Futuristic Blues. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, January 23, 2013. Also here.
Also see: Is Meritocracy A Sham? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 1, 2012.
Mead:
When
Americans peer ahead into the future, the most consequential question we ask is
about jobs: in a world in which manufacturing jobs won’t support an affluent
middle class and in which many professional jobs will be transformed by
automation, how will most Americans make a living, and what will keep the
middle class afloat?
A
conventional, widely shared view informs the way that blue America looks at
that future. This view holds that the death of industrial society means the
death of the mass middle class. When millions of people can’t make a living
“making stuff” in factories anymore, wages for the unskilled will fall. America
will be increasingly polarized between a small group of high skilled creative
professionals and a larger group scavenging a living by serving them: mowing
their lawns, catering their parties and so on.
Those
who think that the blue model needs to be preserved and extended into the
future (including, I think, our current president and most of his top allies
and advisors), tend to think that under those conditions we will both need and
be able to afford an ever-more active redistributive state. The tycoons and the
very successful minority will be so rich, thanks to their continuing gains from
globalization and technological change, that they can pay progressively higher
taxes to fund basic services and middle class jobs for enough of the rest of
the country that something like a middle class society can be preserved. From this perspective, a government-funded
health care system is more than a method of delivering health care: it is a way
of providing protected, blue-model type jobs when the factories have mostly
disappeared. In general, from this perspective you wouldn’t worry about the
growth of public employment compared to jobs growth in the private sector; a
highly productive private sector might employ fewer and fewer people to
generate the wealth that would sustain the larger but much less productive
public sector.
This
view of the future sees a supercharged private economy pumping huge amounts
into the system in a way that, unless corrected by sustained government action,
polarizes incomes to an unacceptable degree.
It sees a handful of very large and very successful businesses—an
information-finance-entertainment complex, perhaps, including everything from
movie studios to investment banks to software firms—generating vast profits.
Top research scientists and a few other groups will also do well: the celebrity
chefs, the famous writers and intellectuals who attract funding and publicity
from the lords of the earth, and other clever, creative types. Wall Street,
Hollywood and Silicon Valley will anchor the vibrant, creative side of the
American economy, but the rest of the country and the very large majority of
the citizenry will live much less productive lives.
The
people who work in the cutting edge firms, directly or as contractors, will do
extremely well and live fascinating lives. But the rest of the country will be
cut off from wealth creation. For 4.0 liberals, the programmatic consequences
are obvious: tax the productive private sector in order to fund a dignified
life for those in education, health care and especially for the large majority
of the population without the skills or the creativity that would qualify them
to join the productive minority.
This
vision of the future can’t be dismissed with contempt, and it would be wrong to
call this socialism. It is a recognizably liberal approach to the problems of
governance and distribution. It does not seek state ownership of the means of
production and it does not seek to crush freedom of expression. It assumes that
the private economy and the creative power of gifted individuals will remain
the wellsprings of innovation and prosperity.
But if this vision retains some of the essential features of the liberal
outlook, it offers a darker and more elitist vision than classic American
approaches have had, and it is a much more pessimistic philosophy than
liberalism 4.0 was in its prime.
. . . . . . . . . .
The
concept of an elite guiding national development for the benefit of those it
governs remains operative today among blue partisans, but what’s changed is
that the blue elite no longer sees a bright future for the masses. It turns out
that there are two ways to think about the trajectory of liberal society. The
traditional view is that over time the differences between elites and
non-elites can and should shrink, and it is the proper goal of liberal policy
to ensure that they do.
The
other view is to believe that differences of talent and ambition ensure that
the world will always be divided between a creative minority and an inert
majority, and that the goal of social policy isn’t to eliminate that
ineradicable difference, but to ensure that the process of recruitment into the
elite is genuinely fair. Once the privileges of race, gender and fortune have
been neutralized so that the elite is a purely meritocratic body, the members
of the elite are obliged to concern themselves for the welfare of the majority,
but there is nothing more to be done about equalizing their condition with that
of the elite. Authority must rest in the hands of the qualified; those who
score poorly on aptitude tests, don’t do well in classes and/or lack
extraordinary beauty, artistic talent or ambition must resign themselves to
taking direction from the natural aristocracy that a well ordered society has
brought so smoothly to the fore.
The
economic vision of the meritocrats nicely complements this view that the
revolutionary and leveling phase of the liberal experiment has come to an end.
An economy in which the talented minority generates wealth that, in its wisdom
and compassion, it then shares with the passive majority becomes a society
destined to be ruled in perpetuity by that talented minority. The titans of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and
Hollywood, advised by the professors of the great universities and the high
civil servants, can perpetuate their social privilege and power forever as long
as careers are open to talent.
From
the standpoint of America’s blue meritocracy, this vision of the future is both
humane and inevitable. Economic development is disempowering the many and empowering
the few; and there is nothing that can be done about that. The only decent and
fair thing to do is to make a trade. The few will be taxed for the sake of the
many, and in return the many will accept the wise guidance of the few.
In this
vision, liberalism has accomplished its historic mission by bringing a true
meritocracy into our midst. No longer do accidents of race or gender block the
path of the talented to the heights of power; hardwired into the social
structure by the shape of the economy and legitimized by equal access, a
radical inequality of power and status will indefinitely persist. Liberalism
now has nothing to do with attacking or eroding the power of the liberal elite;
as long as that elite carries out its duty to share with the masses and accepts
that its children must in turn earn their own place in the elite rather than
simply inheriting one, the elite has no further need to democratize. The long
job of social evolution, the fight against entrenched power going back to Magna
Carta is over. It has done its job, it has brought us into the golden age of
absolute and permanent meritocracy. The best now truly rule.
And
something else has also come to an end: the rise of the common people. In the
industrial economy, the rising productivity of ordinary people underpinned
their rising political power. Karl Marx was not the only observer who could see
that a country where the majority worked in factories was a very different
place from a country where the majority were peasants on farms. History
demonstrated nothing if it didn’t show that peasants could be oppressed with
impunity for hundreds of years. Industrial workers, though, literate,
organized, and urban, were a much more formidable force.
Gentry
liberals today see something different: the ‘ungifted’ majority is the object
of their pity and care, rather than a force that demands their respect and even
their fear. As they contemplate what post industrial society will look like,
they are filled with pity for the incompetent losers, the untalented, those who
will only be able to get jobs as pool boys and cocktail waitresses in the
post-manufacturing world. Industrial society saw the workers as a rising
irresistible force whose interests could not be ignored; post-industrial
liberals seem to see the common folk as a collection of sad and weak losers
whom the strong must protect.
The
economy is making us more unequal, but a wise elite can mitigate the harm—if
only we are willing to live under their tutelage. That is what liberalism 4.0
offers today; from an ideology of populism and reform it has mutated into a
defense of the status quo.
