Dana Blankenhorn

The Speed of Political Change

The speed of political change is generational.

But how long is that?

In many important ways it is growing longer, because we're living longer. That's why John Kerry failed. He could be swift-boated only because enough people from the Vietnam era were still around, and active, to cause political knees to jerk. (Pictured is David Broder, still working as a columnist, a veteran of the Korean conflict.)

This surprised Democrats. After all, it was then 36 years after 1968, and the height of the Vietnam war. But their candidate was of that time, so were too-many of the voters.

Late in the 1968 campaign Hubert Humphrey tried to rally the troops of the New Deal and, it seemed, he almost pulled it off. This was 36 years after the New Deal, the same distance in time as Kerry was from his generational election in 2004. Humphrey failed because, by 1968, the concerns of 1932 were irrelevant, as Kerry thought 1968 was irrelevant to 2004. We age more slowly, thus political change occurs more slowly.

But if that's the case, perhaps 2008 will be more like 2004 than we imagine. Many people from the 1960s will still be around then. Republicans, and the press expects with them, that the past can still control the future.

What changes that equation is the medium you're now reading. Conservatives had to build their institutions slowly, out of public view, over many years, brick-by-brick, in the 1960s. It cost a ton of money. But the Internet allows this entire infrastructure to be built quickly, inexpensively, and (surprisingly) completely.

The Internet, in political terms, allows the future to disassociate itself from the past, at low cost.

Most reporters still don't understand this. Most expect the knees to keep jerking, because in their experience they have always jerked. Most reporters live in the moment, in the eternal today (they think), but in fact most live in the recent past, always extrapolating the last tick of the trend into tomorrow morning and calling this "foresight."

The Ev and Jerry Show

There is a big to-do in Left Blogistan today.

It started with Glenn Greenwald, and was then picked up by Matt Stoller, by Digby, by TalkLeft  and the Booman Tribune. 

They caved again, they let Michael Hayden pass as head of the CIA, they again were McClellan and Bush once again was Robert E. Lee.

Well, apparently we need another history lesson. This one comes from Peggy Noonan, a conservative for whom I have a special fondness since she grew up (partly) in Massapequa, and like me was the child of a small businessman.

She is writing here of the 1960s, and of how Republicans in the House and Senate dealt with issues which, to the Goldwaterites, were just as frustrating to her as Democrats' attitudes on  the "War on Terra"  are to the Netroots:

What did the Republicans do all those days, from the 1930s through the '70s? They griped and wrung their hands and were alarmed. "This irresponsible spending and taxing will do us in," "You're taxing the genius and incentive right out of the economy!" Journalists heard it once a week every week Congress was in session in the 1950s and '60s, from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. It was called the Ev and Jerry show. They banged away on high spending, high taxing, the unbalanced budget. "A million here, a million there and pretty soon you're talking real money," Dirksen famously said, and it was funny at the time because a million dollars was a lot of money.

This was the Goldwater Thesis. It was forged in opposition. It was, to many, a running gag. And not just to Democrats, but to many Republicans as well. (The picture? That's Jerry Ford, Ev Dirksen and other top Congressional Republicans watching the 1966 election returns. Courtesy the University of Texas. Ford is in the foreground, sitting on the floor.)

Google News Tries to Make Sense

Google News has been around for about three years now. That's awful long for a beta test.

The problem is they are having trouble getting the product right. And they must do that before they even think of trying to monetize the traffic. (Right now, they're doing nothing to monetize the traffic.)

Here's the problem.

On the one hand, the news sources it links to want to be paid for the links. Many sit behind firewalls. Others move stories to paid archives very quickly, breaking links.

On the other hand, folks want to get into Google News. I know that my friends at ZDNet have jumped through all sorts of hoops to keep my Open Source blog there.

Which is interesting. Some of the items I post there are pretty-much hard news, often done with an interview. Others are think pieces, done with the idea of stirring comment.

How can a computer tell the difference? It can't. So it monitors results with people, and makes value judgements.

Unfortunately, because of the way their sites are written and organized, many right-wing hate sites have gotten into Google News. During the 2004 campaign I noted many such propaganda sites getting their "stories" in there, so that if you looked up John Kerry or Howard Dean during the heat of their campaigns, you mostly got copies of their nonsense. I complained about this at Corante, but no one seemed to be listening.

Well, Google has had enough. They're moving to purge the political sites. Naturally, the sites are screaming bloody murder, calling it censorship. They call their sites "e-zines," and insist they should get preference over much higher-trafficked "blogs" like Atrios.

Game the rules, and if they don't play your way call them cheaters. Typical bullyboy tactics.

Here's what is really going on.

An Obelisk Painted to Look Like a Rocket

That's what Doc Searls calls M2Z, a proposed "third way" broadband network put together by some Silicon Valley venture capitalists. (That's the obelisk-rocket from the movie Logan's Run. Closest I could come, Doc.)

The proposal is that M2Z  be given 20 MHz of soon-to-be-vacated spectrum, free for 15 years. It would promise to spend $400 million building out "free" (ad-supported) broadband, with a faster paid tier. It would also give 5% of its revenues back to the government.

What's wrong with this? Some say nothing. GigaOM says the monopolists will never go for it. But there's a better reason.

Why not just let this go unlicensed? Call it the "wireless data band." Set equipment requirements so as to minimize interference. Maybe even specify mesh technology. You will get a lot more than $400 million invested (the equipment guys will love this market), you'll get to universal service a lot faster.

How Open Source Changes the (Political) Rules

Meet Howard Berman.

By the standards of the old proprietary politics Berman is a liberal, a steward of the people, a good Southern California Democrat.

By the standards of open source, however, Berman is to the right of the KKK.

Berman is among the Congressional Democrats who have come to depend upon the copyright industries for their political protection. In particular, Berman is a champion of the music and movie industries. (That link to OpenSecrets.org gives the details.)

These are the industries that pushed through the DMCA. These are the industries that began the Copyright Wars. In the name of protecting corporate profits, they expect  immortal copyrights and absolute control over what you can do with products you buy, after you buy them. They have been fighting, in other words, to destroy fair use.

This stand is completely antithetical to an open source politics. It's counter-productive in terms of open source economics. It's also antithetical to the clear intent of the Founders in establishing patent and copyright rights. They sought, in Article I, Section 8, to enable a limited monopoly for a limited time. And for a limited purpose, to encourage the creation of newer content.

Here's the language:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

The Founders saw copyright as an individual right, not as a corporate right. They saw it as a limited right, not a property right. They saw it as something to encourage new production, not to hold the future hostage to the past.

Berman has a long history of fighting fair use in the name of his corporate masters. Following is some language he wants to drop into the net neutrality bill on behalf of those who pull his strings:

The 1966 Game: Who's McCarthy Now?

It's been a while since we played the 1966 Game.

So let's review the rules.

The idea is that you look for modern analogs to the important players who made 1968 so memorable. But remember that this is something of a Bizarro World exercise. Now it's the Republicans who are the insiders, the dominant Thesis being that of Richard Nixon. And it's the Democrats who are on the outs, their Netroots the equivalent of the Goldwater movement.

So who plays Eugene McCarthy?

Let's review. McCarthy in 1966 was a back-bencher who looked set to stay that way. He had a fairly safe seat, was conventional in his outlook, albeit a bit quirky. (He liked poetry.)

McCarthy grabbed history by the throat by challenging his own party, running against LBJ early on an anti-war platform. After nearly beating President Johnson in New Hampshire, Johnson quit the race, and McCarthy was then challenged on the left by Bobby Kennedy and on the right by Hubert Humphrey.

So who's McCarthy now?

Why Net Neutrality Will Win

From  Tim Berners-Lee, in Edinburgh:

"Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

This is a vital piece of the net neutrality debate. Everyone who has tried to take "their" piece of the Internet and control access to it has lost, big-time.

Newspapers have lost. Proprietary services hiding behind registration or paid firewalls have lost. The only way for them to remain minimally credible has been to push some of that content in front of the firewall, as the Wall Street Journal has done.  But even there, the reach and bite of the Journal's vaunted editorial page is reduced, greatly reduced.

This is something that the phone companies and cable operators are going to learn, something those who seek to write net neutrality into law are attempting to teach them. One would think they would be learning that lesson already, given the underperformance of their cellular data operations. But it turns out that the public's appetite for chatting-with-friends-while-driving is virtually limitless, which covers up the failure.

The Long View: What Has to Be

I have many friends who are terribly upset over Alberto Gonzalez' threats to imprison journalists, about the NSA-Bell database merger, about all the "worse than Watergate" abuses of this Administration.

I take it with a grain of salt. It is the price of history.

I have written before here about the generational theory of American history, of great crises appearing every generation, forcing change on the old, imprinting lifelong lessons in the young.

The Civil War. The Panic of 1893. The Great Depression. Vietnam.

Each crisis, at the time, threatened to tear the nation apart. The first one literally did.

It's easy to minimize the second, until you look into the background. (The above is from Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives," describing the New York slums in the 1890s.) Things like the Pullman Strike, and Coxey's Army, the rise of Populism, the New York tenements, the Trusts. To the generation that fought and won the Civil War, it indeed looked as though the whole world was collapsing.

This Week's Clue: Toward an Open Source Politics

Note: This is the essay headlining the most recent issue of my free e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. You're welcome to subscribe. Always Free.

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The conservative movement of the 1960s had a big advantage on today's open source politics.

They knew where they stood from the beginning.

By 1966, which is analogous to our time, modern conservatism had the Sharon Statement (written at William F. Buckley's place) as well as the Goldwater experience, and his book "The Conscience of a Conservative." They knew what they were about, knew what they wanted.

Open source does not know what it wants, politically. Oh, it has some policy goals, but these are mainly elite goals, goals that ordinary voters don't care much about. An open Internet, a software commons, and open spectrum don't make the heart of the average voter go pitter-pat, but that's about as far as most open source people have gotten on policy.

In fact, most people in the open source movement still reject politics. They think it doesn't matter to them. Issues like the current net neutrality battle, a WIPO treaty that destroys fair use, and a "big bang" spectrum auction process are slowly energizing them. But only slowly.

What would an open source politics look like, and stand for?

My Favorite News Story

My favorite news story this week is this one.

The Macon Telegraph reports that a 45 foot tall American chestnut has been found, thriving, on Pine Mountain in FDR State Park, just a quarter-mile from one of the former President's favorite fishing holes.

As late as the 19th century a canopy of chestnuts, up to 100 feet tall, covered the American east. It was said a squirrel could travel from Maine to Georgia in those days without ever touching the ground. And we all recall the Longfellow poem beginning, "Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands..." The trees could live for 300 years.

The American chestnut was wiped-out a century ago by an Asian chestnut blight, and scientists have been trying for decades to cross-breed a blight-resistant strain. They're supported by activists from around the country, including Georgia (from which the image is taken) So far, the best they've come up with is a tree that is 15/16th American.

The secret here may just be the soil. But if the tree itself is resistant, it could become the mother of all botanical finds.