I had an interesting meeting with Joel Kotkin last night. Joel is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and "an author and speaker who focuses on post-urban American culture...specifically suburban, exurban and rural America." To get a feel for some of Joel's thinking, check out this article he wrote recently for The Weekly Standard, or this article for New Democrats Online.
We talked about a lot of things, but what stuck with me the most after the meeting was the idea that Democrats need to get back to thinking like FDR when he called for "frankness and vigor" in facing the challenges that lay ahead of America in the Depression. In the next ~50 years, the population of the United States is going to grow by nearly 100 million people, from ~300m to ~400m. The infrastructure, whether physical (schools, roads and mass-transportation, etc.) or informational (fiber outside of the cities) is simply not there to handle this growth.
If we really want to maintain American primacy in the world, he said, we need to "get back to Nationalism". While he admitted that "nationalism" is a tricky word, I think that the point that we need to, as I re-phrased it "believe in America"...and invest in building an American infrastructure that is capable of fostering the next generation, is a good one, and a potentially great platform for Democrats to begin to build their platform for the 21st century.
It seems to me that one of the things that Democrats suffer from these days, is an inability to articulate what taxes are used for. Many of the small government/lower taxes base seem to believe that taxes are simply a way of re-distributing wealth from the rich to the poor, or as they see it, from the producers to the parasites. What they don't seem to pay attention to is the fact that the vast majority of federal/state spending goes towards infrastructure critial to educating their children, paving their roads...in short, making it possible for them to live the American dream. So, why shouldn't Democrats be able to take back patriotism, by showing the essential cynicism of the vision of starving American government blindly? If you refuse to take the small present day hit to invest in the future, eventually you will necessarily fall behind those that do. A policy that mandates that outcome doesn't seem very patriotic to me.
Comments