Rhode Island: The Ultimate Microcosm of Walter Russell Mead's America

Walter Russell Mead of the American Interest has a long (but very readable) essay on the future of the American social and political systems. He is discussing the nation as a whole, but anyone who follows the news in Rhode Island with any regularity will recognize that we are on the leading edge of nearly every, if not every, trend that he describes. Here are a few excerpts that could have come from an RI-specific article...

The incompetence, mediocrity, high cost structure and all-around dysfunctional nature of backward blue staffing and management patterns in large public school systems increasingly appall Democrats as well as Republicans.

The teachers unions are fighting a bitter rearguard action, and by no means have they lost their influence in Democratic Party politics and state and local governments, but across the country the unions are often fighting Democrats rather than Republicans as Democratic elected officials work to do something about the state of our schools...Ultimately even most Democratic officeholders in deep blue cities can’t keep raising taxes to please teachers while parents fume about poor educational results. Something has to give, and increasingly, that something is the traditional school system as charter schools and other forms of innovation push ahead....

Generous pensions were fine as long as you didn’t have to make much of a tradeoff between paying pensions and covering current expenses. But after years of evasion and deceit, the bills are coming due. The underfunding of state and local pensions isn’t just showing up as shadowy future deficits projected ten and twenty years down the road; it is showing up as actual costs that have to be paid out of current revenues right now. Do you pay off the geezers and fire the cops, or do you keep the cops on the beat and stiff the retirees?

In spite of the problems, Mead harbors a bi-partisan optimism for America's future...

Democrats will have to streamline government, trim fat, stop featherbedding and generally remake state and local government into something leaner and meaner because they have no choice...

Republicans and anti-blue statists will want to fix this because bad government is big government and takes a terrible toll on the economy (cumbersome procedures, bad decisions, a large and expensive staff). But smart proponents of a strong federal government will also want to change this status quo because the state as presently constituted is simply not able to take on all the missions they would like to see addressed.

Just as we once saw competing Republican and Democratic versions of Progressive politics, so going forward we will see competing Republican and Democratic versions of post-blue politics. I can’t predict how these partisan battles will come out, but it seems likely that through it all, the government will be remade and the bureaucratic administrative state that has dominated American life since the New Deal will transform.

As bloggers are wont to say from time-to-time, read the whole thing.