Rich and Ramesh’s piece in the new issue, plus my own quasi-obsession with Tom Friedman (aired-out somewhat in the same issue) prompted me to write today’s column. An excerpt:

Indeed, a year earlier, Steffens went to fascist Italy and came back praising Il Duce’s miraculous accomplishments. Before that, the cream of America’s intellectuals were obsessed with emulating the “top-down socialism” of Bismarck’s Prussia. Later, the New Deal was understood as part of the “Europeanization of America,” in historian William Leuchtenburg’s phrase. Liberal economist Stuart Chase, who coined the term “the New Deal,” remarked: “Why should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?”
In the 1980s, some economists, such as Lester Thurow, and non-economists, such as Robert Reich, Chalmers Johnson, and James Fallows, argued that we needed to emulate Germany or, even better, Japan. “The Cold War is over,” proclaimed Johnson. “Japan won.” American liberalism’s infatuation with Japan’s industrial policy — “Japan Inc.” — should be remembered as one of the great embarrassments of recent intellectual history.
But no, like butterflies always looking for a prettier flower, these intellectuals keep flitting to the next “proof” of America’s shortcomings. For some, such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the prettiest flower out there right now is China. For others, it’s France or Canada. For the truly demented, it’s Cuba.
The problem with all such efforts is that they look abroad solely for what they wish to see at home.