Dana Blankenhorn

Offense

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

---

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. 

The Next Boom Has Begun

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 51 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

I have just one prediction for 2013, but it's an important one.

Good times.

The economy is going to grow, and faster than we expect, for two main reasons:

1. A thumb down on energy prices.

2. The automation of just about everything.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.