Saturday, August 20, 2005
Call to Action
Dana Blankenhorn is, per some of his posts, something of a lightning rod in certain blogging circles. I don't travel in those circles (or, come to that, any others online). So I can't speak to his reputation, his popularity, his general, umm, acceptability. But he does seem to me to speak common sense, decently, more often than not.
An excerpt from a recent posting (which is itself quoting his weekly newsletter, A-clue.com):
I'd add a sixth lesson of the Dean campaign, and another value held by the liberal blogosphere: Community interaction, not isolation, engenders results. Most blogs (certainly this one) resemble continents of content and meaning, inhabited by only a single individual and visited only occasionally by outsiders. It's plenty easy to find other blogs, of course, even when they don't actively promote themselves, through blogrolls and hyperlinked cross-references. Even blogs which don't offer any real commenting feature (like James Wolcott's, or TPM) can become almost Biblical points of reference for the liberal blogosphere.
But all blogs do not exist as separate continents. Some of them are accretions of like-minded citizens along the virtual coastlines of the Internet. Eschaton and Daily Kos and blogs like them -- with posts followed by hundreds of comments, with their loooong and often daily multiple open threads -- are the real engines. They didn't start out as Democratic Party extensions, and even when they receive some support from the party they remain stubbornly independent, criticizing (sometimes ferociously criticizing) timid or feckless party leaders. But it's hard to imagine Dean's early success at fund-raising and grassroots activism without the support of such strong blogs, driven by energetic blog proprietors and especially by energetic communities.
(That's why it's great to see this going strong. Not surprising, considering the source. But great to see nonetheless.)
Blankenhorn's conclusion to his brief review of the problems facing the US (and the world):
An excerpt from a recent posting (which is itself quoting his weekly newsletter, A-clue.com):
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.So far this is pretty standard stuff, except for the "liberalism used to be called Unity" line, which I wish I'd come up with myself. How long has it been since you've read that? But then, a paragraph or so later, he goes on:
The New Deal ended when the Culture Wars, which began in the 1960s, created a crisis our parents' assumptions had no answer for.
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.
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:This -- the bulleted list, and Blankenhorn's connecting it to Howard Dean -- feels exactly right to me. When he was running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Dean represented many things to his supporters (especially before the uncomfortable disaster of the primaries season). But I bet they all felt close to him on one or more of those counts.
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.
- Your grandfather's attitude toward money.
- Public service as a noble calling.
- Open Source Technology as vital.
- Environmental and energy policy are the same thing.
- International law which no one is above.
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.
I'd add a sixth lesson of the Dean campaign, and another value held by the liberal blogosphere: Community interaction, not isolation, engenders results. Most blogs (certainly this one) resemble continents of content and meaning, inhabited by only a single individual and visited only occasionally by outsiders. It's plenty easy to find other blogs, of course, even when they don't actively promote themselves, through blogrolls and hyperlinked cross-references. Even blogs which don't offer any real commenting feature (like James Wolcott's, or TPM) can become almost Biblical points of reference for the liberal blogosphere.
But all blogs do not exist as separate continents. Some of them are accretions of like-minded citizens along the virtual coastlines of the Internet. Eschaton and Daily Kos and blogs like them -- with posts followed by hundreds of comments, with their loooong and often daily multiple open threads -- are the real engines. They didn't start out as Democratic Party extensions, and even when they receive some support from the party they remain stubbornly independent, criticizing (sometimes ferociously criticizing) timid or feckless party leaders. But it's hard to imagine Dean's early success at fund-raising and grassroots activism without the support of such strong blogs, driven by energetic blog proprietors and especially by energetic communities.
(That's why it's great to see this going strong. Not surprising, considering the source. But great to see nonetheless.)
Blankenhorn's conclusion to his brief review of the problems facing the US (and the world):
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.(Actually, he followed that ringing bit of optimism with Walt Kelly's "We have met the enemy and he is us." Which to my ears was rather a thud of a wrap-up.)
