The week before last (week of June 15), TPMCafe hosted a book club discussion of Eric Bohlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, which was as much a forward-looking discussion of the future of blogging as it was a backwards-looking discussion of the Eric's book and the history it covers. One reason for this was that everyone pretty much agreed-Eric got it where earlier authors did not. So discussions of the past linked more naturally to forward-looking speculation than to criticism of Eric's narrative.
That forward-looking discussion links quite naturally, I think, with my earlier diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", and where I want to go next-into a deeper look at what it will take to change the dynamic, not just of Congress, but of American politics more generally. An added factor is the perspective I articulated in my series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future, dealing with the confluence of macro-historical forces in our time, which I'll briefly recapitulate below.
But before doing that, I just want to note that Eric's first post, "The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere", kicks off by mentioning Chris as the very first blogger he talks about:
In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."
There's more about Chris in that diary, so if nothing else, you should read it for that. But there's actually a lot more, with folks like Amanda Marcotte, Armando Llorens, Greg Mitchell and Duncan Black weighing in. I want to cite a few of the things they said, before adding my two cents about how the blogosphere--along with the rest of the online new media--may be able to help do even more than any of the contributors to that discussion have imagined. This is not, I hope, because of an over-inflated sense of the blogosphere's importance, but rather, because of a larger sense of its place within a broader inter-active, flat-hierarchy media environment and how that plays into some much, much bigger historical forces at work....
This final installment to this series was delayed because of a domino effect set in motion when I had to cover a 6-hour Long Beach Harbor Commission meeting on Tuesday. For a refresher on the earlier installments, just click the links below
In this diary set, I've worked with the notion of historical cycles, or waves-specifically, three differently scaled waves all of which converge on this November's election, and in doing so, confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, The second part dealt with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. The third part dealt with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
Now, I look at the wall those waves are crashing up against...
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. In this diary set, I'm looking at the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, the next part will deal with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values. The second part dealt with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. This part deals with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. In this diary set, I'm looking at the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, the next part will deal with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values. This part deals with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. A classic example is the Hindu cosmology of cyclical yugas, starting with the Satya Yuga, and descending through the Trata Yuga, and the Dvapara Yuga., each one more degraded and less refined, until one comes to the Kali Yuga, which, of course, is where we find ourselves today. The ancient Greeks had a similarly dismal view, as seen in Hesiod's Works and Days, which laid a cosmology of five successive, and descenting Ages of Man, each of which ends in destruction.
Modern writers have taken both a more hopeful and a more empirically-grounded approach. The historian Arnold J. Toynbee was a giant in this enterprise--in sharp contrast to Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West built on an entire century of declinist thought among European conservatives and reactionaries, as surveyed in Arthur Herman's flawed, but still somewhat useful guide, The Idea of Decline in Western History . [See Amazon.com review for cautionary advice.]
As Wikipedia notes, Toynbee was neither a determinist, a pemisimist, or a conservative:
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
Toynbee's spirit is one I share, and in this diary set I want to examine the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall-the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers that have maintained a recklessly destructive regime in power, despite its fundamental attacks on principles dating back at least as far as 1215 (habeas corpus, from the Magna Charta).
In ascending order of scope, there three waves are:
The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
My concern here is two-fold: first to lay out these frameworks and explain how they relate to one another, and second to articulate a political argument based on them. The two tasks will not necessarily fall into neat separate categories, but it should be possible for readers to readily grasp the analytical framework, and still critically question my political argument in meaningful ways that incorporate, rather than devaluing or rejecting these frameworks which are the product of considerable intellectual work far beyond my own individual labors.
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