Scorecard of the Senate Graphic

I remember that in a comment previously (I can't remember who said it and when) the observation was made that perhaps Americans naturally lean toward 'wanting' an authoritarian or populist government. I was thinking about this and how it may or may not relate to how our elected officials behave. Check out the below graphic produced based on the scores from the Senate Scorecard.

That's the situation we have in the Senate. You can see some clear splits over social issues, but the differences between the parties are less defined on economic issues. Any thoughts on why?

And in case you can't see it, poor Russ Feingold is all up in the 'Libertarian' corner by himself.

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I think the model of American society Walter Russell Mead sets out in his recent "Power, Terror, Peace and War" has an excellent explanation for the less defined nature of economic policy in the context of left vs. right. He describes the economic organization of the middle to late 20th Century (primarily revolving around the Cold War era) as "Fordist America" - which was a system marked by heavily regulated utilities, state-driven development, and a wide social welfare net designed to promote income equality and economic stability in favor of growth (this involves trends starting from Eisenhower's highway system to LBJ's "Great Society"). It served as a security blanket for Americans and incorporated them into the white-collar, mass-consumption society that persists today.

The Fordist state, however, has been in a long, inevitable decline spurred on by a number of factors starting in the 1980s (Reaganomics, the birth of the information age, the Internet, personal computers, etc.) and its replacement is what Mead labels "millenial capitalism" (I prefer the term techno-capitalism). It is a shift from Fordism's regulatory environment that promoted equality by enforcing economic stability (consolidating utilities, manufacturers and businesses into the corporate giants still around today) toward a system of regulations that protect the "existance and efficiency of markets" with the goal of broaden economic opportunity - in a sense, it is a move past enforcing equality of result to a true equality of opportunity.

I am sorry to rave about this book continuously, but I think Mead has stumbled onto something even bigger than what he has laid out. Just by comparing the mean age of this website's bloggers (which I am assuming is somewhere between 20 and 30) to the mean age of most politicians and voters (at least 10 years older, if not 20), it is clear that the spread of libertarian views, especially among the tech-savvy may be a representation of the children of Mead's "millenial capitalism" political 'coming of age'. Both left and right libertarians may be the 'bleeding edge' of politics that is yet to come - representing a net (and possibly bipartisan) shift toward economic freedom. Russ Feingold, like Van Gogh or Picaso, may just be before his time.

Well, that is the hope anyway - in my view, technology and specifically the Internet have and will continue to change the nature of public administration that will have an indelible impact on politics as whole.

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I am a freedom-lover.

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What did you think of Special Providence by Mead?

Honestly, I haven't read Special Providence - always intended to but never got around to it. I am very intrigued by how he has woven together American social trends, foreign policy and economics, so I plan to pick it up when I have some time.

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I am a freedom-lover.

News-Intelligence-Music