The Nature of the Crisis

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 40 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Every crisis in America's history has been a unique mixture of causes requiring a unique cure.

The Civil War was existential, the war itself inevitable. The progressive crisis was governmental. The New Deal problem was economic. The Vietnam crisis was social.

Our present crisis is political. What looked at first like an economic problem turned out to be a political one. This crisis tests whether our political institutions can survive an all-out attack from a determined minority, or whether a system originally designed to protect slavery would also, by its nature, halt the march of progress.

We have the perfect President for this crisis. Barack Obama studied constitutional law. He understands the nature of our political system inside and out. He understands our past and where we need to go.

I don't think Hillary Clinton could have been a good crisis President. Her husband was an anti-thesis President, that is, he accepted the theses of the Nixon era and leaned against them, moderated them, said yes-but to them. The crafting of a new kind of politics comes out of an old anti-thesis – Lincoln followed Clay and Nixon followed Eisenhower – but what emerges is materially different. (This doesn't mean she'd make a bad president after a new thesis is validated -- she will. But she's transactional by nature, not transformative.) 

Even five years into the Age of Obama we don't yet know what will emerge from this crisis. It is still in the balance. The wealthy few and the muddled many driving this crisis – an interesting combination of the political forces who drove the progressive and New Deal crises – understand the basic weakness of the American system, and are pushing it to the wall.

That weakness is our system's respect for the power of a political minority. In a parliamentary system of government, minorities may be guaranteed rights under law, but politically the majority rules. Whether that majority is an absolute one – as in a first-past-the-post system – or cobbled together as in proportional representation, the result is always the same. Majority rules.

In the American system, majorities don't always have to rule. There are checks and balances in place to guard against short-term majorities taking decisive action. American courts are powerful, and our legislative system was designed to frustrate rapid change.

There's a reason why America's system is unique. It was designed to protect the “rights” of slave-owners, and to create an artificial balance once the majority understood the hypocrisy of it. That's what made the Civil War so existential. But the result was only a collection of amendments to the document – the basic structure remained intact. The popular will remains easy to thwart.

This was very apparent to William Randolph Hearst, who backed the film “Gabriel Over the White House”  during the crisis year of 1932. The only way Hearst, a progressive, could see to get the New Deal through was under martial law. It turned out that an overwhelming majority, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, could accomplish many of the same aims without it. This is what I call the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity, which held until the election of Richard Nixon, whose Thesis of Conflict held until 2008.

Hearst's call for martial law was very much part of the era's zeitgeist, and fighting against this contempt for democracy became the underlying theme of the Roosevelt era. Hearst's politics were centrist, but the 1930s featured many outright Nazi sympathizers on the right wing of the American political spectrum, and outright communists on the left wing. Democracy itself was on trial.

It is again. That's the nature of what we're going through. A group you might call Hearst-ists, led by David and Charles Koch, believe that the system should be based entirely on the needs and demands of a wealthy elite, and they have worked for decades to make the system conform to their needs, to make it as feudal as America was before the Revolution. The brothers were successful, especially through the Bush years, but the needs of our time run counter to their needs, which is why for the Koch brothers this is such an existential crisis. It's why they have pushed it to the wall.

Wealth has dominated American politics since the Civil War, but for 150 years the needs of wealth and the needs of the country could conform with one another. By the Koch logic that's true today. The problem as they see it is an artificial shortage of energy, and fracking provides that energy. But fracking only provides a limited amount of energy. The real solution to our energy problem lies in technology, in turning away from burning stuff like cavemen and harnessing the abundance around us. The Sun shines, the wind blows, the tides roll, the crops grow, and we live on a molten rock.

Such a solution does not benefit the Kochs. It results in lower energy costs, and loosens the stranglehold they have over wealth. So it's true that underneath the political struggle there lies an economic struggle, but the economic abundance can't be truly unleashed until the political war is won.

Ever since he entered national politics, Barack Obama has been gearing up for this war, and at the heart of that is what we know now as cloud technology. He organized his campaign around cloud from the very first, and the technology trends since have shown the wisdom of this. While fracking offers high-cost abundance, cloud offers low-cost abundance.

But while clouds can build support, they have a harder time building passion. After a while the emergency e-mails coming from a cloud-based system turn into semi-spam. They get ignored by the people you most need to take action. Because they're always demanding the same sort of action – send an e-mail, send money, sign a petition. The cloud hasn't called on Americans supporting the President toward any deeper commitment than that.

The passion politics of the Nixon era were built on action, and a committed minority can engage in very strong action. A generation ago, that meant marches, demonstrations, sit-ins. Today it means truckers driving around the city and clogging traffic, or veterans tearing down fences to get at beloved memorials. The atmospherics of action trump what the cloud can offer. The noisy minority can trump the silent majority.

There is no doubt that the President has a majority behind him. What he lacks is a clear way to demonstrate that power which overwhelms what the Koch brothers can do through direct action and bending the power our Constitution gives minorities for frustrating change.

That's the political nature of the crisis. As of this writing, the President had not yet solved it. He seems to believe that consistent pressure will force the House to bend to his will, and that once that will is bent the system will have been changed. But there remain the courts, and there remain the states, and the battle won't truly be won until those fights are won, on behalf of the new majority.

Political wars are wars of attrition just like real ones are. They're just not as obvious, and they take longer to resolve, since people aren't dying in waves. But political war is what we've had since November of 2008, and political war is what we'll have until the new majority is respected. Which is why this is a time that tries the liberal soul. After a lifetime as a minority, it's hard to act as a majority, to do it consistently, to show up whenever the electoral bell is wrung, and to convince the minority that their days in power are over.

Yet that's what these times demand. That's the revolution this President is leading. Political victory will secure economic victory, and economic victory will secure the future. But political victory has yet to be won.