Mark Zuckerberg’s Nerd Manifesto

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/2/12

Mark Zuckerberg presses himself into the public eye. It was his insistence and demanding countenance that first brought to my mind those ancient socialist realist statues of Lenin pressing forward against the wind, oversized, waving a bronzed document, almost a hundred years ago in the century’s first great wave – worldwide wave – of “new man” generational politics. It came then from the realization that they simply had the numbers. Capital had already fled Russia. Russian gentry were now waiters in Paris and all was left were peasants; comrades then, millions upon millions of them. And the document: The three-page, single-spaced letter that Zuckerberg had prepared; a letter to potential investors for a $5 billion initial public offering of Facebook. It was a manifesto:

We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. . . There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.

But the key was in the urgency of his voice before the microphones: They had the numbers. Not so many as Borodin would have in Russia and China when he put them together, but they were getting there. And the legitimacy of the vision came from that: There are more of us. And we will change you: We will change government, we will change what you buy, we will change your life and who you are. But Trotsky was a better writer. Here, from his defense of the October Revolution:

It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of thought and action, who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain of mountains. The human race has a right to be proud of its Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Beethoven, Goethe, Marx, Edison, and Lenin. But why are they so rare? Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame.

The agitprop was breathtaking:

Anthropology, biology, physiology and psychology have accumulated mountains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks of perfecting and developing body and spirit. Psycho-analysis, with the inspired hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically called the “soul”. And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources must shed light on the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will.

Say what you like but fearless they were to a flaw and would shake the world in 10 days. Facebook, basically a Yellow Pages for kids, will take longer.

Trotsky’s famous phrase was repeated often; Everyman a Plato, Lincoln, a Marx. But maybe we have reached the end of the cycle as we find the Everyman today a Newt, a Maynard G. Krebs, a Donald, a Lady Gaga.

Time ahead to begin again from scratch.

Erskine Bowles for North Carolina governor

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/30/12

President Obama’s invitation to Bush family members to the White House makes him seem an Everyman; all things to all people, and Caroline Kennedy’s open letter to vote for Obama a second time because her name is Kennedy, both mark the turning of the times, and suggest that Obama, like the Kennedys and the Bushes, is no longer a rising part of the times. We have left the age of two family politics, honoring Northeastern gentry who bask in Kennebunkport or Hyannis, and have entered instead into a full-bore Jacksonian heartland awakening. Tea Party has taken the mantle these past two years. But Jacksonian populism, channeled today by Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul, all started in Virginia with Mudcat Saunders.

This new Jacksonian wave brings a most auspicious beginning. It awakens a new generation of politics; the first new wave in the new century. It could bring Elizabeth Warren, Tom Brady loyalist and Massachusetts’ own Okie grandmother, to the White House in the future, and Erskine Bowles to the governor’s chair in North Carolina in 2012. Public Policy Polling says that Democrats “will have a better chance at winning the North Carolina Governor's race now than they did yesterday no matter whom their candidate is this fall. But one potential candidate really rises to the top: Erskine Bowles.” Bowles, with assist from Dave “Mudcat” Saunders and Steve Jarding, authors of “Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ‘em Out” could now find a path.

Jarding and Saunders helped Mark Warner win the governorship in Virginia, sponsoring NASCAR stock cars and bringing in The Stanley Brothers. This was not the anti-South, self-hating liberalism which has sapped the spirit of Virginia. Warner’s liberalism demanded fiscal responsibility and economic health and progress. It was liberal politics which sought the center, not that which rushed to the edges; one that families, hillbillies and hunters could feel comfortable with. Warrior-scholar Jim Webb, supported by General Wesley Clark, followed, to remind Virginians that before Ronald Reagan, they were Democrats. The same spirit shortly rose in North Carolina with Senator Kay Hagan. They go to church, watch the Super Bowl, serve in the armed forces and honor those who do.

Bowles would be a prodigy of Warner’s creative model of governance in this rising era. Simpson-Bowles was a heroic effort and Bowles and Simpson were heroes just for one day. Warner was a strong supporter. Bowles could well run now in opposition to a weakling Congress, a failed “super committee” and an ineffective Presidency.

Bowles and his folksy sidekick, Alan Simpson, former senator from Wyoming, brought an old school voice of country authenticity to a time of discontent and confusion, not unlike the voices of Sam Ervin and Howard Baker during Watergate proceedings. It gave sudden clarity to the issues and gave the possibility of a safe recovery and an auspicious future, if only we had the courage and common sense of these two. He could build bipartisan support on this in North Carolina.

The Raleigh News and Observer reports that Bowles and Simpson want to keep the pressure on Congress as they tour the country giving speeches about their deficit plan.

"I think the future of this country is very, very bright if we face up to our problems," Bowles said at one event.

"If not," Simpson interjected, "we'll be a great country, but we won't be No. 1."

Note to Gingrich: “The Seventies called . . . “

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/27/12

“The spaceship has landed,” – Steve Jobs, 2011

Note to Gingrich: To paraphrase from the movie “Joe Dirt”: The Seventies called, they want their space program back. Gingrich is the disco paragon; a conservative reaction to the Sixties in double-poly leisure suit, white patent leather belt and shoes and all the baggage trailing from the very end of a century of total war. Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, Newt is stuck in Seventies space/time. His comment RE the moon base egging us on to get there before the Chinese, might be looked at in view of the singular American conservative genius barely mentioned in the Republican debates, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw the moon project as a stunt. It wasn't then, but it is now. China flies blindly to the moon with no purpose but competition with America, but it is a competition we do not share in.

We as Anglo-Americans are unable to see and feel the competition with China that we felt with Russia. Asia is foreign and difficult to penetrate. Lao Tzu has no equivalence in Angloamerica. A legitimate swami like the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga is soon scorned back to India by MSM and Gingrich’s Seventies space/time mentality. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other hand somehow fit, and often guide us to our deepest places and belong to us. With China it is merely economic, with Russia it is existential. With Russia we share our primordial European prehistory and cultural prehistory which swings back a thousand years and beyond. To their credit, the creators of the Project for a New American Century, Kagan and company, understood this.

The are good reasons to go to space but a moon colony is not one. The Kennedy space program had its beginning in the German rocket program in WW II and in post war imagination still fired on military systems and in the economic competition between American Keynesians and Russian Marxists. For more than a hundred years Anglo-American imagination preceded us in space with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, mavens of the pop culture in the rising populism of mass democracy. The pop culture space imagination ended in the mid 1990s with the rise of a new earth-based myth cycle seen in “Lost” “Survivor” and “Avatar.” The rest of us have returned to earth, but Gingrich, like David Bowie's Major Tom, remains lost in space.

Gingrich thinks the imagination of luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and J.J. Abrams trickles down from some government official offering direction. In fact, and this can be found in endless interviews with space scientists and engineers later in life, it goes the other way around.

If Gingrich wants to see the future he might open to page 22 of The Atlantic this month. There is a picture of a long procession of bearded patriarchs in a row leaving a snowy Russian Orthodox Church which doubled in the space age as a gulag. There may be relevant symbolism to that. Say whatever else you might about the Russians but they have moved on from the age in which Gingrich is stuck. They have returned to the earth and like Raskolnikov, found their way again to God. And they may have gotten their ahead of us.

Free New England: Repudiate The National Defense Authorization Act

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/26/12

New England was a Jeffersonian region of independent-minded yeoman farmers and free-thinking, independents before the Civil War. We lost that earthy colloquialism to the abstraction of federalism after teaming up for the conquest of the west and the South in 1857 and 1865, and again to globalism after the conquest of Europe and Asia in 1946. But today New England begins to find its yeoman soul again. We have always been Jeffersonian. We just forgot. When it starts to catch on any step outside the prescribed Constitutional reservation by the feds will be considered overreach, domination, totalitarianism. And it is starting to catch on. The National Defense Authorization Act is a giant step in the direction of the benign American police state.

Provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act may allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, but the feds could find they get no cooperation from some state and local officials.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) introduced HB1660 which would, “Prevent any agency, political subdivision, employee, or member of the military of Virginia from assisting an agency or the armed forces of the United States in the investigation, prosecution, or detainment of a United States citizen in violation of the Constitution of Virginia.”

On Wednesday, a House subcommittee passed the bill 6-3, moving it closer to a full House vote.

And the Tenth Amendment Center reports that as many as ten states will consider legislation or resolutions in response to the detention provisions in section 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA.

We read today that liberal iconoclast Oliver Stone begins to look to Ron Paul. My kids, reared on Kurt Cobain and Flogging Molly, tend to as well and the Pauls have become big hits on college campus. A new generation is rising to the idea of states rights as a defense against the hovering domination of the federal government.

Lawmakers in Rhode Island and Washington will likely introduce resolutions authored by the Rhode Island Liberty Coalition within the next week, writes Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center. Additionally, local governments, including Fremont County, Colo. and El Paso County, Colo., have passed resolution condemning the detention provisions.

"Federal politicians never seem to repeal federal law. It's going to take ‘We the People’ in our states to stand up and say, ‘No!’ to this unconstitutional monster," Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin said.

The Rhode Island Liberty Coalition, “a grass-roots organization dedicated to the preservation of Civil Liberties, Economic Liberties, and the inherent autonomy of the individual” is especially interesting. I’d like to see it expand to The New England Liberty Coalition.

“We drafted nullification legislation that can double as a draft state-wide Act as well as a local ordinance --in any state, county or municipality in the Country -- that denounces Section 1021 of the NDAA and prevents local officials from cooperating with military investigations and detainments of United States Citizens and legal resident aliens,” their website states. “The Act goes one step further and attempts to outlaw military investigations and detentions of citizens and resident legal aliens within those states, counties or municipalities. Did we mention this legislation can be used as a template in jurisdictions ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY?”

What’s next for Rick Perry?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/24/12

“Come and take it” – Texas flag at the Battle of Gonzales, March, 1831

Rick Perry takes it back to Texas. He might run again for governor. He should. As Steve Forbes says, he's a great governor with great ideas. I'd make the case that his poor performance in the presidential race is a credit to him as a Texan and a Texas governor. He feels uncomfortable away from home, away from Texas. It is the Jeffersonian ideal and Perry is paragon of these earth-based, sense-of-place values. More than values. A sense of being; at one with the ancestors, at one with God, at one with one’s own place on earth and free of abstractions.

What Perry wanted to achieve for Texas as a Texan was unachievable as a President and Ron Paul should take note. Because Perry and Paul are both in their way “free state” guys. But the freedom and autonomy they seek cannot be granted top down like a benevolent master freeing his provincial serfs in the far provinces. They need to take it. Like his boots say, "Come and take it." If Texas wants it, she’s got to take it.

And right now Perry has a whole posse with similar ideas; the Pauls, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate from New Mexico, Joe Miller of Alaska, Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Tenth Amendment Center – more daily, and tens of thousands of young students who are beginning to listen to the Paul's.

Perry must have seen the problems rising right away when he entered the presidential race; the problems of globalized abstractions superimposed on real people of the desert and big sky in places likeTexas. Gay marriage? Michelle Bachmann wanted to legislate from Washington, D.C. how people live in Vermont and Massachusetts on issues which the federal government has no jurisdiction. It is Tea Party totalitarianism and the tendency was always there which I warned about when I first encouraged Perry to run for president in 2009. Perry called it correctly a states rights issue in his great book , “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington”:
“We are a diverse people – incapable of being governed from a faraway capital by people who do not share our values. Recognizing this fact is critical to the preservation of a free state.”
Then he walked it back and fell in line with Bachmann and the others in trying to govern the behavior of Massachusetts and Vermont from D.C.: It is totalitarian when the Chinese tell the Tibetans how to pray, it is totalitarian when Washington tells Vermonters how to make love.

What Perry wants for states, especially Texas, cannot, will not be given by a federal government. It has to be taken by Texas and the few other states which seek free state status and Constitutional government. Rick Perry as Governor of Texas needs a committee of like-minded governors. He should be the leader of this movement. He needs to lead a super committee of governors in sympathetic states.
Texas is ready for self government, so is Alaska, Kentucky, Kansas, Idaho and Utah and few others. That means full Tenth Amendment rights and colloquial consciousness. But this is a job for states and their governors who have the courage to take it, because it will not be given and it is not worth having if it is given by central government. Perry can do this and possibly only he can do it.

And now for something completely different: Petraeus/Jon Huntsman 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill
on 1/23/12

Newt Gingrich’s samurai moment brought a turning. Bloomberg’s Al Hunt said it came right over the plate and Gingrich hit it out of the park. Matthew Dowd on Betty Liu’s Bloomberg report gave a succinct analysis: If Gingrich, who had the crowds rising to their feet in the week’s earlier debate, could rally and dominate in the first five minutes he would have it and he could turn the entire election. That would be the most important moment – the historic turning event – that would change everything and possibly send Gingrich to the presidency. And it came as easily to Gingrich as Tom Brady’s 45 - 10 victory last week over the Mile High Messiah. They said it couldn’t be done, but even women voted for him. Consider that the Gingrich resurgence in South Carolina is not a bump but a birth pain.

I wish New Hampshire, which claims in song and story to have a mind as clear, hard and strong as granite, still had the spontaneous and instinctive gut South Carolina has, but we don’t. Which is why New England today is barely a shadow or reaction to real, organic events rising in the heartland (Occupy the anti-Tea Party, Elizabeth Warren the anti-Sarah Palin). Our primary is irrelevant now: We are North Massachusetts.

But South Carolina still brings it with a rebel yell; they have not lost themselves to the geist and the degenerate gods and golems of mass communications and that horrible music that poisons the air in every mall and grocery store in the realm these last hundred years (Huxley warned of this). And Gingrich has awakened again that which has been sleeping in the earth for a century.

In contrast, Mitt Romney was eating birthday cake at the children’s table and singing happy birthday to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Timing could not have been worse. Hey, I checked her birthday horoscope in Chicago Tribune, significant perhaps on the first day of Aquarius: “Work hard today to bring a wild idea to life.” Eating birthday cake with Mitt Romney? And this: “Do your research, because you'll want this thing to hold up to scrutiny and review.”

Could Gingrich beat Romney? Possibly he already has. And there is no question in my mind now that Gingrich could be named President in 2013. Yes, he could beat Obama and those who say he can’t are like the unfortunate sad eyed John King of CNN, the priests selected by the elders to accompany the conquest, not watching the astonishing thing that is rushing to the front right before our eyes right now, but hoping to preserve the patrons of the past and the old temple.

Gingrich is a revolutionary and there are two authentic revolutionaries in this race, Gingrich and Ron Paul. Gingrich takes the day. He could beat Romney now and Obama. But it is too early for a Gingrich revolution or any other kind, although he has the classic profile of the trickster who starts revolutions. It needs more time to simmer. It will come, but not today and Gingrich will not take the presidency.

But General David Petraeus could in a brokered convention.

The New York Times reports on Saturday that cadets at The Citadel, who generally speak with a united conservative voice, are torn this time between Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Ron Paul.

The old temple will pitch the usual suspects; Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, all surrogates for Jeb Bush. They are already. But how would the Citadel cadets feel about David Petraeus?

Newt Gingrich/Rick Perry 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/20/12

If Newt Gingrich wins the South Carolina primary Saturday:

Gingrich would not be my first choice for president right now, Romney would be, but he does fit the historic contours as I’ve been writing about them here now for several years, making two claims: First, we enter now an age of Jackson, when the heartland rises in opposition to Eastern cities influence as it did shortly after the death of Jefferson and Adams, sending the cold willies up the spine of gentry in Richmond and Boston. Jefferson’s contempt for Jackson was echoed in the establishment of his day and paralleled the “Eek, a mouse!” response of MSM’s to Grizzly Mama, Sarah Palin; daughter of the forest. Second: America has always had two countervailing “creation myths,” the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and The Alamo in 1836. It is not clear yet which will dominant.

Possibly the best and brightest observer of policy today is that Native America fisherman from Alaska Todd Palin, who first threw support to Gingrich at the critical turning. A week later Sarah Palin followed. Rick Perry then, just in the nick of time. These things are related not by design but by intuition. If we enter now a Jacksonian age, Gingrich is the definitive trickster. Here is what a Gingrich administration could look like: Rick Perry, Vice President, John Bolton – he prefers Romney but will take the job as Secretary of State, Sarah Palin, doing something, John Huntsman, doing something else. This would effectively bring a Jacksonian turning as successfully as Jackson himself did. But this time it may turn out differently.

Prediction: In this scenario, Gingrich, bored after two years as president, will either quit or get thrown out and Vice President Perry will take over.