Michigan and the unraveling of the blue social model
Today’s blue model liberals face a challenge. Can they find a path that actually restores states like Michigan and cities like Detroit to the kind of health they knew back when the blue model actually worked?
Red state conservatives, for their part, have yet to show that they can deliver something better than the mere destruction of the blue system: an alternative way to raise living standards and generate an acceptable basic level of personal security for ordinary workers in the American economy.
Voters seem to understand that both alternatives on offer are deeply flawed. The future of American politics will neither be blue or red as they are understood today; there are new solutions and new methods out there that can address many social issues that engage blue concern but getting there involves the creative destruction of many of the institutions and programs that blues have come to see as ends rather than means.
Blowback
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We saw the blue anti-social model this week.
mwbri on December 13, 2012 at 11:47 AM
Red State Conservative Model: Everyone needs to work to receive money.
brewcrew67 on December 13, 2012 at 11:50 AM
6.9% unemployment in red states.
8.7% unemployment in blue states.
How is that for delivery?
JPeterman on December 13, 2012 at 11:57 AM
The people in Red states are working more and for more than the blue states. How is that not success? We need to let Capitalism work and stop wasting money. Period.
DeathtotheSwiss on December 13, 2012 at 11:58 AM
Exactly.
DeathtotheSwiss on December 13, 2012 at 11:59 AM
Just get the damn government out of our lives.
The “blue social model” is utterly destructive because it is run by government and government is inherently corrupt. Look at liberals, look at what they have and they still bleat for more and more and more and more. There is absolutely no satisfying corrupt liberals who use everyone else’s money to buy themselves votes by offering more and more social programs to the point where we’re giving away damn cell phones now.
The blue model doesn’t work, and never will work. It’s corruption at it’s worst.
Just leave us the hell alone. Oh, and if liberals really did give a shyt about “poor people” they’d be spending their own money helping them. Instead, liberals are the last people on earth to spend their own money to help people. They’ll move heaven and earth to take yours, but hell no they aren’t going to use their own money. They’ll spend millions getting laws enacted to take YOUR money but won’t give a dime to charity.
darwin on December 13, 2012 at 11:59 AM
If only the GOP would advertise these facts, JPeterman. If only…
I think that’s why Romney lost. People looked around and saw very few jobs and none paying enough to make up for loss of Section 8 housing, food stamps, Medicaid combined. So, they held their nose and voted for the Food Stamp president.
PattyJ on December 13, 2012 at 11:59 AM
The next obvious target for short term political and longer term cultural victory would be teachers unions, the NEA and the Dept. Of Education.
We have to do a full-court press for school vouchers, teacher accountability, local control of curricula (and decentralization in general) and tax incentives for parents to home school.
Let the shrieking and wailing begin. But the hand that rocks the cradle, as they say.
Take it back or let it burn.
Rixon on December 13, 2012 at 12:00 PM
What a joke! The northern exodus has been going strong for decades now. Half of California’s best people have moved to Texas and points east. Blue places like Detroit are practically ghost towns and the author wants the red states to show how they can deliver better? Talk about missing the forest for the trees…
HotAirian on December 13, 2012 at 12:01 PM
Good luck with that. Every liberal entitlement, policy or tax that’s been reversed is attacked as a denial of fundamental rights.
antipc on December 13, 2012 at 12:03 PM
Yeah we all see how well the blue model works–that’s why we’re in this muffed up mess in the first place. The blue model works quite well until pay up time when the bill comes due. I can see why this guy doesn’t have commenting at his site bcuz he’d get skewered and flame broiled over commentary like this.
stukinIL4now on December 13, 2012 at 12:03 PM
The commenters here have the nailed the obvious: All the red states have to do is be successful.
We did not deliver the failure of the blue state social model. It collapsed upon itself. What do we have to prove W.R. Mead?
mwbri on December 13, 2012 at 12:04 PM
Yup, every person that Jesus helped was instructed to go and sin no more. What was the sin Jesus was admonishing them of? Not working, but instead simply begging and living off others labors. So Jesus did not think that even the disabled should be free from labors.
For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
This is a very prominent moral virtue going back to Homer, Pythagoras and Demosthenes. Pretty much all of written history.
astonerii on December 13, 2012 at 12:06 PM
MA @ 6.5%
Nothing bluer than this state, nothing loonier than the libtards that populate it.
roy_batty on December 13, 2012 at 12:13 PM
Oops, VT @ 5.4% with even loonier libtards.
roy_batty on December 13, 2012 at 12:14 PM
And no institutions are richer right now than Harvard, MIT, Amherst, Williams, Boston U., Boston College, etc. MA benefits from billions in federal research dollars and billions in tuition dollars coming in to its elite universities, which educate primarily the children of the overpriveleged. Thousands of tenured faculty are making huge salaries. Most of these dollars are borrowed, so this economic “success” is unsustainable. MA just hasn’t hit the wall yet. But as soon as the higher ed bubble bursts, look out below!!
And virtually no black people or Hispanics. White liberals enjoy their exclusive enclaves.
rockmom on December 13, 2012 at 12:29 PM
Agree
I grew up in the blue paradise of Detroit. Unions over time became inbred. Fathers bring in sons. Jobs are reserved for those who obey the union.
You couldn’t get into an apprenticeship program back then, without a sponsor. It became one big fiefdom. Racially limited by that fact
If you had the good union job, you were loaded. Many could coast, if they were on the good side – of the union big shots. There was always another schmo who had to pick up the slack.
It was a tradition like Christmas, to plan for the strike pay. We would visit friends who were on the long holiday. The smaller strikes were a joke, time to party, do your scheduled time on the picket line, go fishing.
Meanwhile, management couldn’t afford down time – they had their own exhorbitant salaries, and their nepotist make-work offsprings’ salaries – to preserve, so eventually they handed over concessions, ratcheted up the debt burden, and preserved the golden parachutes. It was just as hard to get into the glass house, as the union broom pushing jobs, because the system had settled into the dark ages. One was born to get a job, or not
My friend’s dad had to deal with line workers OD-ing in the john. Couldn’t fire them.
Fools’ paradise, unfunded, and eventually uncompetitive.
What destroyed the union model was lack of accountability, non secret ballots, closed shop, and the fact unions were able to beat the craxp out of dissenters. Similarly, management was watching out for retirement, because it wasn’t their company. Meanwhile, who can build a business big enough to compete with a giant complex that took generations to create.
IMHO it will take RTW states to shake the union/mgmt sloths out of their dream state
entagor on December 13, 2012 at 1:22 PM
I guess Mead is unaware of the exodus from California to red states like Texas.
gwelf on December 13, 2012 at 1:27 PM
Not one of Mead’s better columns.
petefrt on December 13, 2012 at 8:36 PM
On VT, it is practically Aryan in demography. From my own minute perspective, it seems that anyone who wants a job up there can find one and they do. There is even somewhat of a small business boom there. I believe the reason VT isn’t held up as the liberal wet dream is exactly because there are so few people of color there as you point out.
On MA there is no doubt that the schools get their pockets stuffed from the Fed but, that isn’t the entirety of business here by a long shot. There is medical & high tech device manufacturing, defense industries (Raytheon & the Patriot system), boat building, Smith & Wesson, fisheries, farming, software, new film industry build up, and more. Although it often seems like our idiot governor keeps finding ways to put his foot across the neck of commerce, it keeps finding ways to thrive. With the exception of UMASS, if the schools tanked there would be shrieking in Cambridge, Newton, & Brookline, panic in Boston, and a far less crowded bar scene as 80% of the out of state & foreign students went home. I think we’d survive it.
roy_batty on December 13, 2012 at 10:56 PM