Dana Blankenhorn

Getting Past a Lifetime of Stupid

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Like a bunch of kids realizing the onlookers finally believe them, that the Emperor is parading about naked, liberals are finally calling conservatives idiots.

This is the same exhilaration conservatives felt a generation ago as they saw the Great Society collapsing. It's the same feeling liberal academics had a generation before that, seeing the fall of the Boogoisie. 

As regular readers of this blog know, such stupidity comes from a generation's old insight which is being deployed past its sell-by date. Today's stupidity is based on the Cold War assumptions brought to power by Richard Nixon and (later) Ronald Reagan.

True believers in that stupidity use the ideas of Nixon and Reagan the way medicine men might use shrunken heads. The attacks of John McCain in this last month have repeated both the strategies and tactics of the last 40 years, yet its Rove's minions who are being laughed at. (When your attacks are upstaged by Paris Hilton you've become a caricature.)

So for many people this is a summer of celebration. Liberals have a right to run around like Munchkins after the house fell on the wicked witch. But wise people, and if you've found this blog you're truly a wise person who looks outside the beaten path, should be examining the oncoming assumptions to see how they might be abused, and eventually overthrown, in years to come.

Having been inside the movement which came up with these assumptions, having named them the Internet Thesis,  I'd like to offer my services as your guide. Especially since, like Krugman, most of the better candidates are too busy celebrating the collapse of the old order to look inside the new:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

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 pile. Often found in motor homes, on golf courses, or on condo balconies.
• Talk Show Republicans -- Often found in pick-up trucks on on job sites. They like them some Rush Limbaugh. Used to call themselves Reagan Democrats. Archie Bunker's real kids. The kind of people other Republicans like to rob.
• Professional Republicans -- Mostly found in Washington and its suburbs, or on TV.  Professional greasemen (and women),  sucking either at the government teat or those of other Republicans, mainly the Wall Street variety. Rush Limbaugh himself.
  

Great (Wo)Man Theory

One key difference between the TV era we're leaving and the Internet era we're entering lies in the "Great Man" theory of history.

In TV World, the camera must be on one person. There is always just room for one story.

In the last few years, as the Internet has come to mean more to us, the insanity of this attitude has become apparent. First, with O.J, then with Monica, and now with just about every story TV chooses to obsess on.

This is especially true when it comes to politics. One man, one House, one set. The TV has room for no more than that. This has helped concentrate power in one person, even when that person was, as this President is, a worthless piece of shit. It has also helped create the explosion of "horserace" coverage. Since all that matters is the identity of the face in front of the camera, the minutiae involved in getting someone in front of that camera becomes the only story.

The world doesn't work that way. The Internet certainly doesn't. Even the most important site in the world, Google.Com, is merely a conduit, a connection on the way to somewhere else, an enabler.  Yet notice how the business press has covered Google as though it were a destination, just as it pushed Yahoo into being a destination, just as it pushed Microsoft as a destination. One camera, one destination, one story. TV assumptions are everywhere.

Which brings us to the news of the day. Benazir Bhutto was a product of the TV age, imbued by TV values with TV qualities of perfection and importance. Her death led to a paroxysm, not just on the streets of Pakistan but on the TV, because there was just one camera, one story, and there could be just one heroine in the TV storyline. She knew this, and spent her last months manipulating it, maneuvering herself into  the role of alternative to Pervez Musharraf, whom everyone knew was hopelessly flawed. Everything was set, in a TV world, for her to assume power.

But the lesson of her death, for Pakistan and for us, should be this. Life ain't TV. We imbue a single center with all power at our peril. It's like love. She's not perfect, he's not perfect, no one is perfect. No one person can hold all power and lead righteously, unless they are themselves perfect. And no one is perfect.

The Populists of 2008

The run-up to Iowa is revealing a single trend in both parties.

The rise of populism.

Populism lets you draw a direct line through the rise of Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, John Edwards and (to an extent) Barack Obama. Both parties are flirting with Populism today to a greater extent than ever before, and for the same reason.

It's the economy, stupid. (Right, William Jennings Bryan.)

The shorthand way Washington Villagers will explain this is that Huckabee represents religious populism, Edwards economic populism and Paul libertarian populism. That's wrong. Huckabee carries an economic message as well, Edwards carries a libertarian message, and Paul is perfectly willing to see a theocracy if that's what floats America's boat.

They resonate because America has seen a succession of Populist uprisings at every time of political crisis. The Abolitionists of the 1850s were religious populists. The actual Populist Party reached its peak of electoral influence in the 1890s. Franklin Roosevelt won with the support of the Populists. George Wallace was a Populist.

Populism is a broad term, often difficult to define, but generally reflects a distrust of central authority, and a call for power to be given to the people, taken away from the central government. Its origins can be traced back to the first two crises in American political history -- the contested 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson and the stolen 1824 election which fueled the rise of Andrew Jackson and the creation of the Democratic Party. Both men sounded populist themes, Jefferson the yeoman farmer and Jackson the idealized frontiersman. Both based their success on organizing people around their myths and values.

Populism is the real American political religion. No matter what we actually believe, or what we actually do, we tend to cloak ourselves in the guise of Populism, if only rhetorically. This makes the real thing tough to detect.

So what's the key to discerning the real thing?

Awakening the Netroots

Perhaps nothing illustrates the impact of Howard Dean's achievements than the caving of his party's Congressional wing this month.

It's the reaction to them that's important.

The FISA filibuster and the Bush Christmas Present Budget are angering the Netroots and, hopefully, re-energizing them.

It's a cold slap in the face, one that's overdue.

It's one thing to build a party, or a movement, as Kos has done. It's quite another to see that movement directed toward a goal, and directed toward actively confronting a party, really taking it over. That was the lesson Howard Dean himself tried to teach before becoming DNC chair, when he formed Democracy for America.

That's now taking place. The anger over at DailyKos, at Americablog, at Firedoglake, and elsewhere in the Netroots over what is happening now is palpable.  For much of 2007 netroots bloggers were, when outraged, mainly outraged at President Bush. They cut their own party's leaders considerable slack.

No more. I hope, and expect, that the result of this anger will be a growing sophistication on the part of Netroots activists and a growing number of Netroots-inspired primary challenges, such as those now going on in Illinois and Maryland.

We don't just need more Democrats. We need better Democrats.

We're All Deaniacs Now

In about three months we'll come up on a fascinating anniversary which few in the press will mention. (Image from Rantical.)

On March 22, it will have been five years since Howard Dean's "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" speech.

It's an important event when you compare where we are now to where we were then.

In March 2003 Democrats were in disarray, the base hopelessly divided from the party's center. Today it's Republicans who are in disarray, the base spinning off in all directions from the party's center.

Dean's speech crystallized, in just 20 minutes, the themes that now animate the majority of Americans:

• Ending the war.
• Balancing the budget.
• Health insurance for everyone.
• Caring for the needy.

Dean laid out other markers on that day. A desire to re-animate young voters. A call to conservation and the environment. The 50-state strategy. Absolute inclusiveness. Intellectual honesty and consistency. Honest government.

This Week's Clue: The Crisis Unseen

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 50 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of December 17.

Enjoy.

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One hallmark of a crisis period is how it represents a change in the dominant medium.

I didn't realize this when I started this project, two years ago. It revealed itself to me slowly. The rise of mass-market books which could impact public opinion in the 1850s. The rise of penny newspapers, organized as nationwide chains, in the 1890s. The rise of movies and radio, with all their dramatic power and immediacy, in the 1930s. The rise of TV in the 1960s.

In all these periods the older medium could not respond. It felt dominant. It had dominated a generation of thought, and the people in those media felt they could go on as before, without change. None of them noticed the new crisis. It was left to the avatars of the new media -- newspaper journalists in the 1890s, movie producers in the 1930s, TV producers in the 1960s -- to tell the story. And in the telling they became dominant, then over time became just as ossified, self-centered, and blind to the next crisis as those they had displaced.

So it is today. The Internet is replacing TV. You don't see much respect for the online medium from TV people.

ObamaRomney

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called Let Obama Be Reagan.

The idea was that Barack Obama has a chance to represent the new Internet Thesis of American politics, the values of consensus, openness, transparency, connectivity and standards that define how we must approach our current problems, the values separating us from the TV past. Just as Reagan embodied the Nixon-era values of  conflict, drama, personality, and showbiz.

Now that we're at the key point in this race, with the Democratic nomination (and the Presidency) on the line, I'm afraid Obama is starting to make the mistake another candidate from 1968 made, to his eternal peril and family's torment.

That candidate was Romney. George Romney. Mitt's dad.

A little over 40 years ago, George Romney was on his way to being President, and Mitt was on his way to becoming a Republican Kennedy kid. Then he made a famous, or infamous mistake. He said one word.

Brainwashed.

This screwed Romney good, but the reason it screwed him has only become clear in the light of history. Romney said he'd been "brainwashed" about Vietnam by the Johnson Administration as a nod to Vietnam War opponents.

But the rising thesis of that time, the new assumptions of the emerging Republican majority, held that Vietnam, as a Cold War Activity, was not open to question by those seriously seeking power. Bugging out, to these voters, was not an option.

Grumpy Old Men

Every generational crisis moves at its own pace.

Despite the enjoyment of our 1966 Game and 1967 Game, there is no guarantee things will proceed now as they did then.

One gets the distinct impression Republicans are playing a sort of 1891 Game. Let the old regime take this one, then let the economy collapse as it did in 1893, and the Republicans can come riding in to dominate another generation. In this version the Clintons both play Grover Cleveland (right), with reform meaning such items as the FairTax, a renewed imperialism, and continuing religious revival matching that of our Muslim foes.

It could happen.

Only one other generational crisis, that of 1860, brought with it an open Presidential seat, however. Lyndon Johnson opened his seat only in March 1968, and until then it was assumed the anti-war crowd would have no candidate, yet Democrats should be able to beat whoever the Republicans threw up by emphasizing the shared New Deal assumptions of that time.

The crisis of 1932 saw a united Republican Party go down to thumping defeat behind its incumbent, Herbert Hoover (left).

No guarantees.

Paul and Huckabee

The rise of Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee is great news for Democrats.

No offense to their supporters, but both candidates throw a major element of the Republican coalition off the bus. Their appeal is based on this dismissal, and without absolute unity Republicans can't win.

Just ask Democrats what disunity did for them.

If you've been playing The 1967 Game along with us, you'll recognize these guys as the extremist wings of the Democratic Party from that time, the fire-breathers who drew cheers from their supporters while turning a generation off the Democratic Party brand.

In Ron Paul's case, he's tossing the neo-conservatives off the bus. Then he's running over them. Then he's backing the bus up to run over them again.

You don't just hear it in the sneer he gives their imperial aims in Iraq, you hear it clearly in the cheers with which his followers greet this. They don't care if Paul is an economic royalist, an ultra-Randian, an anti-government absolutist so extreme (sincere, and consistent) in his beliefs that he probably couldn't be re-elected from his South Houston district (he refuses to bring home the bacon, just leaves it on the side of the road to rot).

You don't support Ron Paul with your head. You support him with your heart, and your guts. In your guts you know he's nuts. You are, too. You live in a world of political theory, a jungle world you wouldn't personally survive a day in, unless you had the morals of an ax-murderer. (He's got Bud Light. And a chainsaw!)