Dana Blankenhorn

Gun Owners Anonymous

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The people who attended last week's NRA convention, and the people who support them politically, engender a wide range of emotions in those of us who don't share their ideology.

Fear. Loathing. Anger. In my case, rage and ridicule come quickly to mind.

But the most important, most effective emotion is not being deployed. It's the emotion that led Gandhi and Dr. King and even Jesus Christ to change humanity. It's almost never deployed against the greatest threat to life in our time.

Law and Order

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One way to see the bend of political history clearly is to look at the issue of law and order. (To the right, the original cast of the long-running NBC series.) 

Americans have always favored law and order, and opposed movements that dismissed it. The Republican Party spent a generation hammering Democrats for being “soft on crime,” from Spiro Agnew sneering at the “nattering nabobs” who enabled student protests in the 1960s to George H.W. Bush and his “Willie Horton” ad in 1988. Democrats were only able to break through when they went “yeah-but” on law and order, as with Bill Clinton's support of “welfare reform” and harsh sentences for drug crimes.

The Great Deception of David Stockman

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I know that liberal economists like Paul Krugman want to dismiss David Stockman's latest book, The Great Deformation as the work of a “cranky old man”

But it's not. It's the finest form of political jiu jitsu. And it's dangerous stuff, very dangerous.

Stockman, who was briefly a Reagan budget director, and who was then made wealthy by Wall Street, reveals here that his heart is in the Austrian economics brought to this country by followers of Ludwig von Mises.

The 1973 Game: The Year Of Going Too Far

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There's a natural progression to a generation's historical arc.

A crisis for which current thought has no answer creates new stories from the old opposition, which overthrows the old older and is then validated by a new political coalition.

Until this point it's possible to see the failures of the past as emanating from some extremist fringe, some virus within the old order that, once eradicated, makes it viable again. But then the old mainstream goes too far, the new majority identifies the whole of that mainstream as anathema, and a new generation's politics are made solid, the way starch exploding in heated liquid creates a stable pudding.

I saw this a generation ago, in 1973. Liberals, desperate to gain the last possible advantage they could through court action (since courts are the branch of government that most resists change) handed down decisions like Roe vs. Wade. Roe was a great decision for women but, as even feminist lawyer (now justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, it was a decision that held within it the seeds of a profound backlash, since it went beyond what legislators and voters were willing to do and enshrined abortion as a natural right.

The Real Enemy is England

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The greatest threat to America now comes from England.

Strange to say but hear me out.

The banksters' lair is the roughly one square-mile of central London known as “The City.” The country has become entirely dependent on profits from The City. Without The City, London fails, England fails, the UK fails.

Tax Carbon in the Name of Growth

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The following is going to annoy my liberal friends, but hear me out.

The decisive turn in a generation's political thesis, which is a collection of myths and values driving power, the point at which you go from winning elections to winning them for a generation, comes when business moves to your side.

You don't need all of business. You only need the rising tide of business to be on your side, that element of business driving economic growth.

Without significant business support, your side of the political world is always swimming upstream. That's because the business of America is business, even its political business is business, and anyone who questions that doesn't know America. (This Rising Tide is a restaurant in Scarborough, Maine. We hear good things about the lobster.)

Why the Crisis Continues

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Previous crises in American political history were pretty much settled by this point after the crisis election.

By January of 1865 the Confederacy was all but dead. By this time in 1901 the Populists were a spent force. The initial crisis that created the New Deal was settled by 1937, although the struggle for democracy was just beginning. By 1973, we were well past the 1960s and talking full-time about Watergate.

While the course of our future politics seems settled, however, the political crisis that began in 2008 is ongoing, and the underlying economic cause – the War Against Oil – seems barely to have been launched.

You may ask why. I'm here to tell you:

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.

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: