WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: As Blue Dies, What Happens To the Jobs? Part One.

The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they are not always spoken of in these terms.

The most consequential question facing the United States is rarely talked about directly. Instead we operate on the basis of seldom acknowledged or scrutinized intuitions and assumptions about the implications of the vast economic transition now under way.

The basic question behind the debate is the question of jobs. In the twentieth century, mass manufacturing replaced agriculture as the bread and butter occupation that supported the broad mass of the population.

Now, clearly, that is changing.

Read the whole thing, as always. I remember the Atari Democrats. I guess I was one, once.