Dana Blankenhorn

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.)

The Limited Power of Validation

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The election of 2012 validated what I call the Obama Thesis of Consensus.

It's a politics built on the idea of compromise, on the need to come together and muddle through, despite our sharp divisions.

There is tremendous power in that.

But there are also limits, because none of the previous presidencies that changed America, as this President has changed America, ended well.

The Bookends of the Crisis

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Katrina and Sandy are bookends to the crisis of our time.

The crisis is the War Against Oil, but it's a crisis that dare not speak its name.

Al Gore spoke its name, and he was buried for it. Buried by Bush's Supreme Court in 2000, then buried by ridicule after getting his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This President has tried to approach things in a different way. Rather than address the crisis directly, he has sought to make the case instead for the role of government. He used government to address the financial panic, with modest success, and he used it to try and address health care inflation, although success there remains years away. With people impatient for change they could feel, he needed a break.

Sandy was the break he needed.

As a political bookend, Katrina set things in motion. Katrina changed the nation in profound ways, ways we didn't even notice at first. Katrina made us angry, it enraged us. The non-reaction of the Bush Administration became its unforgiveable sin – more than Iraq, more even than the financial panic. Katrina, and New Orleans, became a burning coal in every Democrat's belly. Never again, we promised ourselves. That fire burned hot in 2006, it burned hotter in 2008, it burns in my heart today.

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.

My Favorite President

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Win or lose in November, Barack Obama has been the Greatest President of my lifetime. Or yours.

He has the class of a great entertainer and lives his values more completely than most religious leaders. He can seem introspective and cold, but so have all America's greatest leaders. He writes in a way that makes you cry. He inspires but can laugh at himself. We are lucky to have him.

There's a scene in “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,” the 1967 Spencer Tracy vehicle, that always makes me cry these days. Sidney Poitier, playing a version of his “magic Negro” character from the period, wants to marry Tracy's daughter, played by Katherine Houghton (Hepburn's niece). They met, yes, in Hawaii. Tracy has just told him about the discrimination they'll face, that their child will face. “She wants him to grow up to be President,” says Poitier, “but I'd settle for Secretary of State.”

Welcome to the 1970s

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 41 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This decade could have easily been the 1930s all over again.

You wouldn't have wanted to go there. We're talking no social safety net, people living in shantytowns, and starving. We're talking 32% unemployment at a time when women didn't work outside the home. We're talking social unrest and the almost-universal feeling that democracy was doomed (DOOMED!), that only the iron hand of the Left or the Right could save mankind from extinction. And then, of course, World War II.

Want to know what the 1930s were like? Look at Greece today. Greece was induced to follow the advice of the bankers, to practice extreme austerity in the face of impossible loan demands, and look what's happening. People are going hungry, and they're turning to a neo-Nazi party called the Golden Dawn for comfort. Not just as an electoral force, but as a social one, which is more ominous. Want to know where Hitler came from? Stuff like that.

Things could have easily gone that way for us, had John McCain been elected. What McCain was promising in the wake of a 1929-like crash was a great heaping helping of Hooverism. Instead we got the stimulus, we got some honest government, and while the problems aren't all fixed – too many bankers are still walking around loose – things are indeed getting better.

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.

Validation

I will be on vacation next week and, in light of events decided y'all deserved an early present. So think of this as Volume 16, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The 1972 Game is about validation.

The second election after an existential crisis is about generational direction. Forward or back, future or past. And it always results in a resounding victory for the new way forward.

I didn't think until last week it was possible to get a decisive result out of 2012, what with the economy sputtering along so weakly.

But now it's possible.

Because in picking Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney picked the very embodiment of the ideas that failed my generation, and the antithesis of the Obama Thesis of Consensus.

Paul Ryan is a Randian theorist, someone who truly believes that those who can't make it should pound sand, that there is no such thing as an “entitlement” people can earn from government. He is the natural extension of Ronald Reagan's rhetoric.

Paul Ryan is Reaganism writ large, and I think he'd call that a compliment.

Which is the point. Any set of principles can become an -ism, and there is nothing more destructive than an -ism in power. The ideas of Karl Marx for an egalitarian society weren't that terrible. Communism sucked.

There is no magical -ism, no single set of principles that create the right policy for every age. There is only muddling along, making mistakes, and going forward.