The three spheres of American society: business, state and community.

Halstead and Lind define three spheres that, according to them, combine to form American society. The description obviously responds to traditional liberal political theory:

In our opinion, America's unique ability to remake itself and thrive during each successive wave of technological change —past and future— stems from its core commitment to a division of social authority among three distinct realms of society: the market, the state, and community. Our nation's history reveals that these three sectors —the private, the public, and the communal— are interdependent, complementary, and mutually supporting. For our nation to flourish, all three must be in relative balance with one another, so that each may perform its unique functions, and provide its unique form of freedom.

The core value of the market is liberty, and its core functions are to promote wealth creation and the efficient allocation of resources. The core value of the state is equality of opportunity, and its core functions are to promote the public good, maintain civil liberties, and preserve law, order, and national defense. And the core value of community —which encompasses the realm of organized religions, voluntary organization, customs, and traditions— is solidarity; its core functions are to preserve communal bonds and national unity and to nurture civic virtues. Each provides a unique form of freedom: The market provides freedom to enrich oneself through hard work, the state provides freedom from oppression and destitution, and the community provides freedom of association with like-minded people. The precise form and makeup of each of these three sectors have changed dramatically throughout our nation's history, but their core values and functions, as well as the freedoms they confer, have remained constant and, it may be hoped, will for the foreseeable future.

Rather than to any particular ideology, it is to our nation's ongoing commitment to this unwritten division of authority between the private, public, and communal spheres that we owe our historic success both in balancing and expanding our competing goals of liberty, fairness, and unity. This is not to suggest that American history has been unidirectional —to the contrary, we have progressed in fits and starts, at times moving forward and at other times moving backward. But taken as a whole, there is little question that our nation's relatively short history has been characterized by an unmistakable upward mobility on the axes of individual freedom, social equality, and national unity. Any particular program must be judged on the basis of its success un promoting improvement in all three realms of American society, not just one.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 14-15)

In other words, Halstead and Lind don't only take this as a description of American society as it is today, but also as a recipe for the best way to organize its future too. Again, in this sense, they are being completely consistent with classical liberalism, or perhaps a moderate form of social liberalism. I agree with their position on this issue. Contrary to what conservative Republicans state these days, the US has not traditionally stood for unfettered market capitalism, but rather for a far more fluid, dynamic and to some extent unstable relationship between the three spheres described by Halstead and Lind.
There have been some changes in regards to the upward mobility and social equality lately, as the authors themselves bring up later. Yet, the very fact that this mode of organization cannot be easily described as a set of simple rules makes it difficult to be adopted as a political dogma, which is precisely the reason why said conservatives dislike it —this is not to say, of course, that there aren't any sensible conservatives, nor does it mean that dogmatism doesn't exist among liberals or progressives, quite the contrary.

In any case, be it liberal, conservative or whatever else one may consider it, this approach to social and political organization does appeal to me too. I agree that a society where these three spheres of activity share a healthy existence, enriching each other, is the way to go. It is, I believe, a centrist (or moderate) approach to politics that solves more problems than it creates, allowing people from different political allegiances to chip in. Perhaps in the US they have overdone it a bit by letting corporations (i.e., the business leg of the tripod) extend its power too much, but the fact is that in Europe we may have also overdone it by letting the state spread too far at the expense of the other two legs (especially at the expense of a healthy, thriving civil society).