Liberal Talk Radio

Via Political Animal, I see Peter Gosselin’s three-part series on Risk in America from the LA Times has been compiled for viewing. This is an amazing series of articles that I’ve been reading from the beginning. When Bruno & the Professor: the Book comes out, you can bet we’ll be trumping some of the ideas Gosselin puts out in this series.

The bottom line is this: since the 1970s, America has bet on de-regulation as a way to battle inflation and encourage growth. A slow, systemic retreat of the New Deal has lead to wild income swings, with individual wealth waxing and collective security waning. The income gap between rich and poor is increasing, but, moreover, the income gap for all americans from year to year is swingiing wildly. As a whole, the nation has gotten richer, but each individual is bearing more risk to make it happen. And the difference between the winners and the losers has grown proportionally.

This is something we’ve chosen. No way around that. We’re a nation of gamblers, and we like risk. Our appetite for economic security has its limits, which is something the Democrats need to realize in this current Social Security debate.

The next winning Democrat will figure out how to properly frame the balance between opportunity and security, and, specifically, what role the government plays in keeping that balance in order. My guess is that it will somehow replace the current Democratic gestalt of “Capitalism, but…” with “Capitalism, PLUS…”

The bigger issue, though, is that Americans desire for security relates directly to our experience of national tragedy. The Great Depression brought us together as a nation, and FDR used that collective empathy to pass the New Deal. Sept. 11 could have been spun in much the same way, but I think the idea men behind the President knew that too much collective sacrifice might make the public less sympathetic Republican policies. I mean, there’s a reason we were told to spend MORE in the days after the attacks and not to cut back in preparation for a costly Global War on Terror.

But that’s an argument for another day…