Dana Blankenhorn

Cyber Monday is the Bunk

I do like PR people.  They often bring good stories to me.

And sometimes they just make stuff up. (Image from ABC.)

Cyber Monday is something they just made up. (The official site is from a trade group -- hint hint.) The idea is that people hit the malls during the weekend, then hit their desks at work and do their real shopping online.

No made-up trend is worth anything without so-called research to back it up, and this one is no exception. Google commissioned Harris Interactive, which found 40% of Americans plan to do some shopping online. The National Retail Foundation commissioned BIGresearch, which found online spending up 19% over the weekend.

Google wants to push the silliness because they have something to sell, Google Checkout. It's offering discounts to people who try its service.

But is there anything wrong with Cyber Monday?  Actually, there is.

Liberalism Starts Over

The 20th century liberal movement was an amalgam of impulses from populists and progressives. It combined elements of the pro-inflation talk of William J. Bryan with the reformist impulses of Upton Sinclair. It was bawdy street politics taken into the parlor, given a suit, and set on a balcony to change the world through the creative use of government.

Liberalism, in other words, was populism + progressivism.

Now, with the Nixon Thesis collapsing, and with the concept of liberalism discredited among the mass of people (because that was at the heart of the Nixon Thesis), big thinkers like Max Sawicky and Stirling Newberry are back in the salons (virtual ones this time) debating where we go next.

And they are starting with the past.

Sawicky argues that "populism is about the bottom line -- ours and not theirs."  The original populists were farmers who sought inflation to keep the value of what they produced high. They wanted a bigger piece of the economic pie, enough to live on. And they wanted money defined by production of goods, not just gold.

Newberry rejects the thesis, saying a populist devolves into a reactionary. His example is Thomas E. Watson,  who began as an economic populist, then became a U.S. Senator on the wings of racism.  (Here he is in front of our state capitol building, about a mile from the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)