Dana Blankenhorn

The Confederate Mind

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 4 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We now reach the stage of our generational crisis that is at once both the most delicious and the most dangerous.

It's the point where the old thesis realizes the jig is up and goes crazy.

If you're of a certain age, like me, you may identify this as the 1973 Game. This was the point where the drug scene shifted decisively away from things like pot and LSD, drugs meant to expand the mind, and toward things like cocaine and heroin, which gave a more immediate, physical rush and had a higher physical cost.

This was where a lot of people decided that dropping out was silly, and that they should get serious about careers. I saw this clearly as I went through college – each successive incoming class was more conservative in outlook than the one before it, more focused on money, family, and personal issues, less focused on society and the wider world.

It was a cynical time, but the Nixon Thesis was a cynical idea to begin with. Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true.  (I moved south in 1973.)

Offense

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The difference between 2013 and every year that has come before, for liberals, is offense.

Liberals have spent a generation playing defense. We have spent over 40 years getting beaten by conservatives, whenever push came to shove. We have considered it a victory when some gain from the past was kept safe, if only for now. And we have watched conservatives use those limited victories for us to raise ever-more money and drive ever-deeper wedges between us, to the point where “pissing off liberals” became a convenient excuse for any policy, no matter how wrong-headed.

This should not surprise. Conservatives felt just this way in the early years of the Nixon era – it's what fed Nixon's paranoia, which was organic, and came from his followers. They assumed that any policy victory might be taken away, or co-opted, at any moment. They assumed they were the minority, and acted like one, right into the Reagan Administration.

Guns and Hippies

A few thoughts in the wake of last week's massacre.

Whether you call it “extreme gun ownership” or “gun fetishism,” the attitudes behind the mother who bought these weapons are common on the American right today.

Many people are struggling to put this new attitude into context, and explain it to foreigners, but my own writing gives you a frame.

These are hippies. And what happened last week, what is happening across the country as these incidents spiral, is very similar to what happened with the “leftist kids” in the wake of of 1968. Kid who'd been innocently tripping out on pot turned to harder stuff, they turned to cocaine and heroin. A lot of them died. 

Pay for Your God-Damned War

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 50 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have spent most of my professional career as a Democrat writing for Republicans, while coming back here to my typewriter in order to try and put all that into perspective.

What I have learned, through my study of American history and its cycles, is that disgraced Power, a combination of Myths and Values created in an earlier time, never takes responsibility for the excess that results from its abuse of that power.

There were never Confederates who could admit in their hearts that maybe Lincoln had a point. There were never Populists who accepted the idea that an organized, regulated economy would bring prosperity, that it was the right way to go. Republicans who opposed the New Deal went right into fascism, either excusing Hitler or embracing him, while few Democrats who fought Nixon ever saw that, maybe, he had a point about the Cold War and the need to maintain social peace through discipline.

So it should be no surprise to me that my readers at Seeking Alpha and TheStreet.Com, who are mostly firm believers in the Nixon Thesis, and who supported the excesses of George W. Bush each step of the way, are more than a little reluctant, even now, to see any error in their ways.

I was slapped in the face by this realization when the following was rejected by Seeking Alpha. Plenty of similar commentaries, from Republicans, about the "Fiscal Cliff" and the issues of the budget had been published. One, most memorably, was titled "Has Paul Krugman Gone Too Far?"  Yet this was deemed to be overly political.

Lesson learned. If you want to speak truth, do it on your own time. My view on the matter is contained in the headline at the top of this. The piece, as submitted, follows:

Is Wal-Mart Good for America

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 49 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Following any political realignment there is often a re-evaluation of a major sector in American business. It's not the heart of the losing side that's attacked, it's usually something on the periphery that represents something larger.

In the 1970s this was Detroit. GM and Chrysler and Ford were all symbols of the manufacturing era, the post-War boom in which factories were where wealth came from. The attacks that began with Ralph Nader in the 1960s accelerated during this period until the industry became symbolic of what was obsolete about America. The movement of production, first to Japan, then to Korea, and eventually back to the American South, was also symbolic of the “Rust Belt – Sun Belt” attitude that was so much a part of the Nixon era.

The Open Source Thesis Returns

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Right after this year's election I began looking back at all the stories I've written, since 2006, on political philosophy.

I was looking for patterns, and frankly for an e-book.

My review is far from complete – there are over 200 pages just in the first year I began my work – but what I have found is that my views on political patterns were first informed by my work on open source. I first wrote about what I called the “open source thesis” in 2006 , and I found, even then, that it matched up very well with the political aims of one Barack Obama.

The Fall of the Suburbs

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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All the post-mortems on this year's elections missed the key point.

It wasn't about race, and it wasn't about class. It was about economics, specifically the economic model most of us grew up in.

That model is the suburb.

The modern American suburb was a product of the post-war boom. It featured small houses on postage-stamp lots, where former soldiers and their wives could raise children in peace with the men working in nearby offices or factories. (Above, Levittown, New York.)

Overcoming the Crisis: Be Who They Fear You Are

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Regular readers of this space may know that I believe we've had four major political crises in this nation's history, and four crisis Presidents who led us through them.

This is the fifth.

The four previous crises were the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Nixon Revolution. The fifth crisis began in the last decade, with Iraq and Katrina and deliberate speculation leading directly to the 2008 economic collapse we're still pulling out of.

I call this crisis the War Against Oil. There's an artificial shortage of energy because we define energy as oil, gas, and coal, which deplete. The oil forces, like the slaveholders of the 1850s, took control of our politics in order to maintain this scarcity. Thus the battle is to overcome them so the market, and science, work their will.

Crisis Presidents Are Always Misunderstood

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most misunderstood President in American history was Willliam McKinley. (Right, from Wikipedia.)

I'm still reading crap about how conservative McKinley was. With hints about his being corrupt.

Fact is it was McKinley who launched the investigations that broke up Standard Oil, it was McKinley who began the Progressive Era, and it was McKinley who made Theodore Roosevelt the President by making him Vice President.

The reason for the misunderstanding was McKinley's assassination, in 1901, at Buffalo, by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. (right.)

Reform is the enemy of revolution, in that reform makes revolution unnecessary. The killing froze McKinley within his time, and as the Republican Party moved to the right, his memory moved right with it. It was Bryan's Populists who were the racists, the states' rightists, and the conservative force of that time.

Why Mitt the Dick is the Best They Had

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 40 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Sure, Mitt Romney is a dick.

He's stiff, he's blind to the real world he never lived in, he has very little empathy for anyone outside his Mormon social circle. He spouts a Randian social gospel that's not from the Gilded Age, but from the Middle Ages.

But he's still the best candidate the Republicans had this year, and that's a more important point.

Let's look at who ran. A perennial candidate and radio talk show host whose only real experience lay in running a pizza chain that made bad pizza. A social neanderthal who lost his last statewide race by 20 points to a Democrat with all the charisma of wallboard. A pompous ass, and Newt Gingrich. A governor from a very big state who actually has no power and has shit for brains. Did I miss anyone? (No, I already mentioned Bachmann.)

Do you think any of those estimables could have run a better race than Willard the Rat? I don't. And if you think about it you won't either.