Walter Russell Mead: A Red Dixiecrat Dawn?
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
Is America turning into Dixie? And, if it is, is that a bad thing?
The controversy over the blue social model keeps heating up. With the controversy over Wisconsin’s restrictions on public employee unions metastasizing from the Madison protests to what increasingly looks like a national political battle, the blue state and red state models of social development and economic governance seem to be at daggers drawn.
The South — anti-union, anti-government and ‘pro-business’ — looks to be squaring off against what remains of the industrial North with its historically higher wages, stronger unions and more interventionist government.
Many liberals worry that what we are seeing with the assault on public sector unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere is the triumph of red state capitalism over the blue state model — and that the result will be the export of classic southern poverty and ignorance to the rest of the country. This is not, on its face, an unreasonable fear; many southern states rank at the bottom for school achievement, teacher pay, life expectancy and per capita income. (I remember hearing as a kid that South Carolina’s motto should be “Thank God for Mississippi!” since Mississippi was often the only state keeping the Palmetto State out of dead last on national comparisons.)
Wisconsin doesn’t want to thank God for Mississippi, and rightly so.
But jumpy Wisconsin liberals should relax — and Southerners should not feel so smug. The policies associated with red state economics aren’t the cause of Southern poverty; they are if anything associated with its cure. And in any case, the South is going to have to change its development strategy too. Red state ‘catch-up’ capitalism is as dead as blue state ‘coaster’ capitalism and the United States is going to have to strike out in a new direction that, while ultimately very promising, is going to cause trouble in every section of the country...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
Is America turning into Dixie? And, if it is, is that a bad thing?
The controversy over the blue social model keeps heating up. With the controversy over Wisconsin’s restrictions on public employee unions metastasizing from the Madison protests to what increasingly looks like a national political battle, the blue state and red state models of social development and economic governance seem to be at daggers drawn.
The South — anti-union, anti-government and ‘pro-business’ — looks to be squaring off against what remains of the industrial North with its historically higher wages, stronger unions and more interventionist government.
Many liberals worry that what we are seeing with the assault on public sector unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere is the triumph of red state capitalism over the blue state model — and that the result will be the export of classic southern poverty and ignorance to the rest of the country. This is not, on its face, an unreasonable fear; many southern states rank at the bottom for school achievement, teacher pay, life expectancy and per capita income. (I remember hearing as a kid that South Carolina’s motto should be “Thank God for Mississippi!” since Mississippi was often the only state keeping the Palmetto State out of dead last on national comparisons.)
Wisconsin doesn’t want to thank God for Mississippi, and rightly so.
But jumpy Wisconsin liberals should relax — and Southerners should not feel so smug. The policies associated with red state economics aren’t the cause of Southern poverty; they are if anything associated with its cure. And in any case, the South is going to have to change its development strategy too. Red state ‘catch-up’ capitalism is as dead as blue state ‘coaster’ capitalism and the United States is going to have to strike out in a new direction that, while ultimately very promising, is going to cause trouble in every section of the country...