The General Welfare

What we are seeing in both politics and business today is the return of something the Founders understood well.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defence,^[1]
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America.

Promotion of the general welfare has been distinctly lacking in the generation now fading from the scene. Baby boomers were chastened by the Nixon reaction and we have spent our lives looking out for number one. Our nation, too, has also been looking out for number one, and our domestic policies have taught that the general welfare is merely a calculation, our specific welfare added together.

We now see where that gets us. The banking system has had to embrace the idea of general welfare in order to merely survive, not just within this nation but globally. We have seen this week, at McCain-Palin rallies, where this obsession with our specific welfare can lead us. It can drive you crazy.

So voters are turning to Barack Obama as the alternative, but he seems more like a life raft than the more substantial recovery we need. That is because we don’t know where he is coming from, a theme I have been developing here for several years.

Let me explain.

What I have been tracking through my journalism and my advocacy is what might be called an Internet Thesis, or Open Source Thesis, in politics and in business. It is based on the values and myths underlying the Internet, which can be seen this decade in the rise of open source technology.

The Internet works by consensus. It requires a technical consensus to work. Protocols like TCP.IP, the addressing scheme, the way we map numerical addresses to names (like www.www.danablankenhorn.com or www.google.com), the way in which this browser can visualize for you what I have written as a clear page, with pictures, even video, although it’s stored online as computer code.

All this requires consensus to work.

Consensus finds what we agree upon and works outward from there. Competition, by contrast, finds points of difference and works inward. The tech industry has embraced consensus in our time, and this embrace has been extended from the way our global network works into a new business model for software code, and thus another way of looking at our industry, one in harmony with the interests of customers and users.

It is in the difference between competition and consensus, in the difference between our specific welfare and the general welfare, that we find the politics of Barack Obama.

This has been a hard sell all along the way. He had to overcome the
idea of nationalist unity represented by John Edwards, the traditional
liberalism of the New Deal. He had to overcome the Clinton AntiThesis,
the idea of leaning against our existing assumptions as a sailboat
leans into the wind, hoping to move forward by going laterally to the
shore. And now he is facing the Nixon-Reagan-Bush Thesis itself, the
wind the Clintons sailed against, all the myths, values and power of
the last 40 years, the assumptions of the media and everyone who works
in politics.

Today’s crisis has enabled him to break through. The events of this last month have
forced Wall Street to embrace a different vision, for its own survival.
This is more than an embrace of "socialism" but, as the ongoing efforts
of the G7 show, an acknowledgment of global interdependence.

Promotion of the general welfare, in other words, no longer just
applies to the United States of America. It applies to the whole world.
And to promote that general welfare requires that we first see where we
agree and move out from there.

Wall Street has embraced consensus. It has grasped the key to the
Internet Thesis and, ignoring what seem like thorns, it is hanging on
for dear life.

Some reporters, like Charlie Gasparino, still
don’t get this. By embracing a global bailout, governments and private
institutions working together, Wall Street has embraced Barack Obama as
it once did Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that
will have enormous repercussions.

The most important will come in how we grow our way out of this.
Together. There is a growing consensus that the next boom must come in
alternative energy, the domestic production of electricity from Earth,
wind and the fire of the Sun, and its two-way distribution. Obama calls
this a "Manhattan Project," I have called it The War Against Oil. There
is now no stopping it.

This also implies our acceptance of another global consensus, the
understanding that this planet is burning up due to man’s own actions,
and the commitment to change those actions, again on behalf of the
general welfare.

That struggle, which will consume the lifetime of my children and
grandchildren, finally begins now. It means more than just cutting back
on our use of hydrocarbons. It means seeking to repair the natural
world, restoring natural predation, and producing goods based on what
the Earth below us knows works, rather than merely what today’s markets
demand.

Progress will not come easily. The forces unleashed over the last
generation will not go quietly into that good night. There will be
setbacks. There will be tears. Barack Obama can only begin the work, he
can only start the building of the new scaffold of global consensus.

But in the plunging knife of a market panic, that work has most
definitely begun. And after November 4, it will most definitely begin in earnest.