Dana Blankenhorn

The Party of Hoover

The political media is catching up with something I first wrote over a year ago.

The Republican Party is the Party of Hoover.

Herbert Hoover may be the most fascinating failed President in all American history. (Even more so than Millard Fillmore.) Not only did he dominate the late Progressive era, feeding Europe after World War I, providing private relief after the 1927 Louisiana hurricane (little fat man with a notebook in his hand) but he re-built his party by hand after its 1932 defeat, his Hoover Institution being among the key builders of what became today's Nixon Thesis. 

What the Hoover Institution was building, as early as the 1950s, was an ideology meant first to do battle with the Republican Anti-Thesis of that time, exemplified by Thomas E. Dewey, then Dwight Eisenhower, and finally Nelson Rockefeller, a practical politics which assumed the basic truth in what New Deal Democrats were saying but sought to lean against it, as into a strong wind. It was by winning this intra-party war through Barry Goldwater, who was nominated the same year Hoover died, that their triumph began, and that of their party. Today's GOP remains what the Hoover Institution built then. 

Call it NixonLand if you like. Bob Dole called the second half of the 20th century the Age of Nixon. But in terms of the Republican Party the whole century was really the Age of Hoover.

And so it remains today.

The Class War

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Look carefully at the chart above. It represents the biggest scandal of the last two decades.

Bigger than Iraq.  Bigger than Abu Ghraib. Bigger than the housing bubble.

It is nothing less than class war, the slow extermination of the uneducated by the educated.

These government statistics, compiled by government researchers, show trends in premature death rates from 8 causes -- everything from diabetes and heart attack to cancer and accidents. That's the rate per 100,000 people in 8 subgroups, college educated on the right, high school educated on the left.

I have already heard the excuses. The poor deserve their fate. They choose to get fat and die young. Most causes of death before 65 are preventable, and if you don't take care of yourself it's your own fault.

Bunk.

Not only are the rates higher for those without education, but those with just high school they rise steadily, for both races and both sexes. Does anyone doubt that those trends have accelerated in this decade? Does anyone think that the less educated are becoming more shiftless with time?

I would love to see a similar regression done for, say, Canada or England. Perhaps the comparison to Europe is unfair, given that college here is an option which can be purchased while there entry into it is won through competition.

But the conclusion is inescapable. We have two main classes of people in the U.S., those with education and those without. For the last 16 years those with are learning to live longer, those without are dieing younger.

This explains a lot about our politics:

Republicans are Toast

It's time someone admits it. The TeeVee won't, it would be bad for ratings, and when it's a choice between telling the truth and securing ratings the TeeVee lies through its teeth.

The Republicans are Toast. They're done. They're dead. Stick a fork in 'em. They'll be lucky if they survive as a national party after November.

All this assumes, of course, that we're allowed to have a free election. But the margins Democrats are piling up in opinion polls would be tough for even Robert Mugabe to steal away. And Americans don't lie down like the Burmese do and just take it.

The plain fact is that the Republican brand is dead to us. They trotted it out twice in recent weeks, once around Baton Rouge, Louisiana and again yesterday in northeast Mississippi. Both Louisiana's 6th and Mississippi's 1st were deep red districts, the kind a Republican should take without thinking twice about it.

Both times the Republicans sought to nationalize the election. They trotted out Barack Obama as a bogeyman, and in case people didn't get the connection, added Nancy Pelosi. Crickets. In Mississippi last night, Travis Childers won 54-46, a really enormous margin in a district which went for Bush 2-1 and was drawn especially to elect a Republican.

Those Republicans commenting to the state's chief GOP political site, Y'All Politics, were, well, despondent last night. Wrote one who calls himself "Reagan Dem":

Think about that:  the vote from northeast Mississippi will be the same as the vote from Pelosi of San Francisco, which will be the same of that of Barney Frank of Massachusetts, which will be the same as that of John Conyers of Michigan, which will be the same as Jesse Jackson, Jr. of Illinois.

Beautiful.

I assume he meant that last bit facetiously.

If Republicans can't win on their party label in Mississippi's 1st CD, nothing is safe. Alaska isn't safe. Wyoming isn't safe.

There are a few states where the Republicans can expect to clean up this year, thanks to the weakness of local Democrats. Kentucky is one. My own home state of Georgia is another. You can add South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama to that list, although whether Alabama's GOP will survive a Democratic Attorney General is an open question.

But even in the Deep South, Republicans are getting hit right-and-right. Virginia is practically gone Blue. North Carolina too. Democrats are competitive in Louisiana, and they may just grab a Congress seat in Alabama! This is their heartland, for pity's sake!

Some Republican leaders are starting to panic, and their best hope at this point may be for everyone to try and save himself, to recall Tip O'Neill's claim that "all politics is local," and tell their Washington consultants to go stick it where the sun don't shine.

Trouble is, I don't think they can do that. And I question whether it would help.

Now for the bad news...

Hope Rising

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In most of the items marked Crisis of 2008 I have emphasized the difficulties in the time we're living with, the problems, the dangers.

But it is also vital, sometimes, to look at the opportunities, and to see the hope rising all around us.

I'm fortunate to find such things often in my work. Sometimes I bring them to you. Here are two just from this week:

• Simple breakthroughs in things like capacitors that can improve the efficiency of electric motors by as much as 300%.
• Breakthroughs in telemedicine which Microsoft is quickly taking advantage of.

Science and engineering are using the benefits of Moore's Law to create progress at a Moore's Law rate. That is breakthroughs are coming faster-and-faster, fast enough (perhaps) to halt the present processes destroying human life on this planet, and even turn them around.

If, that is, they can be brought into the world rapidly enough. The society which brings them to the market most rapidly will have the greatest share in the resulting prosperity.

What we need to make this happen is a process revolution. I am talking about accelerating both economic and political processes. We need to change business' processes so companies make more money solving problems than  causing them, as they have in this decade. And we need to change the way political change occurs at a fundamental level.

A generation ago Republicans talked about making government run more like a business. Now we need businesses to start taking their societal responsibilities seriously.

You do that by changing incentives.

• Right now electric utilities have more incentives to build power plants than to build efficiency into our electrical grid. We can change that.
• Right now drug companies have more incentives to create "me-too" drugs with patent protection than to produce generics we know work. We can change that.
• Right now energy producers have more incentives to withhold product from the market than to produce it. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create monopolies than to open new markets. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create paper than to see loans are repaid. We can change that.
  

When Al Gore talks about trading carbon credits, this is really what he's talking about, creating an incentive to emit less carbon by simply putting a price on it.

None of these changes are terribly difficult. Most are just a matter of will. And when we put the power of the market to work on the world's problems, pointing to those problems as opportunities with profits going to those who create solutions, positive change can happen quickly.

But that's not all.

My Burma Sorrow

I am sorry about the Burma hurricane. I am sad that its leaders are so paranoid as to refuse aid from the world. I am saddened that so little aid is getting into the affected region and that people are dieing needlessly.

But still...

When I read complaints from our government about the failure to allow aid it's like someone rubbing a balloon before popping it and laughing in my face.

Is it that way to you?

This morning on TV Cindy McCain was complaining bitterly of the Burmese peoples' plight. I have no doubt she felt sincere. But I kept switching back to that picture of her husband, the day Katrina hit New Orleans, standing with our leader, and a birthday cake.

Crocodile tears.

When I see Secretary of State Rice demanding that Burma allow aid in, all I can think of is what she was doing when Katrina hit New Orleans. Shopping for shoes.

When I read about U.S. diplomats bemoaning the destruction of Burmese rice fields, I think about how all they cared about after Katrina was getting the casinos back into operation, and how we're now benefiting from higher rice prices.

Closing the Deal

I'm sort of accustomed to being ignored. But since I often end up being right, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

I'm a bit like the lady to the right in that. As has been noted before, she passed away at the same age I am right now, at 53. And she didn't live one day for how other people saw her. She charted her own path. She was a role model.

So now, despite my distinct lack of qualifications or notoreity, I'm going to explain to Barack Obama just how he closes this nomination deal.

Yo Mama.

Had Stanley Ann Dunham not been felled by ovarian cancer in 1995, she would be turning 66 this year. She would be right in Hillary Clinton's wheelhouse.

So use that. Speak from the heart of how she might feel. This is the time in campaigns where we start getting the full autobiography anyway. This question has to be addressed.

Start by stating the obvious.

The Road to Chengdu

The tickets are paid for. The visa application is in the mail. It seems likely that my son John and I will be heading to Chengdu, Sichuan, China on May 22, taking his exchange teacher home.  (Not this way, of course.)

A decade ago, I would have gone with great optimism, a representative of American values. Now? Well, consider these two stories, and where in the world they occurred:

• Hundreds of people quietly protest a new refinery, expecting to be heard.
• Regime opponents are subject to political prosecutions, to having their homes torched, while elections are stolen and public opinion is ignored.

The first story is from Chengdu. The second is from Alabama. As others have noted, the Bush war against democracy continues apace, and even seems to be accelerating.

I think it's time for us to get off our ideological high horses and start talking first principles, not just the what but the why.

The Wright Reality

No matter how we feel about "phony" controversies they usually have an important point behind them.

They define the limits of acceptable speech.

Take the Jeremiah Wright mess, which Bill Moyers is still agonizing over. Why is Wright condemned for statements like "God Damn America" while preachers like John Hagee, who (along with Falwell and Robertson) said the exact same things (only with different reasons) go merrily on. Isn't that a double standard?

Well, yes and no.

It's a double standard in that one man's speech is seen as out of bounds and another man's speech is seen as within bounds. True. But the whole purpose of the exercise was to define the bounds of acceptable political speech. It was to make Wright, and everything he says, out of bounds while enabling extremists on the other side free rein. (Actually, free reign.)

In this, as in other phony controversies over the years, the Right has been masterful. Through this process of phony controversy the acceptable discourse within our society has been pushed ever-more to the right, so it's becoming impossible to even publicly utter obvious truths. I'd say that's an important result.

For instance, the following sentence is, politically, completely out of bounds within the American political discourse:

The Oil Standard

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have long been intrigued by what stands for value. (Picture from The Zoo.)

Throughout the 19th century, gold was the standard of value.

The 1896 Crisis, the Cross of Gold speech, these were outgrowths of the 1895 gold loan by J.P. Morgan to the U.S. government in exchange for bonds, which Morgan then sold at the "usurious" interest rate of 4%. With gold as the standard of value, the value of other commodities (like wheat) withered. Farmers suffered, bankers gained. The farmers' uprising was called Populism, and it made Democrats dominant in the farm belt for decades.

Today we have a new standard of value. Oil. And the impact is much the same. For wheat read dollars, for farmers read Americans, and for J.P. Morgan read the Saudi sheikhs, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin.

What makes a "strong" store of value is the fact that its supply is limited, that it doesn't inflate. It's stable. It's sound.

The U.S. dollar is no longer sound. It's being tossed out by Helicopter Ben the way farmers a century ago tossed wheat on the market, and the result is very predictable. The age of the "dollar standard" is over, and while the world seeks a new safe haven, oil will do nicely.

There can be only one response.

Pushing the Process Revolution

Top netroots bloggers are making a key mistake right now, one which could cost them this election.

It has to do with the nature of  our revolution.

The Internet Thesis is, at heart, a process revolution. What is changing, more than our policy preference, is the means we use to choose that policy.

It's a lot like the 1896 Crisis which produced the Progressive era. While that earlier process revolution was about mass production, mass markets and mass media, this one is about custom production, micro-markets and the Internet medium, which enables -- not mere immediacy -- but immediacy in infinite depth.

So what's the mistake and how do we fix it?

Making It About Us Again

Why are people so disgusted with the present political campaign?

It's not about us. (Picture by Fred Askew from MonthlyReview.)

Candidates give lip service to this being about us, but it seems to be more about the media and the pundits and their own obsessions than about us.

Campaigns generally get into the weeds like this when the discussion about us becomes uncomfortable to the elites in power. It's not policy choices which make the elites uncomfortable. It's the idea of someone other than the elites making those choices which makes them uncomfortable.

I'm not talking here of idiots and know-nothings making decisions based on their own prejudices. I'm talking about candidates and parties addressing our real crisis, not just pandering to our short-term problems but inspiring us with a different future.

What's happening, to both young and old, is we fear losing control of our future. We don't know where our next job is. We don't know if America can ever lead again. We don't know how we'll pay our bills or educate our children. We fear we've lost control, personally, politically, economically. We're scared.

Why the Press Hates America

There are several good reasons why the TV media wants to use Jeremiah Wright to push Barack Obama to the sidelines:

1. This decade has been very-very-good for Big Media. Monopolization means you don't have to work hard for profits. Disney, GE, Time-Warner, Microsoft and Fox have gotten everything they could have wanted (and more) from this Administration.
2. The Internet threatens to destroy Big Media's ability to create campaign narratives, which lie at the heart of its political power. You spend your life working toward the height of power, you're going to resent another medium trying to take that power from you.
3. The myths, values and assumptions of 40 years are deeply ingrained in New York and Washington. Power isn't going to give up easily. It has to be seized.
4. After decades of basing power on Nixon's McCarthyism, using 30-second soundbites, TV can't conceive of people sitting through a long speech and getting information on their own.

It is telling that Obama is having problems right now with under-educated, older women, people who are unlikely to use the Internet. They're the people most easily manipulated by Big Media. That's the greatest threat the Internet Thesis has right now.

When a comedian is the best reporter in the room there is something wrong with the room. It's not just Jon Stewart's interviews. His bit about the rice shortage last week was classic, getting the message of American arrogance through our resistance.

Not everyone is helping, however, which says something very interesting about this medium.

Principles and Ideology

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

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What is most frustrating to me, as I read responses to my blog posts here and elsewhere, is how often I come up against raw, naked ideology.

Ideology is a soul stealer. Ideology blinds us to reality, substituting an artificial construct. Ideology, regardless of where its -ism comes from, is simply impractical.

One big reason why we have generational change is that the principles which first motivate important changes morph, over time, into ideology. This happens at all times, to all types of principle. The kind, simple words of Jesus have been transformed over the centuries into a host of warring ideologies. The same is true for Mohammad.

The same is true, in our time, for Adam Smith, for George Mason, for John Locke, even for Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, all the  great men who are credited with defining what is today modern conservatism.

I have been quite taken with the interviews surrounding the book Pure Goldwater, co-written by Barry Goldwater Jr. (who supported Ron Paul) and former Nixon counsel John W. Dean (who now seems to be a Democrat). Dean revealed that, while Goldwater Sr. was seen as a right-wing extremist in 1964 he was, by the end of his life, considered to be something of a libertarian, out of step with his own party. He even befriended the Clintons!

Goldwater was a man of principle. What he saw in his lifetime was those principles morph into an ideology, an absolutism as troubling as what he had fought in the 1950s.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

Class War

What was the most amazing statement in this week's ABC debate?

For my money it was anchor Charles Gibson's assertion that $200,000 is a middle class income. It is, in fact, within the top 4%.

The Census Bureau estimates the current median family income at $62,228. It varies by state. As high as $78,000 in New Jersey, as low as $46,000 in Arkansas. A median income means half of all families make more than that, half make less. It's a true, real-world average.

But I have no doubt that, to Gibson, his statement was right-on. Half the people he knows make more than $200,000, only half less. Which is precisely the problem.

If you make your living as a talking head, on network or cable TV, it's almost certain that you are, by most common definitions, wealthy. This is true for those so-called "newspaper" people you see on TV, not to mention nearly all the pundits and "strategists" who populate the political chat shows. (For the record, our family is doing just fine -- nowhere near $200,000, though.)

This is a very important point to understand when you're looking at today's media. If there is a class war -- and I would argue that there has been for many years -- everyone on the tube is on the rich side of that divide. Everyone, whether they're claiming to argue for conservatives or liberals.

This was not always the case. When I was a kid journalists were truly middle class, their incomes close to the median. Top editors were a bit above, reporters were always below. Our job was to identify with the middle class, and with those who had middle class aspirations. We could do that because that's where we lived -- in the middle.

No more. Now those paid to supposedly advocate on behalf of the middle class are themselves far above that station.

Passing the Media Torch

Perhaps the most important story coming out of Pennsylvania may be this.

The media torch has been passed. Not to a new generation, but to a new medium.

Not that the incoming medium notices. To read DailyKos you would think that idiocy were triumphant. Yet despite the constant drumbeat of "Obama's going down" from TV "pundits" and newspaper wags, nothing has really happened. Polls have barely budged.

This would not have been the case 20 years ago, or even 4 years ago. Michael Dukakis was destroyed for simply looking goofy in a tank, Howard Dean by a misrepresented attempt to rev up his supporters. The power of pundits and the media to make (and break) candidates has gone unquestioned for decades now.

What happened?

Something very important.

The Manipulators

We don't like being talked down to.

(This is actually a marketing talk, by Seth Godin, done at Google, but it's worth listening to whatever business you're in. Notice that he's not talking down to anyone.)

The reason the Obama "bitter" deal hasn't hurt him is the same reason the "Jeremiah Wright" deal didn't hurt him.

This election is not about him.

What all the manipulators who are pissing-and-moaning about it, whether on the TeeVee or online, don't realize is something just as important.

This election is not about them, either.

This election is about us. You and me.

Crisis elections are like that.

Anyone want to deny we're in a crisis (other than the manipulators)?

A World Without a Moral Center

As I may have mentioned here before I'm scheduled to visit Chengdu, China next month. Blogging will be sporadic.

Given the recent headlines over the torch run I'm certain you're wondering what I might tell my hosts.

The answer is -- not much.

For one thing I expect few there to know English. But even without the language barrier I'd mainly want to listen. Listen to my son try to puzzle out the language barrier after three years of Mandarin. Listen to people greet me, and try to explain things by speaking Szechuan ve-ry slow-ly (as though that would help).

But there's another, more important reason. I no longer have cause to condemn anyone.

Neither, frankly, do you.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What is true for mortal man is also true for ideas, for concepts, for myths and values, for political theses.

That's what we're dealing with in events like the supposed "bitter" contretemps and Barack Obama.

Forget for a moment whether Barack Obama is a black man or white. He is, first of all, a Hawaiian.

Hawaiians surf. They stand on a board above the waves and they ride the water the way Texans ride horses. Obama surfs history the way painters like Picasso surf artistic trends or the way a Tom Brady surfs through defenses seeking a receiver.

As do we all, once we realize it. But journalists are stuck in the eternal now, and have no concept of this idea of surfing.

Thus they see scandal where there is, in fact, the death rattle of their own assumptions of political myth, value, and power, and the alchemy in which both are created.

What Barack Obama said last week in Pennsylvania was the simple truth. It should surprise no one that people turn bitter when their jobs disappear, when politicians in both parties use that to gain power and then do nothing about it.

The Clintons promised to help, but instead took that power and endorsed free trade agreements which guaranteed the jobs would never come back. The Bushes blamed the blacks, the browns, all the "others," then continued the march away from production, towards consumption.

There is no lie there. There is no scandal.

Tribes of the GOP

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Back in 1968 it was easy to identify the Democratic tribes splitting off from the party by the way they dressed and the way they looked.

White, black, brown, male, female, young, old -- each tribe had its own look and its own outlook.

It's tougher now. About the only black Republicans are on TV. Republicans are generally Euro-Americans, aged 30 and higher. They blend in. It's only when they start talking that you detect the tribal differences.

Anthropologists had two ways to discern the tribal identity of Nixon-era Republicans, by where they sat and by what they obsessed over. 

Where they were definitions include:

• Wall Street Republicans -- Urban only if they had an apartment in New York itself (maybe Philly), otherwise strictly suburban or exurban. Their first concern is money, getting it, keeping it, getting more of it, keeping other people from getting any.
• Church Street Republicans -- Usually found in megachurches or in front of their TV sets. Densest populations in the South and Southwest, but found in every state. Their first concern is morality, usually others, and using the power of the state to force that morality into a mold their preacher approves of.
• Easy Street Republicans -- Mostly found in Florida, Arizona, and California, these are Wall Street Republicans who made their