My colleague Paul Krugman has written an interesting response to my Sunday column, which pushed back against “winning the future” triumphalism on the left by noting the emergent Democratic majority’s roots in what I described as “social disintegration” and “economic fear.” Krugman agrees with the second half of that description, but argues that the economic factors vastly oughtweigh the social ones:

The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more insecure at any given point of time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. Our industrial structure is probably less stable than it was — you can’t count on today’s big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job — a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan — have been going away across the board. … And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k), or make insurance affordable on the individual market. So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?

I agree with quite a bit of this. The signal failure of Republican economic policy since the 1990s has been the absence of an agenda — apart from the temporary ascendance of “compassionate conservatism” — addressed to the turbulence that the Reagan revolution helped unleash, and the pressure on middle and working class wages created by the combination of global competition and surging health care costs. Amid such stresses, mere social conservatism is not enough: As Noah Millman of the American Conservative put it recently, “a marriage culture requires a material basis” that seems out of reach for too many Americans.

Where I part company with my colleague, though, is on the question of whether the existing American welfare state is basically sound and needs only to be expanded to meet these challenges, or whether we should be looking to prune and restructure in some arenas (entitlements, in particular) even as we try to address insecurity in others. I worry more than Krugman does (at least at the moment) about American economic growth in the shadow of our long-term deficits, more than he does about American competitiveness in a world where taxes and spending rise much higher than their post-1960s norm, and much more about some of the negative feedback loops that large welfare states tend to set in motion — where old-age spending weighs on working-age families, and falling birth rates undercut the basic demographic foundation of the system. Which is why I tend to think we should be trying to hit a kind of “small government egalitarian” sweet spot on these issues, instead of just letting the welfare state grow apace: We need to experiment policies that raise the returns to work for American families (whether that means a new child tax credit, an expanded earned income tax credit, a permanent payroll tax cut, further reforms to the health insurance marketplace, or something else entirely), but these policies need need to be accompanied by major entitlement reform and spending restraint in other areas as well.

I also disagree with my colleague that “nothing” about people’s personal choices can mitigate the problems associated with economic insecurity. The fact that it was Rick Santorum saying it no doubt biases many liberals against the point, but his campaign trail riff about how much people improve their odds of staying out of poverty just by graduating from high school, taking full-time work and (above all) getting married before having kids has pretty solid data behind it. Yes, correlation isn’t always causation; yes, there are lots of complicating variables at work in every individual life trajectory. But we have enough data on the subject to say with some decisiveness that our age of economic instability hasn’t severed the traditional link between the bourgeois virtues and the hope of becoming, well, bourgeois. (As Kevin Drum points out, this a point that nobody in the upper reaches of the American meritocracy seems to doubt where their own families are concerned.)

This is true even in Sweden, a country that Krugman invokes at the conclusion of his post as a model for how a sturdy-enough welfare state can more than compensate for the decline of the two-parent family. It’s true that the Swedish rate of child poverty is much lower than ours even though their out-of-wedlock birth rate is higher, and the scope of their social spending clearly has something to do with this reality. (What’s more, the design of that spending has some lessons for American conservatives, since the Swedes have combined generous family subsidies with their own version of entitlement reform.) However, three big caveats are in order. First, even though Sweden is more egalitarian than the United States, the link between child poverty and family structure is still very much present, and non-intact families produce worse outcomes for their offspring in Scandinavia as well. Second, Sweden’s high out-of-wedlock birth rate notwithstanding, Swedish children are more likely than Americans to grow up with both parents in the household: The marriage rate may be lower, in other words, but Swedish families are more stable even when the parents are cohabitating rather than joined in matrimony.

This second caveat points, in turn, to the third and most important one, which is that Swedish society differs from American society so substantially as to make cross-country comparisons extremely difficult.

The Swedish experience does demonstrate that it’s possible for a welfare-state society to survive the waning of religion and the decline of traditional marriage without sacrificing middle class prosperity. But this success is founded on a level of cultural homogeneity and an inheritance of social capital that simply isn’t available in a polyglot republic-cum-empire like our own. Sweden has the population of North Carolina, no real linguistic or religious diversity, no experience of chattel slavery or mass immigration (and the children of recent immigrants in Sweden, incidentally, tend to have much higher poverty rates than the native-born), and a culture of Lutheran thrift and prudence that endures even though Lutheranism itself is on life support. America is and always has been a country of much greater diversity and wider cultural extremes, which is why we’ve always had to lean more heavily than smaller and more homogeneous societies on a wide array of mediating institutions — churches, families and private associations of all sorts — to foster assimilation, encourage upward mobility, and make the pursuit of happiness a possibility for people from wildly different walks of life. Even if the Scandinavian counter-example — in which a strong government compensates for a weakened social fabric — has some applicability here, it offers fewer lessons than many liberals like to think. The bonds that hold Swedish society together aren’t just the creation of a well-funded welfare state, and they simply aren’t available to, say, recent immigrants in Southern California or struggling blue-collar workers in the post-industrial Midwest.

All of this still leaves the question of how much public policy can really do about the fraying of those bonds. But I’ll leave off here, and leave that subject that for another, post-Thanksgiving post.