"A new policy synthesis"

I avoid linking to the Times' latest New. Young. Conservative. Columnist. But this week's offering is a good example of the soft bigotry of low expectations that the Times employs for its New. Young. Conservative. Columnist. Seat.

A billion-odd Chinese had a pretty good decade, and so did a billion Indians: their economies just about doubled in size, minting new millionaires and lifting countless peasants into a growing middle class. Brazil boomed, Indonesia prospered, and even Africa enjoyed a season of substantial growth. Nobody would mistake Vladimir Putin’s Russia for a liberal democratic paradise, but most Russians seem to prefer its stability to the basket-case republic Putin inherited from Boris Yeltsin.

Now that is pretty remarkable. I'm sure the "billion-odd" or so Chinese living here would raise a glass with you, young Ross, toasting their good fortune. Ditto the "billion" or so Indians not employed by an American company outsourcing their back office operations to the country. Brazil's economy is growing, but I doubt very much that Ross is planning a jaunt there anytime soon. Whoever wrote the headline to your piece, at least, was accurate, as "Decline" certainly is "relative."

Seen in this light, America’s lost decade looks less like a big zero and more like an inevitable corrective to the high-flying 1990s. The enormous Clinton-era gulf between the United States and its competitors was bound to narrow eventually. For now, at least, our decline is only relative — from hyperpower back to superpower, from the only nation that mattered to the one that matters most.

Wait. Was that praise for the "Clinton-era" posing as a condemnation of "the enormous gulf?" Curiously, the gulf was "bound to narrow eventually," avoiding any mention of what precipitated that narrowing. And, oh, by the way, is the 28 year old Reagonaut rejecting what Clinton's economic team overcame?

Nah.

But as the 2010s begin, there’s reason to worry that America has further to fall. Our politics are polarized, our finances are still overleveraged, and our society is increasingly segregated — by income, education and family structure — between a thriving elite and a struggling working class. Worse, neither political party seems capable of forging a new policy synthesis to reckon with our domestic challenges.

In the unhappy aughts, we witnessed the exhaustion of Reaganomics. A quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s mix of tax cuts and deregulation revived American competitiveness, George W. Bush’s attempt to imitate the Gipper produced only wage stagnation and skyrocketing debt.

Competitiveness, particularly in the area of our arms race with the already bankrupt Soviets. Leading to a massive budget deficit that doesn't get talked about much in conservative circles these days, sort of like Reagan's tax increases.

This failure helped cost Republicans their majority. But instead of seeking a new post-Reagan consensus, the Obama Democrats are returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.

These policies may help smooth over the inequalities that have opened in our national life since the 1970s. But they threaten to cost America its position in the world along the way.

"Post-Reagan consensus?" What is he talking about? And oh yeah, the Dems' long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy is certainly evident in the government being forced to take over failing car companies, bail out banks, and provide badly needed economic stimulus to battle an economic collapse brought on by his party's faith in Reagan-era "voodoo economics." Or perhaps the effort to copy Switzerland's universal health care through private health insurers is way too much like France. Or something. And how, pray tell, does an effort to smooth over the inequalities that really began in the 1980s, not the 1970s unless you're using some odd math -- under the less-than watchful eye of your cowboy Ron hero -- the same inequalities you worried about a half-dozen paragraphs earlier, threaten to "cost America its position in the world?" Oh right, the specter of European "stagnation."

Finally, we get to Douthat's policy prescriptions: "unwinding" the partnership between "Big Government and Big Business," "contain busts," and charter schools.

New. Young. Conservative. Columnist. Ideas.

It would be far easier to criticize Douthat's column's if the logic in them were consistent from paragraph to paragraph.