21rst Century Populism: the New "Us" Against the Same Old "Them"

Mark Bittman published a very important article last week in the New York Times, entitled, "What is the Purpose of Society?".  Important, because in just a few words he gets to the very heart of political action.

He begins with the most basic problem imaginable: food:

The world of food and agriculture symbolizes most of what’s gone wrong in the United States. But because food is plentiful for most people, and the damage that conventional agriculture does isn’t readily evident to everyone, it’s important that we look deeper, beyond food, to the structure that underlies most decisions: the political economy.(...) Think about it this way: There are two kinds of operating systems, hard and soft. A clock is a hard system. We know what it’s for, we know when it isn’t working, and we know that 10 clock experts would agree on how to fix it — and could do so. Soft systems, like agriculture and economics, are more complex. We don’t all agree on goals, and we don’t agree on whether things are working or in need of repair. For example, is contemporary American agriculture a system for nourishing people and providing a livelihood for farmers? Or is it one for denuding the nation’s topsoil while poisoning land, water, workers and consumers and enriching corporations? Our collective actions would indicate that our principles favor the latter; that has to change. Mark Bittman - New York Times

Toward the end of his article comes a paragraph which, in my opinion  could be the political strategy that "connects the dots" between many heterogeneous groups and issues in a way that might finally articulate a serious progressive challenge to today's floundering "conservative revolution".

It’s clear to most everyone, regardless of politics, that the big issues — labor, race, food, immigration, education and so on — must be “fixed,” and that fixing any one of these will help with the others. But this kind of change must begin with an agreement about principles, specifically principles of human rights and well-being rather than principles of making a favorable business climate.

I find this striking because it connects with what Podemos, the wildly successful, out of the blue, political movement that is shaking the foundations of Spain's establishment is saying these days.

Podemos originated in the aftermath of the 2011–12 Spanish protests against inequality and corruption. It is a left-wing populist party that seeks to address the problems of inequality, unemployment and economic malaise that followed in the wake of the European debt crisis. (...) Podemos is currently the 2nd largest Spanish party by number of members; it became the 3rd largest party within the first 20 days it allowed membership, with 100,000 signing up in that period, and currently has more than 344,000 members. Wikipedia 

Basically their message is that today's problems are not so much a question of "left versus right", but more a question of "up versus down"; "down" being defined as "la gente", a less political buzzword for the people than "el pueblo". This is a demographic smorgasbord that ranges all over the political system but who are united, perhaps unknowingly, in their mutual suffering, the common adversary of all of them being "La casta" (the "caste"), defined as a tiny minority of amazingly wealthy and powerful corporations and individuals who control and manipulate the financial, political and mainstream information systems to their benefit and to the detriment of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

Finally we are talking about finding a common denominator shared throughout most of the population. Those suffering could include anyone from a civil servant trying to fix the climate or guarantee the purity of what Americans eat or a small, "main street" businessman smothered by the "big boxes", all the way to someone flipping burgers in McDonald's, and every imaginable minority: all could feel oppressed by the system as it stands.

The "casta", then, is the common adversary of all "la gente", the people, that is to say, everybody that is not super-rich and powerful.

In American terms it would sound something like "everybody against the one percent".

What sort of mentality are "we the people" facing? Let's ask Bloomberg:

It's not necessarily natural to act selfishly. Decades of research suggest that humans are hard-wired to reciprocate kind deeds because doing so offers an evolutionary advantage. Yet being at work seems to strip people of a desire to help people. "Organizations are more future-oriented," Pfeffer says. "They emphasize calculation, rather than morality and duty." He and Belmi cite prior research showing how companies have increasingly walked back promised pension benefits, cut retirees' medical insurance benefits, and laid off staff in the absence of financial strains. Even though research suggests the obvious—that being stingy about reciprocation can make employees less productive and more likely to quit—companies still seem to have no qualms about screwing over workers. Bloomberg Business

Clearly then, contrary to much that "they" would like "us" to believe, (understatement warning) the corporate model cannot serve the well being of the community as a whole.

As Mark Bittman says,

Shouldn’t adequate shelter, clothing, food and health care be universal? Isn’t everyone owed a society that works toward guaranteeing the well-being of its citizens? Shouldn’t we prioritize avoiding self-destruction?

You could say it louder perhaps, but I doubt if you could say it more clearly. DS

Notes on the new populism

Classic left wing parties are missing the boat today, almost to the point of irrelevance,  because the traditional "working class", which was their power base, has been largely fragmented and is now practically powerless as the enormous "reserve army of labor" that globalization provides means that the worker´s principal weapon, withdrawing their labor, is no longer effective, increasingly even in skilled or jobs requiring higher education: if an American legal assistant is expensive, get an Indian lawyer in India to do the paperwork at a tenth the price per hour. But this has a certain "death spiral" effect.

The"killer contradiction" today is that while workers are no long needed more and more consumers are. Globalization has also brought on overproduction, a glut of consumer goods flood the markets.

How are unemployed or underemployed formerly middle class people, brought up on the idea of their right, even duty to consume, consume? Credit? Been there, done that.

So the real "revolutionary protagonist" today is the enormous, but increasingly declassé and naturally resentful middle class that was created before globalization. Some sort of populism,  "us against the one-percent" is the only possible progressive game in town now. 

The challenge is to keep this populism international, progressive and not nationalistic-racist, reactionary etc. 

That is why Thomas Piketty work, "Capital in the Twentyfirst-Century" is a great help, especially among statistic loving Americans, in building objective political consciousness in the middle class for this struggle, which is really just beginning. DS

Time to stick it to the Gipper

"The surge from nowhere of Mike Huckabee(...) threatens to split and even destroy the Republican coalition, by dividing social conservatives from economic conservatives."
Clive Crook -FT

"The strategic failure of a whole generation of economists, bankers, and policy-makers has been so enormous that it may now take a strong draught of socialism to save the Western democracies."
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph

David Seaton's News Links
I have been writing a lot about Mike Huckabee lately, not because I'm endorsing him but because I find his sudden appearance, his explosion, so significant.

It seems to me that he has discovered and is exploiting for all it's worth, what is in effect a "contradiction" within the Republican, conservative coalition that Reagan built. He is speaking to the working poor of America but without the nauseating, implicit racism of Reagan's state's rights, anti-welfare, rhetoric.

I don't believe that Huckabee is really a serious populist. He isn't because he wishes to abolish income tax and substitute it with a sales tax. Progressive income tax: taking wealth from the wealthy and redistributing it to the poor, is the heart and soul of social justice and sales taxes favor the wealthy and penalize the poor. Everything begins there. So to advocate eliminating income tax while bombastically attacking the "The Wall Street to Washington axis" is either cynical or weird.

I think it's cynical, and I prefer it that way. If he is cynical it is because he is shrewdly exploiting a lifetime of knowledge of his audience (flock?) and their fears and resentments and this is knowledge that progressives could profit from acquiring for themselves.

What Huckabee is for sure doing is taking control of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party. And even if he isn't the candidate, without his enthusiastic support, no Republican anywhere will win much of anything in November of 2008.

It is really difficult to talk about class conflict in American English because all the words like, "class struggle", "contradiction" etc are taboo or sound foreign to American ears. This is as if a doctor would have to use awkward euphemisms when making a diagnosis. Imagine a gynecologist writing, "the patient reports experiencing severe discomfort whenever a dime is inserted in her pay phone." Communication would suffer. The march of science would be arrested. Probably the most significant thing that will happen in the coming months in America will be the rebirth of progressive politics and the language of progressive politics among the working poor.

Any real change has to come from people who feel oppressed and victimized. Mike Huckabee is probably nothing but a red herring, but we should encourage the "red*" and discard the "herring". If the Democrats cannot exploit the goldmine that Huckabee has opened then others will come along who will. DS
*Notice how the language of American politics has been deliberately deformed. In every other language in the world including British English, "red" means "left" and "blue" means "conservative". In the US they mean exactly the opposite. DS

Clive Crook: America in 2008: Populism calls the shots - Financial Times
Abstract: If the elections give Democrats the presidency and increased majorities in both houses, as seems likely, the US is going to see one of the most radical alterations in its political outlook for decades. As things stand right now, the politics is all good for the Democrats and all bad for the Republicans. The time-series of national opinion-poll ratings for the Republican presidential candidates looks like the read-out of a patient having a stroke. The lines jerk up and down, as party supporters search desperately, and so far in vain, for a candidate they like. The surge from nowhere of Mike Huckabee – to join a three-way tie with Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney – is partly a sign of this desperation. It threatens to split and even destroy the Republican coalition, by dividing social conservatives from economic conservatives. Mainly, though, it underlines something even more significant than that: the growing appeal of economic populism among supporters of both parties. Mr Huckabee is an evangelical – his faith leads him to reject the theory of evolution and to favour constitutional amendments to ban abortion and gay marriage – but he is an economic populist as well. On trade, on the tyrannical power of Wall Street and sometimes even on public spending, he sounds more like John Edwards than Mr Romney. Trade must be “fair” not free. There must be an end to “shipping jobs overseas”. He rails against outlandish CEO pay. He is not averse to more regulation, or to spending (financed with higher taxes) on many social programmes. Immigration complicates the picture: as governor of Arkansas, his treatment of illegal immigrants was too soft for many Republicans. But he is making up for it now, promising to fence the border and deport (and bar from re-entry), immigrants who fail to register within 120 days. “The Wall Street to Washington axis, this corridor of power, is absolutely, frantically against me,” he boasted this week. To be sure, for many Republicans, his main attraction is his religious conviction; he is also a likeable, funny, easy-going man and good on television. Nonetheless, the economic populism is all upfront and has plainly struck a chord.(...) A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC found that 58 per cent of Americans think that globalisation has been bad for the US and that only 28 per cent believe that it has been good. Ten years ago the split was more even: 48 per cent thought that globalisation was good and 42 per cent that it was bad. The biggest surprise is that supporters of the two parties are no longer far apart on the question. Globalisation has been bad for the US according to 55 per cent of Republicans and 63 per cent of Democrats.(...) the real question is what happens in 2009, when (let us suppose) the main obstacles to a populist turn in policy have been removed. How far left, in economic policy, might America then veer? The answer is a long way. As a rule, the stridency expressed in the primaries fades once the nominees are chosen and the general election approaches. Debate gets tugged back to the centre as candidates try harder to appeal to independents. That cyclical correction will happen again next year, but it will be milder than usual because populist economics is selling so well across the board. It is striking, too, that the growth of anti-trade and anti-corporate sentiment has happened up to now in a relatively benign economic environment. Stagnation in middle-class living standards, erosion of manufacturing employment, financial stress, alarm over the cost of health insurance and a college education – all these concerns came to the fore with interest rates, inflation and unemployment low, with the stock market strong, and with aggregate output (until very recently) growing at a reasonable pace. Add an election-year slowdown, already begun or even an outright recession to this mix. Add rising unemployment. Add an accelerating fall in house prices and a gathering wave (counter-measures notwithstanding) of mortgage foreclosures. If populism had material to work with in 2007, just wait for 2008. READ IT ALL

Yet more notes on populism

"A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad. In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal from another one. (...) Democratic politics became increasingly workable because it was feasible for everybody to become steadily better off.(...) in the new positive-sum world, elites were willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses. The fact that they no longer depended on forced labour made this shift easier still. Consensual politics, and so democracy, became the political norm.(...) The biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits. If, for example, the entire planet emitted CO2 at the rate the US does today, global emissions would be almost five times greater. The same, roughly speaking, is true of energy use per head. This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries."
Martin Wolf - Financial Times

"In May, the Pew Research Center released the 2005 edition of its Political Typology, a survey that slices the American electorate into nine discrete groups. Unsurprisingly, the core of the GOP's support turns out to be drawn from "Enterprisers," affluent, optimistic, and staunchly conservative on economic and social issues alike. But the so-called Enterprisers represent just 11 percent of registered voters--and apart from them, the most reliable GOP voters are Social Conservatives (13 percent of registered voters) and Pro-Government Conservatives (10 percent of voters). Both groups are predominantly female (Enterprisers are overwhelmingly male); both are critical of big business; and both advocate more government involvement to alleviate the economic risks faced by a growing number of families. They tend to be hostile to expanding free trade, Social Security reform, and guest-worker proposals--which is to say the Bush second term agenda." This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club." Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam - Weekly Standard

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The bottom line that ties together all the above quotes are the taboo words, "class struggle" or what Martin Wolf artfully calls, "intense distributional conflicts."

"if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart"

What does Martin Wolf mean by the "underpinnings of our world"? The great (huge understatement) British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, puts it this way in "The Age of Revolution":

"... some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid and up to the present llimitless multiplication of men, goods and services."

This is the world we have lived in since the end of the 18th century, we know no other and it is predicated on limitless growth. Limitlessness is an article of faith, so is optimism. In the article from the Weekly Standard quoted above there is a relevant paragraph on this optimism:

"...the core of the GOP's support turns out to be drawn from "Enterprisers," affluent, optimistic, and staunchly conservative on economic and social issues alike."

I'm sure my readers will have noticed that when ever they talk to one of these "Enterprisers", they invariably pooh pooh any doubts about the sustainability of our system. These people have a taliban-like faith that there will always be a technological solution to any "limit" that might ever pop up.

Until recently this optimism was not confined to the Rotarian, Republican, booster crowd, it was also an article of faith of the left. Every Soviet five year plan that ever was, was filled with this very same optimism. Up till recently the only argument between the left and the right on the question of growth was to whom would fall the privilege of fulfilling mankind's destiny to soar ever upward on the wings of growing productivity... and the right is the last man standing.

At this point, as the evidence of the reality of global warming piles up, most of these optimists are whistling past the graveyard or in denial. Some of them, however, may be prudently planning for the future.

Martin Wolf is the chief economist of the Financial Times and a wonderful journalist. In his work: at international conferences, and over a thousand dinner tables and at countless coffee sessions, he comes into daily contact with some of the most wealthy and powerful men and women in the world and those that serve them. Wolf hears them speak and most of all picks up their body language, their silences and vibrations. His article on "limits", which I am quoting abundantly is the cri de coeur of a man who, though not wealthy and powerful himself, knows the ways of the wealthy and powerful as no other does... with the possible exception of Rupert Murdoch's butler. For the language of a financial newspaper, Wolf practically weeps:

"The response of many, notably environmentalists and people with socialist leanings, is to welcome such conflicts. These, they believe, are the birth-pangs of a just global society. I strongly disagree. It is far more likely to be a step towards a world characterised by catastrophic conflict and brutal repression. This is why I sympathise with the hostile response of classical liberals and libertarians to the very notion of such limits, since they view them as the death-knell of any hopes for domestic freedom and peaceful foreign relations."

If we examine what Martin Wolf is saying logically, not even really reading between the lines, this supremely informed man is declaring that he knows that, before they ever pay Scandinavian like income taxes, drive small cars and wear sweaters around the house on cold winter days, the elites of the United States will create a police state and go to war endlessly to dominate the resource rich areas of the world. Hyperbole? Examine George W. Bush's presidency in that light and perhaps Dubya may not really be as dumb as he looks.. Or maybe he is more like what May West said about Ronald Reagan, "dumb but willing."

At this juncture, the elites of the Republican Party begin to separate from the middle class and working class base and the only way to keep them on board would be endless war and endless fear. Terror and paranoia may be the key to 2008 election. What moldy old Marxists used to call, "false consciousness". The Republican Party, to use another worn but useful Marxist term, has entered into contradiction with itself and using Wolf's analysis as our text, is clearly going to tear itself apart.

Who knows, Huckabee may only be a straw in the breeze, but that is the way the wind is blowing. DS

The secret to Mike Huckabee's success - Salon
Abstract: The miracle birth of the Republican candidate with the four-word name -- Mike Huckabee Iowa Front-runner -- has as much to do with social class as religion. There is nothing subtle about Huckabee's celebration of his humble roots: He gleefully told 150 supporters (some more accurately described as acolytes) in Marshalltown Thursday morning that a "Republican muckety-muck" had recently declared that Huckabee was unelectable because he had a "hick last name." Then, a few minutes later, Huckabee returned to his obsession with the name game. "I didn't grow up with a name that opened a lot of doors or had a Rolodex," he boasted, harking back to his childhood in Hope, Ark. Then, the candidate suddenly switched to a twangy version of an upper-class lockjaw accent as he recalled, "Nobody said, 'Oh, he's a Huckabee, let him in.'" After the laughter died down, Huckabee added, "I often say that for my family, summer was never a verb. We summered in hay fields and chicken yards and all kinds of stuff." Of course, Huckabee is laying it on thick, but the candidate is peddling his common-man persona more than any specific set of policies. This time around, Romney (the governor's son) and McCain (the son of an admiral) lack convincing hard-scrabble stories from their early years. And the Bush family is not exactly the embodiment of portraits in populism. Huckabee, in fact, stole a joke that Jim Hightower famously used to ridicule the elder George Bush at the 1988 Democratic Convention. "Many of you work hard," Huckabee said, as he looked out at the breakfast crowd (not a tie or a dress-for-success outfit in view) at the Best Western in Marshalltown. "That's what America's always been about. It's not about folks who were born on third base and think they hit a triple."(....) But the Democrat whom Huckabee appears to be channeling is John Edwards, who never missed an opportunity to remind voters back in 2004 that he was "the son of a mill worker." At a chaotic rally in a cramped room in a West Des Moines shopping mall Wednesday night, Huckabee lifted a signature Edwards phrase, promising that when he triumphs in Iowa on Jan. 3, "America can say thank you for restoring faith in a political system that's not just run by corporate greed but is run by ordinary citizens." Huckabee followed up in Marshalltown by uttering a line of such naked populism that the Baccarat crystal probably rattled in corporate dining rooms around the country: "Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who doesn't find himself wholly owned and completely tied to the biggest corporations in the country?"(...) In contrast, Romney, on the stump in Iowa in late November, told a joke that literally began, "A man walks into a country club." There may be a social-class barrier that explains why, despite Iowa spending that will undoubtedly top $10 million, Romney risks being upended by Huckabee -- an underfunded candidate whose campaign seems modeled on Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a "backyard musical." Gail Stecker, who works for a food-safety institute at Iowa State University in Ames, captured the Romney-the-robot problem when I spoke to her before the Huckabee speech. "I went to a Romney rally in July and decided that he's not the man for me," Stecker, who was wearing a festive garland of Christmas lights around her neck, recalled. "When Romney looks at you, he looks right through you like he doesn't care." If Romney falls short in Iowa, that sentence -- "He looks right through you" -- could serve as his epitaph. READ IT ALL

Notes on populism

David Seaton's News Links
Howard Dean has often said the "values voter" should not be awarded to the Republicans by default. Democrats could learn a lot by studying Huckabee.

I have no idea what is really behind Mike Huckabee's friendly facade, but he is making some interesting and nuanced noises for a southern populist and I think Democrats should take note of these nuances and make some of the same noises.

What are the nuances I'm talking about? For one thing, as far as I know he never uses Reagan-type racist code terms like, "state's rights", which is code for keeping black people from voting, or "welfare queen", which is another, racially loaded term. In fact I believe he is on record as saying that the major problem of the American prison system is that it is filled with people who are drug addicts, not criminals, and that instead of prison they should be in rehab. Since the majority of prisoners in American jails are persons of color, this statement is profoundly un-racist. And if you consider how much more caring, un-punitive and especially how much more expensive it would be to treat these unfortunates as sick people instead of criminals to be locked away, the statement is amazingly un-conservative. This is the sort of message that Democrats should be delivering.

Why are so many of the poor of America, white and black, socially conservative? Because without a welfare state, the only institutions that offer any comfort or protection are the church and the family. The family is the first welfare state. Here is Spain where we have a welfare state and a fine public health system, the traditional family is still in place. In the hospital system this means that the operations are fantastic, but the nursing is deficient, because normally the patients are surrounded by solicitous family members carrying bed pans etc and nurses only come around if patient suddenly takes a turn for the worse. In the USA there is no welfare state and the family is also under heavy pressure from the system.

Poor people are terrified: frightened people take comfort where they can. A divorced waitress with two kids who has to take them to an emergency room to treat their asma can't be criticized for being a "Left Behind" enthusiast. There is no better country than America in the whole world to be rich. It is probably the only country in the world where the rich are loved. Conversely there is no worse country in the world to be poor. Of course these people are paranoid, the system literally hates them.

We all know that Marx said that religion was the "opium of the people", but it could be argued that worshiping Jesus is less harmful to poor people than taking meths, heroin or crack. Very few people are equipped to take such suffering straight.

Huckabee sometimes talks just like an old fashioned, Huey Long type southern populist. In an amazingly un-Reaganlike statement Huckabee demolished the central Republican article of faith, "trickle down economics", claiming that cutting the taxes of the super rich is: "a false and callous assumption that the poorest people in our nation, with inadequate salaries, lack of nutritious food, substandard housing and nonexistent or underfunded health care, can somehow afford to patiently wait while someone else's wealth eventually splashes onto them.". Hell, that sounds like that other creationist, William Jennings Bryan! No wonder the conservative establishment is horrified by him. Where are the Democrats on this, only Edward's make these noises.

If Democrats were intelligent and, after 2004, this is in doubt, they would study Huckabee with the attitude of humble self-criticism and then triangulate him to death. I really doubt that they can and they will.

It would be a shame if a serious populist movement took off in the United States and the party of FDR was left out of it... But I'm afraid that's what might happen. DS

Huckabee, Giuliani tied in 2008 Republican race - Reuters
Mike Huckabee has surged into a virtual tie with front-runner Rudy Giuliani in the national 2008 Republican presidential race two weeks before the first contest, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas whose campaign has caught fire in recent weeks, wiped out an 18-point deficit in one month to pull within one point of Giuliani, 23 percent to 22 percent.(...) "Huckabee is on a roll, he has gotten an enormous amount of publicity and he is doing very well with conservatives, who at least for now appear to have found a candidate," pollster John Zogby said. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has led most national polls since early in the year, saw his support drop from 29 percent to 23 percent in the survey. His one-point lead over Huckabee was well within the poll's 4.8 percentage point margin of error. Huckabee moved ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who was in third place at 16 percent, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson at 13 percent, Arizona Sen. John McCain at 12 percent and Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 4 percent. The groundswell for Huckabee, a Baptist minister with close ties to religious conservatives, has been fueled in part by his growing support among that key party constituency. Among likely Republican voters who say they are "very conservative," Huckabee drew the support of 43 percent, with Thompson second at 20 percent and Romney third at 16 percent. Those voters who describe themselves as "born again" gave Huckabee the lead at 33 percent, with McCain in second at 17 percent and Romney with 14 percent. The number of undecided likely Republican voters dropped from 21 percent last month to 9 percent. The race remains fluid enough to be shaped dramatically by the results in Iowa on January 3 and New Hampshire, where voters go to the polls on January 8. "Voters are starting to at least pay attention and identify with someone," Zogby said. "But it doesn't mean they have made up their minds for good." READ IT ALL

"You the man!", so says Time Magazine

Uncle Sam says, "Take charge. No 'leader' can do it for you!"

David Seaton's News Links

According to Time Magazine, all us Internet users are the "Person of the Year." You have to wonder why Time Warner of all people is celebrating the loss of their gatekeeper function, but still, they could be right. The 20th century opened with many outsized, revolutionary personalities like Einstein, Picasso and Lenin, who, in the space of only a few years, changed the way the world looked and the way it looked at itself.

Now, at the beginning of the 21rst century, either humans of the Einstein, Picasso and Lenin mold don't exist any more or, as is more probable, they are simply not needed and not called forth. Today, we have Kleenex-like, disposable, "celebrities" to satisfy our need to worship "great men".

On the contrary, this seems to be an era where, for the first time in history, intelligent, mass opinion can be formed and set into motion without the benefit and shepherding of the "great and the good"; those who have manipulated humanity to their benefit since records have been kept of our affairs. We have just seen a clear example in the Iraq disaster: the most serious and defining crisis of our time, where as Strobe Talbot tells us in the Financial Times, "The US faces in Iraq what could be the most consequential foreign-policy debacle in its history".

At this decisive moment most of America's so called "leaders" either voted or lobbied for the war. And as for the "gatekeepers", the great media groups captained by America's newspaper of reference, the New York Times, actively promoted it. At the very same time, in an unprecedented popular movement, millions of people in America and around the world demonstrated against the war and organized to oppose it and haven't ceased organizing, blogging and agitating online against it since the very day it began. Obviously if the "people" had been listened to, an unprecedented disaster could have been averted.

The insight would be, that after decades of nearly universal literacy and public education, the general public with the new technologies at its command, is perfectly able to decide the major issues of the day more correctly than its "leaders," who instead of stewarding the general welfare are for the most part responding to the cocktail of special interest groups whose large contributions finance their campaigns. What we have just lived through in the first years of the new century seems to bear out the theories of "deliberative democracy", Which in Wikipedia's article on the subject is defined as,

"Any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative democracy. In contrast to the traditional economics-based theory of democracy, which emphasizes voting as the central institution in democracy, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can only arise from the public deliberation of the citizenry."

I seem to remember that somewhere Noam Chomsky said that if Americans studied public affairs with the attention and sophisticated powers of analysis that they expend on baseball statistics, it would change the world. Perhaps we are looking at the beginning of that now. Substitute "soccer" for "baseball" and it could apply to the rest of the world.

The only major US politician that seems to have acted decisively on this insight is Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Dean (or someone very near him) seems to have read and understood the Hardt and Negri concept of the "Multitude" (no mean feat as the authors can't write their way out of a paper bag). This "multitude" (Hardt-Negri's definition) "is our era's new political class, a fungible mass of political force, which in contrast to the 'proletariat' or working-class, is 'a collection of singularities" who discover what they have in common, but without fusing into some sort of sovereign unity'.

Howard Dean, alone among mainstream politicians, seems to understand the potential of opening political life to this "multitude" by giving them the chance to take their own political fate directly into their hands.

If this sounds a little esoteric to you, consider this simple arithmetic: there are an estimated 40,000,000 Americans without any health coverage... if each of them donated only 50 cents through the Internet to the Democratic Party's "war chest," that would make $20,000,000. By thus short-circuiting of the traditional "big wallet," special interest contributors, the realistic possibility for a new, high-tech populism opens.

The moral of the story? Before they figure out how to shut the Internet down, let us hurry and change the world. DS

You -- Yes, You -- Are TIME's Person of the Year

Abstract: Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. READ IT ALL

Waiting for the Democrats - Editorial - The Jewish Daily Forward

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The American Jewish community has always led the liberal causes that I have admired and supported since I was a child. Indeed, it is impossible for me to imagine the "left" without Jewish people. For that reason one has felt especially disappointed... (betrayed?) when the lead balloon of Zionist chauvinism pulled significant numbers of Jewish people to the racist, far right; causing them to combine opportunistically with even "last days" evangelical fascists. The Forward, where Bashevis first published his stories, is one of the oldest progressive newspapers in the United States and as this editorial shows, its antennae are still finely tuned .. things are moving. DS
Abstract: Many of the movers and shakers who make it their business to speak truth to power in the name of the Jewish community are jittery these days. They’ve been watching the Democrats in Washington get ready to take over the reins of Congress, and trying to figure out what it will mean for the interests and values that they and their community hold dear. They sense that there’s a lot at stake in the months ahead, and they’re not sure what the new Democratic majority has in mind. That alone should tell you quite a bit about the way things are today. When Jews are afraid of Democrats, something has changed.(...) The Democrats, out of power and leaderless for years, return to power chastened and convinced they need to do things differently. Just how differently, no one knows, but the buzzword on everyone’s lips is economic populism.(...) The Democrats seem to be aiming now to push their minority-rights agenda toward the background and emphasize their old New Deal-labor platform of economic egalitarianism, promising a better deal for society’s have-nots. This is a double-whammy for the Jewish community’s traditional leadership. For one thing, they’ve carved out a political space for themselves in the past generation on a platform of defending Jews as a minority. For another, they’ve built a well-oiled machine that’s mostly dependent — though they don’t like to discuss it — on the donations of society’s haves. Naturally they’re nervous. Then there’s the matter of Israel. There’s no real difference between Democratic and Republican elected officials on questions of Israeli security, but their grass-roots constituencies are a different story. Public opinion surveys show that self-identified Democrats are markedly less sympathetic to Israel than self-identified Republicans. The Democrats have some noisy constituencies on the left that identify openly with the Palestinians. Most party leaders don’t pay much attention to those groups, but some do. Jewish activists have noticed this. Many Jewish activists, for their part, have responded by rallying behind President Bush. They call him the greatest friend Israel has ever had, a title that’s passed to nearly every president on entering the White House. What they really mean, though, is that he’s the strongest proponent in memory of a strong-arm approach to extremism in the Muslim world. That’s won him strong, vocal support from some very visible elements in the Jewish community, while most of the rest of the country tears its hair out. Democratic leaders don’t like to talk about this, but they have noticed.(...) Republicans who have made life difficult for pleaders who tried to remain friends with Democrats. So there hasn’t been much communication in a while. The best-known Jewish agencies have narrowed their action agendas in the past few years to items they could hope to achieve — lots of Middle East and counter-terrorism stuff, not so much social gospel. One could read that as a hijacking of the Jewish communal agenda by the rich and conservative. And indeed, there’s something odd in Jewish advocacy agencies and representative bodies acting nervous at the triumph of a party that won the votes of nearly seven out of every eight Jews.(...) We can remember that Jews live in the world — indeed, we’re commanded to protect it — and that there’s an opportunity now to get serious about saving the planet from the environmental catastrophe threatening it. We can look at the Democrats’ economic agenda as an opportunity to make society right and to give back, as the saying goes. That could go a long way toward repairing the social fabric and reducing the hate we so fear. In short, we can start thinking about our values as well as our interests. As for our representative bodies, they might start by taking time off to do some deep thinking about what it means to represent. READ IT ALL