The Blue Beast

Walter Russell Mead is onto something in his description of the “blue model,” which has become the “blue beast” (“blue” as in “blue state,” i.e., Democratic).

The “blue model” is the America Democrats pine for, the post-war (1946-1965) society of growing government, big business, and big unions, oligopolies and monopolies providing lifetime employment, competing and cooperating with each other according to understood rules, providing security to the great American middle class. Democrats ran the show, the country grew economically, expanded government, and moved toward “more and better services each year,” with college “expected to become more and more affordable.”

Now, according to Mead, “The breakdown of the blue model” is both the core American society problem and key to the Democratic party’s troubles:

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. . .like the blue model [and] 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 problem, as Mead sees it, is with Democrats. They believe the exact opposite: that the blue model is the only way to go:

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The . . . 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 Party thinks its job is to make [public services] bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that’s what it’s all about.

Mead argues we must instead check the “blue beast”:

We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it.

This from a Democrat!