As The Blue Model Of Government Fades, What Will Take Its Place?

Columbus Crossing the Atlantic                                              N.C. Wyeth, 1927

The old adage, the more things change the more they remain the same, finds serious reinforcement in a Walter Russell Mead article posted yesterday at The American Interest. Mead is a traditional liberal schooled in English, history, and American foreign policy. In that respect he is an "old school Democrat" with  strong beliefs in our Constitution as well as an understanding and respect for the traditions that have guided the nation and its foreign policy over two centuries. He understands that our government structure may change, but the principles that have made it exceptional will remain strong:

The state will transform but it will not disappear. We may change the way the educational system works, but the goal of the changes will be to ensure more and better universal education. We may change the policies aimed at helping low income people move up the ladder of life, but American society does not want to write off the poor. We may liberalize drug laws and look for alternatives to imprisonment for non-violent offenders, but we won’t abandon the effort to protect the public from unsafe or impure drugs and we won’t turn law and order over to the private sector. We may look for ways to reduce the bureaucratic delays when it comes to permitting processes, but we will not abandon the effort to impose safety and environmental standards. The state will go high tech, its processes will accelerate, bureaucracies will become flatter and more open, but it won’t wither away.

Full Fathom Five: 5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State  is a short lesson in the traditions that have shaped our national character. It is a hopeful and satisfying approach to the question of change, an ever-present challenge and opportunity that Mead sees as new beginnings without end:

The old America I grew up in and the new America growing up around me now are very different places. Some of the changes are for the better and others are for the worse. Yet somehow the America in which my grandfather was born in 1897 is connected to the country my youngest great-nephew (born in 2012) will come to know. The lasting values that were the best things about the America of 1897, or of 1776 for that matter, will still matter in 2097 and beyond. They will be embodied in different institutions and will deal with more complex realities than we knew in earlier times, but the spirit of ordered liberty that has brought the American experiment so far, so fast, will, if we get things right, still be at the core of American life—and we will still, I suspect, be quarreling about how to organize and limit government in ways that the founding fathers would recognize.

OTR thinks readers will enjoy this uplifting commentary from someone well-grounded in the American story and equipped with exceptional writing skills, two elements we find sorely lacking among our political elite today.

On that note...it is always a good day when this blogger can link politics, history, economics, literature and music into a coherent post.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.