being built around the feeling that it has. And that's why it's doomed.
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