This week's issue of my free weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com, dealt with politics. (Subscribe here.) That's why the jump is so high up. Those who don't like politics, or who don't like me blogging about it, should be forced to see as little of it as possible.
But there are things I have to get off my chest.
Political generations end when a crisis emerges that they can't answer for. Then new values emerge, new myths are told, and a new generation takes power. Gradually the new formulation replaces the old until its alliances become second nature.
The New Deal ended when the Culture Wars, which began in the 1960s, created a crisis our parents' assumptions had no answer for. (Illustration from the Meat Eating Leftist.)
What we now call liberalism they called Unity, the need to get along forged from a Great Depression and a World War. Politics ends at the water's edge, Republican Arthur Vanderberg said. The Cold War was a bipartisan endeavor, and Vietnam was, in Robert McNamara's words, "a Cold War activity." Those who didn't understand that became part of The Enemy, and have been used that way for a generation.
But the Culture Wars don't have an answer for our current problems. Events like the coming Rumsfeld 9/11 rally make that clear. It only makes sense seen throught the prism of Culture War. Circle the wagons on the side of what Nixon called the "Silent Majority." Up with People and Lee Greenwood unavailable? Clint Black will have to do.
But the Silent Majority is dead. In fact, I'd argue it's now on the other side. Most people have lost faith in this War, and its cause. The attempt to conflate Osama Bin Laden and Bill (or Hillary) Clinton is silly. But the new Silent Majority is afraid to raise its voice, afraid to express what is in its heart (although sometimes it comes out in a strangled scream).
Today's Far Right movements and causes remind me of nothing so much as the Far Left of the late 1960s. (When you think of it that way it's quite entertaining.) Religion really can be the opiate the people, and it's being used just that way now. Where liberals see James Dobson I see Timothy Leary. Ignore science for Intelligent Design? It's Ebonics, man.
Neither the Clinton Left nor the Bush Right currently has any answer to our problems, but there are signs in the blogosphere of a new set of values emerging:
Variations on these stands unite many people who are now on either side of the Culture War. Opposition to these stands also unite people on either side of the present political conflict.
I have written several times here that Howard Dean is the Barry Goldwater of the Democratic Party. I personally think he's got some Reagan in him, but that's just me. The point is this was, and is, his policy formulation, and it's one that draws strong charges of extremism, not just from Republicans but from other Democrats.
The Netroots, the comment-filled blogosphere of the Left, is becoming the equivalent of the 1960s New Right. For some reason people forget just how hard Goldwater fell in 1964, and how far from power conservatives were in 1965. The leaders of the party were all accomodationists, men like Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford, or yeah-buts like Nelson Rockefeller. But institutions were being built then, out of sight of Washington, and alliances were being forged. People were starting political careers in groups like the Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom, young people like Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney.
Their time is now passing. Their politics won't answer our present troubles. Struggling against the oil monster only makes it stronger. Buggering the dollar only takes pressure off China reformers so desperately need. Resisting international law only makes us weaker. Government isn't them, it must be us or it's just another form of oppression.
Debts need to be paid. Debts to international law. Debts to our nation's law. Debts to foreign creditors. Debts to the environment.
The solutions are in our hands. Open source technology, open source politics, and the open source economics practiced from the 1930s until the very recent past. The tools are sufficient to the day, if wielded by a people politically united, both with one another and with the rest of the world, in a common struggle to save the planet from its greatest threat.
We have met the enemy and it is us.