Mead: The Blue Future

Historian Walter Russell Mead blogs about sweeping topics for The American Interest. Here he writes about how liberals, called by Mead "Blues," see the future developing. See his summary:

Gentry liberals today see something different. (snip) As they contemplate what post industrial society will look like, they are filled with pity for the incompetent losers, the untalented, those who will only be able to get jobs as pool boys and cocktail waitresses in the post-manufacturing world.(snip) Post-industrial liberals seem to see the common folk as a collection of sad and weak losers whom the strong must protect.

Very clearly Mead hears this in the President's recent re-inaugural address. Either you've got what it takes or you spend your life as a service worker, a description of the end-state meritocracy. Our post-industrial society may well evolve in this direction.