Dana Blankenhorn

Liberalism Starts Over

The 20th century liberal movement was an amalgam of impulses from populists and progressives. It combined elements of the pro-inflation talk of William J. Bryan with the reformist impulses of Upton Sinclair. It was bawdy street politics taken into the parlor, given a suit, and set on a balcony to change the world through the creative use of government.

Liberalism, in other words, was populism + progressivism.

Now, with the Nixon Thesis collapsing, and with the concept of liberalism discredited among the mass of people (because that was at the heart of the Nixon Thesis), big thinkers like Max Sawicky and Stirling Newberry are back in the salons (virtual ones this time) debating where we go next.

And they are starting with the past.

Sawicky argues that "populism is about the bottom line -- ours and not theirs."  The original populists were farmers who sought inflation to keep the value of what they produced high. They wanted a bigger piece of the economic pie, enough to live on. And they wanted money defined by production of goods, not just gold.

Newberry rejects the thesis, saying a populist devolves into a reactionary. His example is Thomas E. Watson,  who began as an economic populist, then became a U.S. Senator on the wings of racism.  (Here he is in front of our state capitol building, about a mile from the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

No More Magic Pony Plans

Here is a fact most people won't acknowledge.

Iraq is irrelevant. Frankly, Afghanistan is irrelevant. Osama bin Laden was relevant, but since we allowed Al Qaeda to metastacize, and we are told it's no longer under his control, he's now only symbolically relevant.

Democrats, subject to the Vietnam Syndrome (afraid to sound “dovish”) will not admit this fact. Republicans, in whose name the War Crimes of Iraq were committed, under whom the Cradle of Civilization has been reduced to ashes, are completely unwilling to face reality.

Here is the truth. Oil is the enemy.

It's the replacement of petroleum, first with biofuels, then with hydrogen, that must be our top priority. Oil is destroying the planet's ecosystem and scientists say we are very close now to a “tipping point” where the damage from global warming, the mass extinction of nearly everything, becomes inevitable.

What's the worst thing that can happen if we abandon Iraq? The price of oil goes up, maybe way up.

Good.

We need a high floor price for energy to encourage the technology of conservation, and to assure a market for alternative fuels. Whatever the price, it will be a price.

If we can set a government-mandated floor near that price, then we have the incentive our inventors need to get inventing. So long as the price of energy is subject to free fall, no one will make the long-term investments needed to deal with our real problem, which is to replace petroleum with something sustainable, with unlimited hydrogen from wind, water, the Sun and the heat of the Earth itself.

Rather than deal with this reality, which is as stark and as threatening as a heart attack, we have all sorts of “magic pony plans” to “win” Iraq or at least, claim a Vietnam-like draw (losing after we leave). It's not just a waste of treasure and of lives, it's beside the point.

Normal Service to Resume Shortly

We were treated this Thanksgiving to a visit by my mother.

Following my dad's death in 1999, mom made a decision many in her situation fail to make. (They had been married nearly 49 years.)

She chose happiness.

Since then she has had her share of reasons to choose otherwise. Friends have sickened, friends have died, some have become estranged. She lost her home of 30-plus years to reconstruction, and now lives in what she describes as a castle ruled by my little brother and his wife.

Left and Right Blogistan Expand Their Agreement

One point I keep making regarding my “open source thesis” is that, on matters regarding the Internet, Left Blogistan and Right Blogistan agree. (Art by Adam Fox, originally printed at Down with Tyranny.)

Both sides support network neutrality. Both sides want campaign reformers to keep their hands off the Net. Both cheered today's California decision expanding the rights of bloggers who repeat what turn out to be lies.

But in the wake of the latest election results, another area of agreement has emerged. Both sides are against corruption, and ready to do battle with their own “side” in order to “purify” the ranks.

Conservatives like Dean Barnett at Townhall.Com are unhappy over the Republicans' House leadership choices. They seem a continuation of the arguably “pro-corruption” meme that cost those leaders power in the first place. Rather than merely parrot the Republican Party line, bloggers like Captain's Quarters now want to be more like DailyKos, raising money and taking on their own side.

Democrats like Howie Klein have their own corruption worries. In a recent post he offers sympathy for those Republicans upset with their House leadership and in another demands that Democratic bloggers go after the corrupt members in their own ranks, no matter how powerful.

This is a significant moment. Mainstream reporters like David Ignatius have tried to enter the blogosphere but they have been mainly jeered because they are spouting Washington-received conventional wisdom.

 

Nanotubes From Seeds

No offense, but this is a bigger win than the East Carolina game.

A team under James Tour, who now heads the Rice Carbon Nanotechnology Lab, appears to have succeeded in growing carbon nanotubes from "seed" tubes.

A paper on all this will go into the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Dr. Tour (right) is listed as "lead corresponding author" on the final paper because it continues work started by the late Dr. Richard Smalley, the 1996 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry who passed away last year. Dr. Smalley had long been working on creating commercial quantities of nanotubes for industry, and even invented a manufacturing technology for tubes involving carbon monoxide.

In writing of this latest discovery, Tour warns against over-exuberance. So far the team has only shown that the new tubes are longer and of the same  internal dimensions as the seeds. They must still be tested to show that they are chemically identical to the original seeds. Smalley's earlier manufacturing processes resulted in a variety of up to 80 different nanotubes being produced -- he wasn't replicating specific tubes with specific properties in mass quantities.

But now the team may have cracked that case.

Stalinism Resurrected

The greatest accomplishment of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era was arguably the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Personally I don't buy it. The USSR was destroyed, not by Reagan's speeches or his Star Wars threats, but by the internal contradictions of the system. You can't remove incentive, destroy innovation and succeed in a post-industrial economy.

But what if Communism had a sugar daddy? What if it became Texas?

That's precisely what is happening. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has essentially re-nationalized its oil and gas industry. Thanks to our insatiable appetites, and our own refusal to work on alternatives, this provides the regime with enormous financial leverage. Putin has been using this leverage to recreate the Soviet state.

• Intimidating the near abroad to recreate its network of satellites.
• Killing potential enemies.
• Systematically eliminating dissent.

An End, Not a Beginning

A careful analysis of the 2006 election returns shows that it was an end, not a beginning.

While Democrats won by 7 points overall, and Netroots Democrats performed better in competitive races than DCCC Democrats, the issues defining the next generation were simply not addressed.

This is easy to see looking at the returns from the South. Incumbency remained powerful. The Republican Party, wedded to the idea of a universal exurb, was able to overcome hard facts -- median income fell in the region through the decade and the region's manufacturing base disappeared. The old business elite, which had supported Democrats as the "incumbent" party, was replaced by a new elite -- mainly mortgage bankers and real estate interests -- that was overwhelmingly Republican.

This was true in every state within the region, including Florida, which had previously been seen as a special case. While minorities actually increased their affection for Democrats, Republicans still dominated. For every voter who felt disillusioned with Republicans because of what was happening regarding their church, there was another who felt closer to their state Republicans because of what was happening at work.

Unfortunately for Republicans, this favorable balance is fragile, and due for destruction. Exurbs depend on ready supplies of gasoline, and a refusal by voters to see environmental issues as paramount.

Events will simply not allow that to continue.

The West Side (of campus)

I have noticed that bloggers sometimes take time out from their regular chores to congratulate their favorite teams.

John Aravois is a fan of Ohio State. Oliver Willis loves the Washington Redskins.

Regular readers know I'm an alumnus of Rice University and when I notice the old school at all it's to highlight its achievements in science and engineering, which is as it should be.

But the west side of the campus is devoted to athletic pursuits, and the far west side features an enormous, concrete, 72,000 seat football stadium, built by a predecessor company of Halliburton (Brown & Root) in just 9 months back in 1950.

Nothing much happens there. Since the Southwest Conference left Rice in the mid-1990s, few have even noticed the place.

But something remarkable did happen at homecoming this year. A new coach, Todd Graham, suffered through some enormous defeats while installing a new passing offense on what had been a wishbone program. And he stiffened the defense. Long story short, the Owls beat East Carolina yesterday 18-17, their third win on the last play of the game in a five-game win streak. (This one was witnessed by about 12,000 souls.)

It was also great entertainment. Real value-for-money stuff. The other team misses a clinching pass by inches, we get the ball on our 26, and drive the field in less than a minute with our second and third string quarterbacks, before the final score is laid down by a walk-on?

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict

I have been remiss in not describing, in detail, the political myth and values that now dominate American politics.

I call it the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, because most of it originated with Richard M. Nixon. Its assumptions include the ideas that political adversaries are enemies, that politics is a form of war, that attack is always better than defense, and that the system is always under threat from outside.

As with most Political Theses in American history, the Nixon Thesis is made from bits of the old AntiThesis, combined with the character of the leader and the nature of the crisis he rode in on. The AntiThesis in this case was McCarthyism, the character of the leader is Nixon's personal myth of the Great Man, and the crisis was what we called the 1960s.

It's the crisis that ties all this together, and the political crisis of the 1960s was misunderstood for a long, long time. Seeing the 60s from the point of view of the anti-war movement is a lot like seeing the Civil War from the point of view of the South. Culture makes it the popular view. But that's not how it went down.

Middle class Americans felt threatened by the changes of the 1960s. By constantly conjuring up the threat (whether or not it exists) leaders under the Nixon Thesis can get the political knees to jerk, and impose their will. It's the equivalent of Republicans in the late 19^th century “waving the bloody shirt,” calling all Democrats potential traitors because they either fought against the Union or urged peace with the Confederacy.

Giving Thanks

Following is the lead essay from this week's A-Clue.Com, the e-mail newsletter I have written since 1997.

Enjoy.

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It's important to stop every once in a while and give thanks.

We all have personal blessings to be thankful for. But without minimizing them I want to focus on more corporate blessings.

The 21st century marks a truly new phase in our history, the slow development of a "hive mind." The Internet is the first iteration of this idea. It is, by the standards of such things incredibly primitive. It's slow, it doesn't translate languages, it has many other barriers. But the work has begun and that's a blessing.

I am especially thankful this year for the wisdom of the American people. Even when I violently disagreed with their electoral decisions, I was always, eventually, able to place them into an historical context that made them intelligible.

As you know, this is what I call the Open Source Thesis, although you might also call it the Internet Political Thesis. The recent election represents the first real triumph of that Thesis. Democrats organized themselves around the Internet as never before, and for the first time this kind of self-organization trumped the corporate and media politics that has dominated our culture for a generation.

Yes, everyone seeks personal validation in an election result. Conservatives say Republicans weren't "really" conservative. Talking heads on TV will say that Democrats moved to the right. Some Democratic Party leaders will credit the money they raised, or the candidates they themselves recruited and endorsed.

But it's the self-organizing work of the Internet itself that deserves more credit. Not the "Netroots" but the medium these activists used. Many idiots are now busy calling people like Chris Bowers of MyDD or Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos stars, but that's like calling the bartender at the Algonquin the father of the Algonquin Roundtable. These people were mediums through which hundreds of thousands of others self-organized. They were enablers, nothing more. As Markos himself likes to insist.

But there were assumptions that grew out of anyone's participation in this new political medium, even if they did it through conservative sites such as Redstate and its "Rightroots" project. These are assumptions inherent in the Internet  itself. They are values – openness, connectivity, consensus – universally understood by active Internet users, universally embraced by these activists, but actually quite new in the political realm.