Can We Be Sweden? ByRoss DouthatMy colleague Paul Krugman has writtenan interesting responsetomy Sunday column,which pushed back against “winning the future” triumphalism on the left by noting the emergent Democratic majority’s roots in what I described as “social disintegration” and “economic fear.” Krugman agrees with the second half of that description, but argues that the economic factors vastly oughtweigh the social ones: The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more i nsecure at any given point of time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. Our industrial structure is probably less stable than it was —you can’t count on today’s big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job —a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan —have been going away across the board. … And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarante e the value of your 401(k), or make insurance affordable on the individual market. So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy thatshouldhave a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor? I agree with quite a bit of this. The signal failure of Republican economic policy since the 1990s has been the absence of an agenda —apart from the temporary ascendance of “compassionate conservatism”—addressed to the turbulence that the Reagan revolution helped unleash, and the pressure on middle and working class wages created by the combination of global competition and surging health care costs. Amid such stresses, mere social con servatism is not enough: As Noah Millman of the American Conservative put it recently,“a marriage culture requires a material basis” that seems out of reach for too many Americans. Where I part company with my collea gue, though, is on th e question of whether t he existing American welfare state is basically sound and needs only to be expanded to m eet these challenges, or whether we should be looking to prune and restructure in some arenas (entitlements, in particular) even as we try to address insecurity in others. I worry more than Krugman does (at least at the moment) about American economic growth in the shadow of our long-term deficits, more than he does about American competitivene ssin a world where taxes
