A Natural History of States: Waiting for Arnold, Part 2

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/26/07

At the end of this cosmic age Vishnu will change into a white horse and create a new world. This refers to Pegasus, who ushers in the Aquarian Age. - Carl Jung

Photo by Annie Leibowitz

FMNN reader Tom asks: "Am I reading that Arnold and many Californians would love to secede from the Nation? Does west coast harbor secession?"

I see nothing overt. But part of what I do in my life is write about historical patterns as they portend a change in culture and California appears to be in a state of awakening and beginning to feel a state of autonomy similar to what New England felt in the mid 1700s.

History has soft conditions and hard conditions, much like the body has bones and blood. They each do their own things, but they go to the same place. Beneath the hurrah and hubris, lay simple events dictated by economy and perhaps by nature. These bring about secession movements, revolutions and glorious events, but they are only glorious in the eyes of the victors, who paint themselves as great moral warriors and their enemies as criminals. Beneath each historical turning there are simple economic determinants which demand economic and political change.

Among the main ones are different economic structures rising together or a variety of different economic structures acting together. There is an almost biological destiny to these events: the Strong will Eat the Weak, and by weak is implied an economic system no longer suited to the period; it will soon to be overtaken by a new system.

Victoria’s kingdom had slave-based global agriculture and industrial-based economy growing together. The Victorians claimed the high moral ground by freeing the slaves, yet it came at a time when England’s economic base was rapidly moving to industrialization and capitalization and no longer required slaves. These two systems would play out in warfare in the U.S. in 1860. Northern industrialism was the stronger and would dominate.

Redundant economic systems are another cause of change. Beneath the triumphant echoes of American Revolution was the basic economic reality of two political and economic systems doing the same thing. One or the other is eventually irrelevant.

It is different for different regions. Where I live in New England there was a large Puritan population. For the first long while, these people, pious though they may have been, were not particularly competent in surviving in a new land. The Puritans relied for a very long time on the Crown, especially in protecting them against the French and the Indians. By the mid-1700s they had passed on to another kind of culture, and the Yankee yeoman farmer was well able to take care of himself. The job the Brits were required to do – send out the French and the Indians – had been completed. Likewise, by then Boston business people were equal to and as able as their British counterparts.

So what was the point of paying for British security when they no longer needed it and business-supporting tariffs when they were making their own goods and conducting their own trade? New Englanders no longer shared the objectives of British globalism in many ways and naturally came to see themselves as a separate people. As Sun Tzu said, “The war is over before it begins.” The American Revolution was the end-game of a practical relationship that had served its conditions well and worked since 1607. By 1776, it simply no longer made sense.

Much has been written about red and blue state alienation in the last two decades. It is an important division which must be considered if we are to be a federation: A federation implies that each distinct region respects the needs and the culture of the others. But I see this as well as an end-game; the end of 200 years of North/South contention.

It is the fate of all dynamic regions to divide into two parts (which might be called Particle and Wave or Yin and Yang) as the Romans did and as the Christian Church which followed in its wake did; as Paris divides between the Burgher’s Right Bank and the Artist’s Left Bank and as New York City likewise divides between the artist’s Downtown and the businessman’s Uptown. The fate of our country and of this continent will be East/West. What we have seen so far in 400 years is prelude.

Contention has been growing between East and West for a long time – perhaps since the opening of the West. But there has been a distinct breach between New York and its point of view and LA and its point of view at least since 1964. New York, in the academy and in class periodicals like The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The NYTs, still looks to Europe and thus lives in the shadow of Europe. At its most regressive, it features itself sitting in the café Les Deux Magots writing one-act plays against racist if only it had a non-smoking section. A characteristic writer in this period like Susan Sontag would want to live in Paris and New York both – they will carry European wood like Sartre and Beckett across the Atlantic to continue the Europeanist pattern in he U.S. Thus, East coast is inherent nihilist and anchored in the past (and, in my opinion, burdened by a useless weight).

LA does not do this: California is born free on the Pacific side of the Mississippi. It opens to new ideas organically, without fear or inhibition and it does not look back. George Lucas is characteristic. Clint Eastwood is characteristic. Arnold Schwarzenegger is characteristic. The Pacific region is conduit to the East and Eastern thinking. NY is terrified of Eastern thinking: Lucas’s Taoist-based Star Wars sent shivers through the deconstructivist English department in the East’s ivory tower.

If you watch pop culture closely as it has been my job to do in different places in the past 40 years, you see this invisible hand of culture everywhere today. I saw it most recently with the Clintons and the comments of Hollywood’s David Geffen and the Dreamworks Three. The Hillary/Geffen discord was an organic East/West spat in which the West established dominance and territoriality over the East.

The Clintons’ mistake was in moving to NY after the Presidency, thinking it to be the center of power and imagining that they could thus dictate power from that perch. But the Clintons (both of them) have a fundamental misunderstanding of power. They think they are the power. Napoleon understood better: Power resides in the people and a true leader is the least of the important people. Geffen understands this: He understood that the Clintons were intending to extend their power beyond their yard and beyond their period.

This can get pretty arcane. If you work in this realm you can see the institutions speak symbolically as the Swedish Academy does when it gives a Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama or Jimmy Carter. The Academy Awards people do the same thing and this week has been a smorgasbord of court drama.

A big issue these past years is why does Martin Scorsese not get the big awards? He’s a great American director, no? And why does Clint Eastwood get one? He makes cop movies and is not so great, is he?

Yes, but Scorsese, like Robert De Niro, is a New Yorker and is always referring to Italian directors of the 1930s and ‘40s that you learn about in film school (and those glasses – he wants to look like one). And they are always going to places like Paris to make friends and making movies about NY.

Not Clint Eastwood (except for Cannes, which is different). True West never looks back across the Mississippi. Not ever. (It is always a fatal error in life; like Moses going back across the Red Sea.) Scorsese finally got his Oscar last night, but only after the Dreamworks Big Three spokesman had put a whooping on the East Coast Clintons a few days before. (And Billary nemesis Al Gore got one as well. Ouch! A double whooping for Billary!)

This is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, culture as warfare by other strategies. The distinction is already there, although it is still amorphous in the ozone. One day it will delineate and rise to politics. Perhaps eventually in history, to warfare.

But not today.

Today, California is the City on the Hill, born free in the new millennium. And as we celebrate it in Virginia this year, the rest of us are 400 years old.

We live in a system of federalism born in the mind of Alexander Hamilton. It proclaims a strong central government without barriers to advance the flow of corporate capital. It was possibly the best form of economy in building new regions out of a frontier. But eventually, those regions will be built, and when they are built they should be able to take care of themselves. The relationship of the regions to the central power will become similar to the relationship between New England and England in the mid 1700s: They will have Redundant Economic and Political Systems. And that implies two taxes for the same services; one of which works well, one of which doesn’t work at all.

I bring it up because there was an interesting op-ed in the NYTs two weeks ago by Gar Alperovitz, an old historian and scholar at the University of Maryland. Alperovitz looks to California and its Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and asks if the country has not reached the point where it is ungovernable as a single unit.

He writes: “SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

“Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. ‘We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta’ he recently declared. ‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.’ In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, ‘We are a good and global commonwealth.’”

The Governor today advances his own and the state’s ideas on global warming.

“The federal government doesn’t believe in global warming,” he says. “We do.” End of conversation.

California establishes its own strategies and today even makes inroads out-of-country with British Columbia, creating its own foreign policy.

At one point this question will occur without hostility, but by fair-minded people with basic and simple curiosity: But don’t we pay the feds to think about this? Why are we doing their work? Why are we being taxed for work they are supposed to be doing when we are quite capable of doing it ourselves, and when we do it successfully and they fail at every turning?

California is in a cultural phase of transition. A political phase will inevitably follow. I see no antagonism between Californians and their Governor between themselves and federal government. I see only common sense in their approach.

What Would David Geffen Do?

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/22/07

A few years back Bob Dole called these guys the most important people in the world. They were the people who created the culture. They created the country. Politicians just live in it. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in particular, the people of Dreamworks. They shaped the entertainment world for the last 50 years. They have been in the last half century akin to what the Magi were to Christendom.

David Geffen, in particular. He was there when John Lennon died and when Joni Mitchell first arrived in our world from the Alberta plains. And he was every place else in between. This week Maureen Dowd, the NYTs columnist, referring to the house he lived in, all but suggested that he might be God.

The Dreamworks Three held a fundraiser in Hollywood for Barack Obama this past week. People like Tom Hanks paid $2,500 for a ticket. And in endorsing Obama, Geffen brought this early panic primary to a turning point.

Right now, I’ll claim that Obama has the Democratic nomination. And if Geffen is right, and he seems to be always right, the one who takes the Democratic nomination in this race will take the Presidency.

So if any other Democrat was thinking of entering, consider that you have done very, very well in holding off. We are at a historical turning point. Enjoy he ride. It will be Obama for the Democrats from here on out and there will be no more entry points.

This may be panic politics and Obama may be a novelty. But so was Arnold panic politics and so was he a novelty. And now he is one of the most highly regarded Governors in California history. So might Obama be as President. Hard to say. The one thing for sure; he will make a difference. It is forgotten now, but make no mistake, to the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers and even I suspect, the Eisenhowers, an Irish Catholic like Jack Kennedy was novelty politics.

If elected, Obama will change our political world just as Jack Kennedy did. In hindsight, JFK does not look like a great President in many ways. But like Reagan, he was the indispensable President. He changed our world and made us what we have since become. And without him we would have been a different America and a different world.

Geffen did something else indespensible: He went after Senator Clinton in a big way.

“Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling,” he told Dowd.

Geffen stated clearly to the faithful what most Democrats have conveniently repressed: The Clintons are crooks. Probably the worst in the modern history of the Democratic Party. In an interview with Dowd Geffen cited a pardon granted to Marc Rich after he gave the Clintons a million dollars. I’d complained this year that if they didn’t yield in this most ridiculous journey of political narcissism, the Clintons would destroy the Democratic Party and send the country into turmoil. No need now. The deed in done.

Obama is a god-send to the Democrats because he neutralizes the yuppie vote and the auntie vote going to Hillary. Without Obama, the Democrats could have completely disintegrated. Hillary would have gotten the nomination and lost to McCain in every state except NY and Massachusetts. Now she is finished. Back to Kansas, Dorothy!

Last year I wrote about the "new Democrats" – Mark Warner, Wes Clark and Kathleen Sebelius in particular - saying that Jim Webb would be catalyst to a new movement within the Democratic Party. But first the Democrats had to divide. That is happening now. Since Webb's rebuttal to Bush, the New Democrats concept is taking hold and MSM is now on the case. The new Democrats are starting to call themselves Webb Democrats. That is in opposition to the Democratic Leadership Council types like the Clintons and Al Gore; Democrats sympathetic to Wall St., which Ralph Nader called in the last election indistinguishable from Republicans. Obama fits the new pattern and he will bring in people in opposition to the Wall St. Democrats.

But long-term, the big Hollywood story will be Arnold and the development of the Western places. He is making alliances with British Comumbia RE global warming and generally taking the initiative on a variety of issues, generally ignoring the federal government.

California is going at different speeds than the rest of the country. At some point it is possible for Arnold to establish California identity in defiance of some federal regulation or another. Or the federal government could challenge California’s new autonomy. That will shake the world.

Contention between North and South in the 1800s advanced as the North grew stronger economically in industrial power and population and it became easier for the North to dominate.

This is natural history. At one point CA will be strong RE the rest of the country. But I do not see that it will want to dominate the rest of the country but rather ditch it, so as to not get bogged down in supporting welfare in rust belt industrial regions past their historical period, as the angel of capitalism moves to India and China. In effect, what we are seeing is the end of capitalism in many of our regions as an American Energizer Bunny. And the different regions now are growing and receding at different rates.

But California is the City on the Hill and is bound to prosper through Pacific overseas traffic and cheap labor in the south. Economic policy must have to be regionalized if we are no longer a manufacturing country nationally, and an economic policy for rust-belt regions can't be right for prosperous CA. And why would a Buddhist Seattle be so hot on engaging in religious warfare in the Middle East as per the Crusades in the 13th Century? This is where I see the real interesting issues growing in the next 20 years.

Neither of the major political parties is in any way prepared to deal with these cultural changes and economic issues. Only the Libertarians are. Likewise, only one candidate running against John McCain and Mitt Romney is able to face foreign policy fair and square: Ron Paul.

It is Paul, sometimes alone on the floor of Congress, who has been resolute and patriotic on all of the issues in the Middle East. The others in office today – Cheney and Bush, in particular – will be recalled by history much as Pierre Laval and Marshall Petain are recalled by the French: Bold in intention, but poor in spirit. And in the end, traitors to their own.

Wes Clark: Where is the New Commander?

- for WesPAC, 2/15/07

I wanted to express some likes and dislikes as it feels now that we are at the end of something but not yet at the beginning of something else. In fact, we seem to be at the end of so many things; the end of the century, the end of the millennium, even the end of a Platonic Age which is said to bring a turning of the human spirit every 2,000 years or so.

We are certainly at the end of our country’s New York Centuries which, since Alexander Hamilton, would change the world in so many ways, and just at the very beginnings of our Pacific Centuries which are sure to do the same. Already, the Titan has arrived on our Pacific Shore riding his Big White Horse, Pegasus. Until this day we were a North and South nation. No longer. Now we will be East and West. And we will travel this path now for as long as we exist as a people; for a thousand years or so – what preceded so far since the Roanoke landing was only prelude.

I’ve never been so proud to be part of politics as I have been in the last three years. Actually I’d never been part of the public dialog and passage before. I do simple work in life and have esoteric concerns. But crisis, the deceptive and misguided drive to Iraq, brought out a necessity. And since I first stood six feet before Wes Clark when he signed the book in Concord, New Hampshire, to enter the primary, there has built in this country and in the Democratic Party a new beginning. And like all things which last, it begins with a new attitude and a new sense of will; a self-assurance and an unfettered desire to face the crises ahead head on.

Wes Clark brought this forth, challenging the official deceptions at every turn, and bringing in with him new people. Many of them were veterans, some veterans of the war on Iraq. No one was more dedicated to the task of bringing in the new House and Senate in the ’06 elections, here in New Hampshire with Carol Shea-Porter or in Virginia with Jim Webb, in Pennsylvania with Joe Sestak and Patrick Riley and across the country in red and blue states alike.

It is a new sensibility. It is a new Democratic Party. It is a new political culture for a new century. But centuries do not begin at the turn of the clock. The old politics refuse to die for a decade or so well into the new.

And that is what has been bringing a disturbance. As said, my interest in politics is only secondary and my innate directions are elsewhere, generally to religion. So what I have to say is not as a professional, but as a citizen.

Daily now I am concerned about fast, naïve and panicky actions on behalf of Democrats. Yesterday, the Governor of Virginia, who I ordinarily respect, endorsed a candidate for the ’08 Presidential race a full year before the major primaries take place, and probably before the best even arrive on the scene. The day before that, a stand-up comic announced his intentions to run for Senate as a Democrat. Will irony stop malfeasance and illegal politics? I think not. It was the assurance that the others would only respond with irony that enabled the brute to power in the first place. Another announced candidate hired bloggers well-known and notorious for their anti-Catholic screed and was slow to fire them when this was brought to the attention of the public.

These are not issues with any specific individuals. They are symptomatic of a general condition of the public which I would call at best a satisfied malaise, at worse, a smug and nihilistic defeatism. We have come to accept as public practice strategies and attitudes that should be completely unacceptable in public dialog. For example, if you were to go back and look to the major blogs and follow the discussion on the anti-Catholic bloggers, you would find a discourse akin to what one would expect on The Jerry Springer Show.

This bodes poorly for the new generation coming up, many of whom are claiming Democratic allegiance: What should bring shame brings vitriol; what should bring disgrace brings instead a false sense of victory. The public discussion has been territorialized by its darkest side. This is bad for Democrats and for the country. This is a great boon to the Republicans.

I do not particularly want a Democratic Party in which the President proposes to hire Goldman Sacks to run economic policy. That is not Democrat; that is Republicanism with fanciful hair. I do not want a party in which a Democratic mayor of a major city will hire Bain & Co. to run her or his city accounts – it is a masquerade; it is dress up. There is no doubt in my mind that Mitt Romney’s old firm would be very good at that kind of work, but why would I want to vote for a Democrat who is going to hire Romney to do the work of governance?

What I want in the Democratic Party is when a candidate says: “I take full responsibility,” it implies that she or he will accept and internalize the failure and not seek further office and find instead a more appropriate path in life. It is something we used to take for granted. Now “I take full responsibility” only asks that we change the subject

I do not want a candidate who claims they should be the President because they got the highest mark in law school. That does not necessarily prepare one for President. It prepares you for post-grad work and perhaps the quiet life of the chaired professorship.

I want a candidate who says, as one did recently, that he hopes no one votes for him just because he is black. But I do not want one who just the same accepts the ride nevertheless.

But we are getting that up here in New Hampshire. Recently, the leading fund-raiser in the state proposed that one of the candidates hold off on announcing for awhile to “get some stuff done” in the Senate. Ruth Marcus, Washington Post columnist, asked the same for another announced candidate the same day.

It is good advice for a kid who wants to be President: “Get some stuff done” first. But not for one who wants to be President the year after next.

Here in the Northeast we have developed a negative state which I have seen growing for 35 years now. I take it arises from a shift in power from New York and Boston to Texas and the West. We tend to call failure victory. I think it started with the nomination of George McGovern, who lost 49 states in 1972. We became proud of that failure and still are today. I saw it again with Howard Dean. His campaign in ’04 is constantly referred to as a victory on the blogosphere. It was not. It was, of course, an abject failure: He ran for President. He did not win even one state as George McGovern did, nor even a primary.

This attitude does not bode well for Democrats in the upcoming election. It will send us the way of the Whigs. It puts us in the position of defending the indefensible and diminishes our spirit.

We need to change course. We need to find that spark which Wes Clark lit in race after race across the country in ’06 and nurture it. I’d like to propose that we form a new group within the Democratic Party to explain who we are and to tell what we want and to make clear our intentions. It would be a group like the DLC, formed to consolidate a new attitude; an attitude which respects veterans, which expects duty and responsibility of its citizens; an attitude which will respond to public villainy with something stronger than irony in its opposition. And it would be a group to express clearly that we will not be passed by; not by Republicans, not by other Democrats, not by anyone.

Jim Webb awakened our spirit into the world in his address in opposition to the President’s State of the Union a few weeks back. It sent a heroic wave of confidence and élan across the country and even here where we sit under three feet of snow in the mountains of New Hampshire. The other day I saw a bumper sticker which said “Webb” on a car with New Hampshire plates.

Like Clark, he brings forth to the light into the republic; a yearning that the rest of us have felt these past two or three years. Webb also expressed the effectiveness of the political strategy that I call The Bruschi Theorem. Our own famed New England Patriot Tedy Bruschi says, “When you throw a block, your opponent has to feel some pain.”

Webb did so. His talk of “Robber Barons” and Wall Street salaries in which the chief executive makes as much in one day as the average worker makes in 21 years hit a cord. Three days later, the President made public addresses in opposition to said salaries. They felt the pain. They responded. It will be more than irony or the deconstructivst pout from the new people in Congress. They became actually afraid, which was the intention.

These past weeks I received emails from a woman I was great friends with as a child but hadn’t heard from in 43 years. Her son, it turned out, now 25 and a West Point graduate, had been working on Patrick Riley’s campaign. She wanted to know what I thought about the current campaign.

It brought a great recollection of growing up together on the ocean in Tiverton, Rhode Island, where we played on the beach as children in the salt air, and sailed small boats in competition. In old New England towns on the Narragansett Bay each region had its own class of sail boat, and ours was designed by Commander Wood, a retired Navy man.

Commander Wood brought an old New England spirit to our town. Every day, into his 80s and beyond, his face torn open by skin cancer, he marched down the wharf alone to sail - undefeated, undefeatable, invincible - in one of the small sail boats he had designed for us.

I don’t think any of us ever heard him speak and certainly we never spoke to him: It would be like speaking to Triton or Poseidon. But he was a part of us. And he made many of us, like my friend and I, whose grandparents were born in the same town in Ireland, a part of the new world and its work and a part of New England. Even a part of the ocean as we experienced it on those chilly New England mornings. That’s what we needed, I said: A new commander.

Virginia's Natural Commonwealth

by Bernie Quigley - for Raising Kaine, 2/12/07

There was a remarkable op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend by Gar Alperovitz, a progressive historian and scholar at the University of Maryland, whose name I often find on-line these days associated with Jim Webb. Alperovitz looks to California and its fascinating Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and asks if the country has not reached the point where it is ungovernable as a single unit.

He writes: SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

“Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

I wanted to point out to Virginians how this idea of regional commonwealth and independent city-state has partially evolved in the public mind in recent years. At the very beginning of the war on Iraq an ad hoc group called The Acadian Alliance, consisting of a very small number of citizens from the three northernmost New England states, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, made the claim that under Jefferson’s view of the Constitution, the states had the Constitutional right not to participate in the invasion. Furthermore, we claimed that if the United States no longer wanted to be part of the United Nations, then we would like to send our own observer to the UN.

In an article in The Nation this last year Alperovitz included an idea somewhat along these lines in an article on “bold new ideas” for the new century.

From my point of view (and I was the one who started The Acadian Alliance), I’d been writing about Jefferson’s view of a republic compared with Hamilton’s. Here in New England, I’d been trying to convince New Englanders that we have political advantages through the Jefferson view that are our birth right and that when we abandoned the Jefferson view (and it became outlawed during the Civil Law) we lost our identity as New Englanders. We also lost our ability to resist the federal government, as the state is our natural package of rights in a republic and groupings of states form our identity. The states and the natural cultural regions they form over time are our natural defense against federalist wrong doing.

The idea began to catch on, but not in New England, as we have largely become since 1865 a provincial extension of New York. But it began to catch on in California and the Pacific Northwest.

My own thinking was based on Tolstoy’s ideas of a “natural state” or a natural commonwealth. New England formed a natural commonwealth before 1865. California, as Schwarzenegger points out here, forms a natural commonwealth today.

The South – or the upper states in the South – formed a natural commonwealth under colonial conditions as did New York and the middle states around Pennsylvania. And recent economic patterns advancing wealth in the North Carolina region express a new reemergence of a natural commonwealth in the North Carolina/Virginia region.

When I lived and worked in Virginia and North Carolina I felt that the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and South Carolina formed a natural Appalachian Commonwealth. In Tolstoy’s view, much like Jefferson’s, a natural commonwealth is a place not held together by doctrine or a set of dominating ideas, but which organically evolves through the natural relationship of people to each other in their natural surroundings.

Alperovitz’s articles here are helpful in understanding this. The “community tier” of business he speaks of should be advanced. All countries in the world except our own have “community tiers” within their borders – they are customs and ways of doing things locally that don’t necessarily transport globally, but which make us what we are as a people.

Community economies stabilize people and culture over a long period of time. A farmer in Sweden, for example, has been running a farm which has been in his family for a thousand years. Families together like this is the Jeffersonian vision; they build communities that last and nurture generation upon generation, after hedge funds, mutual funds, Wall St., stock options and globalization are long gone with the wind.

Community economies form within federations and in no way challenge federalism. But Governor Schwarzenegger’s declaring California “a good and global commonwealth” directly challenges the kind of federalism we have practiced in this country since the early 1800s.

To review, there are two approaches to American federalism, Alexander Hamilton’s and Thomas Jefferson’s. Historian Frank Owsley explains the difference in his 1930 essay, “The Irrepressible Conflict.”

Owsley writes: “In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies, Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other States Rights, but in truth the first should have been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.”

Being raised here in New England we were taught that the Civil War was about slavery, period. The states rights component is never explained to us and is always denied by historians. But in denying the issue of states right we New Englanders have lost our own protections against federalism gone amok - as we see it’s free-form arc light random in the world today - granted to us by Jefferson. We have also lost the abilities to build and form our own communities. Instead, we watch them yield invariably to the forces of the info-entertainment industry and Madison Ave. – the way of the corporation aided and advanced by a dominating central government, as per Hamilton’s instruction.

It was this breach between Hamilton and Jefferson, writes Owsley, that formed a “war of intellectual and spiritual conquest” in early America and forced contention between North and South. It continues to do so today in “red state” and “blue state” cultural warfare.

But now the season is changing. And now, the very same issue which divided us for centuries North and South, begins to divide us East and West.

Now, for the first time since Jay’s Treaty in 1794, when Washington teamed up with the New Yorker, Hamilton, in opposition to his fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, putting us on Hamilton’s corporate path for more than 200 years, we are beginning to see awaken again Jefferson’s vision of a federation in Arnold’s “good and global commonwealth”; a federation of commonwealths and free and varied peoples. And in the long and conspicuous absence of Ulysses S. Grant and Tecumseh Sherman, who do they think they are going to send up against the Governator to stop him in this new wave of contention? Dick Cheney?

Alperovitz NYTs essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/opinion/10alperovitz.html

Other A;perovtiz articles at http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/alperovitz/

Article from John Parker at "Good Works" in North Carolina on rising "red state" economy at

http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/cms/?p=7161

Arnold’s Challenge to Federalism

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 2/12/07

There was a remarkable op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend by Gar Alperovitz, a progressive historian and scholar at the University of Maryland, whose name I often find on-line these days associated with Jim Webb. Alperovitz looks to California and its fascinating Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and asks if the country has not reached the point where it is ungovernable as a single unit.

He writes: SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

“Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

I wanted to point out to Virginians how this idea of regional commonwealth and independent city-state has partially evolved in the public mind in recent years. At the very beginning of the war on Iraq an ad hoc group called The Acadian Alliance, consisting of a very small number of citizens from the three northernmost New England states, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, made the claim that under Jefferson’s view of the Constitution, the states had the Constitutional right not to participate in the invasion. Furthermore, we claimed that if the United States no longer wanted to be part of the United Nations, then we would like to send our own observer to the UN.

In an article in The Nation this last year Alperovitz included an idea somewhat along these lines in an article on “bold new ideas” for the new century.

From my point of view (and I was the one who started The Acadian Alliance), I’d been writing about Jefferson’s view of a republic compared with Hamilton’s. Here in New England, I’d been trying to convince New Englanders that we have political advantages through the Jefferson view that are our birth right and that when we abandoned the Jefferson view (and it became outlawed during the Civil Law) we lost our identity as New Englanders. We also lost our ability to resist the federal government, as the state is our natural package of rights in a republic and groupings of states form our identity. The states and the natural cultural regions they form over time are our natural defense against federalist wrong doing.

The idea began to catch on, but not in New England, as we have largely become since 1865 a provincial extension of New York. But it began to catch on in California and the Pacific Northwest.

My own thinking was based on Tolstoy’s ideas of a “natural state” or a natural commonwealth. New England formed a natural commonwealth before 1865. California, as Schwarzenegger points out here, forms a natural commonwealth today.

The South – or the upper states in the South – formed a natural commonwealth under colonial conditions as did New York and the middle states around Pennsylvania. And recent economic patterns advancing wealth in the North Carolina region express a new reemergence of a natural commonwealth in the North Carolina/Virginia region.

When I lived and worked in Virginia and North Carolina I felt that the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and South Carolina formed a natural Appalachian Commonwealth. Other regions form their own natural commonwealths. In Tolstoy’s view, much like Jefferson’s, a natural commonwealth is a place not held together by doctrine or a set of dominating ideas and dogma, but which organically evolves through the natural relationship of people to each other in their natural surroundings.

Alperovitz’s articles are helpful in understanding this. The “community tier” of business he speaks of should be advanced. All countries in the world except our own have “community tiers” within their borders – they are customs and ways of doing things locally that don’t necessarily transport globally, but which make us what we are as a people.

Community economies stabilize people and culture over a long period of time. A farmer in Sweden, for example, has been running a farm which has been in his family for a thousand years. Families working and interacting together like this form the Jeffersonian vision; they build communities that last and nurture generation upon generation, after hedge funds, mutual funds, Wall St., stock options and globalization are long gone with the wind.

Community economies form within federations and in no way challenge federalism. But Governor Schwarzenegger’s declaring California “a good and global commonwealth” directly challenges the kind of federalism we have practiced in this country since the early 1800s.

To review, there are two approaches to American federalism, Alexander Hamilton’s and Thomas Jefferson’s. Historian Frank Owsley explains the difference in his 1930 essay, “The Irrepressible Conflict.”

Owsley writes: “In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies [North and South], Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other States Rights, but in truth the first should have been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.”

Being raised here in New England we were taught that the Civil War was about slavery, period. The states rights component is never explained to us and is always denied by historians. But in denying the issue of states right we deny Jefferson, and we New Englanders have thus lost our own protections against federalism gone amok - as we see it’s free-form arc light random in the world today - granted to us by Jefferson. We have also lost the abilities to build and form our own communities. Instead, we watch them yield invariably to the forces of the info-entertainment industry and Madison Ave. – the way of the corporation aided and advanced by a dominating central government, as per Hamilton’s instruction.

It was this breach between Hamilton and Jefferson, writes Owsley, that formed a “war of intellectual and spiritual conquest” in early America and forced contention between North and South. It continues to do so today in “red state” and “blue state” cultural warfare.

But now the season is changing. And now, the very same issue which divided us for centuries North and South, begins to divide us East and West instead.

Now, for the first time since Jay’s Treaty in 1794, when Washington teamed up with the New Yorker, Hamilton, in opposition to his fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, putting us on Hamilton’s corporate path for more than 200 years, we are beginning to see awaken again Jefferson’s vision of a federation in Arnold’s “good and global commonwealth”; a federation of commonwealths and free and varied peoples.

And in the long and conspicuous absence of Ulysses S. Grant and Tecumseh Sherman, who do they think they are going to send up against the Governator to try and stop him in this new wave of contention? Dick Cheney?

Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger for President

by Bernie Quigley, for The Free Market News Network, 2/5/07

There was an interesting article by Jonathan Chait in the LA Times the other day about Hillary Clinton. Chait is an editor of the political journal “The New Republic” and a Bill Clinton liberal, the kind under attack nowadays by Southern Populists rising in the Democratic Party because of their attachment to the Big Bucks on Wall St. Even “The New York Times” editorial page was absolutely in full pout this weekend on how the Clintons are short-circuiting the voting process with tons and tons of money. Piles of it. But that’s not Chait’s concern. He, like millions of other Democrats, just wants Bill to be President again.

“The Hillary Clinton campaign is a product of the fact that her husband can’t run for re-election,” he says. “She is certainly highly intelligent and qualified to hold the Presidency, but if her husband were running, she wouldn’t be. People react to her candidacy largely on the basis of how they felt about Bill Clinton.”

No doubt. As we vividly remember, as soon as Elvis entered the building, the missus emerged as co-manager. As they so coyly put it back then, we were getting “two for one.”

Bush would probably be dumped unceremoniously in 2008 [if only he could run again], says Chiat, and only our “kooky current system lets him [Bush] retire undefeated [by Bill Clinton].”

“What this country really needs is to have Bill Clinton run against George W. Bush,” he says.

Chiat has a point. There is a way large group of people, most of whom are about the same age, who have been able to think of nothing but Bill Clinton since he was President. He’s just a hunka, hunka, burnin’ love to these people. Can Bill be Vice President? Secretary of State? First Lady or whatever that would be? As it is with Chairman Mao and Peter the Great, they hope to extend his legacy and extend his career by sending his charming Midwestern wife to the Oval Office. Obviously, it is a way of circumventing those pesky Republicans who changed the law just to block Franklin Roosevelt out of reelection.

Laws are laws. If we don’t like them, we can change them. But to circumvent them by sending a spouse to office, so as to govern behind her skirt is worse than illegal – it is bad faith. It is monarchist in tendency and attempts to circumvent the common tradition of political faith and fairness we have established in this country since 1776.

If Constitutional issues are blocking the will of the American people, let’s be straight and consider fixing them. Of course, it would be a political expedient simply to enable the Bill Faithful who see Elvis One as a kind of generational deity, but so was the original law that now blocks his reelection a political expediency.

And while we’re at it, let’s review again why Arnold Schwarzenegger, the highly regarded Governor of California, who was just reelected in a small landslide, can’t run. Foreign born, outlawed by the Constitution. The LA Times, always vigilant, recently wrote about this as well. They say it had something to do with Poland during the Revolution and Napoleon. I can’t remember exactly, but it sounded like more of that partisan bickering of which the Founding Fathers are so noted for. They recommend changing the Constitution so Arnold can run.

Maybe we could have a quick Constitutional Convention so that Bill can run against Arnold.

No? Then how about this. Why doesn’t the savvy, intelligent and formidable wife of the Governator, Maria Shriver, of the famed Kennedy clan, run in Arnold’s place, like the missus is doing for Bill? There would be a kind of native fairness and equity to it. It would be an extra-legal solution for clearing a path around a bunch of archaic legal knotholes and it wouldn’t be technically illegal. And just like with the Clintons, we’d be getting “two for one.” And a Kennedy and an Arnold! The White House would be awash with grace, intelligence and élan like we haven’t seen since Jackie Kennedy hosted the likes of Andre Malraux and a gaggle of other writers, artists and Nobel laureates. I’m sure the Arnolds know lots of nice people.

As Chait says, politics since Bill Clinton has consisted largely of referendum-by-proxy on Bill Clinton.

But here is something else: The drafting of Arnold in mid-stream was also a referendum on contentious Clinton partisan politics and Clinton proxies, like Gray Davis. Toward the end of his ill-fated half term, California was paralyzed by partisan gridlock and its economy was being compared to the economy of Venezuela. It was about to tank. Governor Schwarzenegger retrieved California not only from weak-management, but from the same bitter political warfare that plagues the rest of the country today.

Schwarzenegger was reelected by a wide margin just recently by showing agile and responsive leadership. He is willing to change course when the set course fails. He calls himself a “nonpartisan” politician. He is part Libertarian, part Liberal, part Conservative.

California is the awakening American vision. Perhaps it has just turned the corner ahead of the rest of us. The rise of the Governator has sent the old school into remission with a superior new political model that has not yet been brought to a national election.

So Chait is wrong. This country doesn’t need George W. Bush to run against Bill Clinton. It needs Arnold Schwarzenegger to run against Bill Clinton. That would put us back on path again in the new century. But as the Constitution forbids it for both candidates, let’s run Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger against the already declared Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Returning . . .

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/4/07

“ . . . by returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength . . .” – The Book of Common Prayer

There are today four political parties. Maybe there will be five by this time next year. There are the Clinton Democrats, fueled by “Hillraisers” according to New York Times editorialists – hip billionaires who are expected to give at least a million dollars each to the Senator from the Empire State. And now there are the Southern Insurgent Populists, who consider the Hillraisers to be Robber Barons and Wall St. stooges, same as the Republicans. There are also Old South Republicans and New West Republicans, both of whom could well go their own way in ‘08. And then there is Mike Bloomberg of New York, who says if the mischief doesn’t stop, he is going to start his own party and will put a half billion dollars to that effort. My guess today is that he will.

Four of these five trains will crash in 2008. For at least one, probably two, the crash will be fatal. The train that doesn’t crash will mark the new century.

It looks like John Edwards has taken the initiative with the Southern Insurgents. That’s what Jonathan Chait, senior editor at The New Republic says (a magazine which, in another space/time moment did not support billionaires). And Chait talks straight enough: He wants to know why he has to go through the charade of voting for Hillary and can’t just vote for Bill again, because that’s really what it is all about.

There was an important event in Washington, D.C., on Friday and Saturday with both Hillarycrats and Southern Insurgents speaking together. Edwards seemed to break out of this pack of Democrats who want to be President in 2008.

I heard John and Elizabeth up here in New Hampshire the other day and found their new ideas about poverty to be oddly familiar. Then I realized John seemed to be talking about the same set of ideas which I had written about in 1975 in Philadelphia; naive ideas which created an almost permanent underclass and a culture of welfare in the U.S. They are ideas which almost ruined the Democratic Party and sent millions to Reagan a few years later. Simplistic ideas like interspersing poor people into wealthy neighborhoods to end poverty; ideas like everyone should go to college. And funding these ideas with deficit spending. These ideas vastly expanded the welfare state and were wholeheartedly rejected by the Democrats and by most Americans almost 30 years ago. It took decades for some very good universities to recover from them and some have never yet recovered.

I am guessing that Edwards got these new ideas at the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC - Chapel Hill where he was Director until recently. It is a departure from his point of view of four years ago, and it is a vast departure from any Democratic policy initiatives of the last 30 years. Having worked in colleges within the last 20 years I have found that as ideas get rejected by the outside world they frequently become tenurized and live quiet lives exiled in academia, like potted plants. But like the mysterious Corpse Flower that blossoms every 30 years or so at the Smithsonian’s Botanical Gardens, they pop up again as sure as Dave Dillinger (rest in peace) and Jane Fonda pop up at anti-war rallies 30 years after their hour in the sun has passed (“Max! Its time for my Close Up!”).

Edwards was only 23 when these strategies last failed across America. Perhaps he has been unfamiliar with them until now. He also said things like the U.S. is the only place in the world where poor people live separate from rich people. Do what now? He and Elizabeth presented these ideas as if he had heard them for the first time and was awakened by them and no one else knew about them yet.

This is quite different from the economic populism we’ve been hearing recently from Jim Webb, but Edwards now seems to be riding on the momentum which Webb hatched last Tuesday night in his rousing populist speech in opposition to the President’s State of the Union. What I have heard so far suggests that Webb and Edwards hold quite contrary views. Webb cuts through academic rubric and partisan bullshit to get to the core of things. I was particularly impressed in Webb’s debate with George Allen in the Virginia Senate race – before he was cut off – when he talked about the specific responsibility the state of Virginia has to black people as per the specific history of the region. Academia has long extended the cloak of victimization to nearly everyone on every social scale and pay grade and in doing so, has excused itself from the specific responsibilities to its own regional poor.

Indeed, these new ideas of Edwards, which appear to be primarily based in philosophy of the 1930s, are the ideas which sent people like Webb and millions of other plain folk in the rural South and urban America away from the Democratic Party in the first place.

Edwards’ new pitch is also vastly different from the talk we hear today from Wes Clark, who brings in a new vision of the Labor Union as a vehicle for the transformation of worker’s lives, not necessarily in opposition to management, but more as a church group does or like the “worker’s circle” in Japanese industry, enhancing cooperation between worker and management and equitably improving the lives of both.

Edwards was probably only playing to the undergraduate audience and what he said might only be viewed as the work of a skillful trial lawyer engaging a maleable jury. A task in which his skills are formidable.

But there is something else here; something else we are stuck between and maybe need to get unstuck from in order to go forward.

We have class issues: With the Clintons it is Common Folk wanting to be Big, and with the Gentry, they’re always trying to be Common. Bill is po’ white supreme, right from the Ozarks, striving and driven as if by demons to Oxford and the tallest building in Manhattan and the most expensive suits and haircuts . . . which might even seem gouche to those Born of the Blood and Old Money. And Hillary more so; direct from John Wesley’s church choir on the Great Plains – the naïve script for her rise to celebrity politics and the Big House in New York written by Willa Catha ages before James Carville and the Cajun Cartel ever got their hands on it - and it hides in plain sight in every photograph ever taken of her. But Gentry, like Kerry and Bush, strive endlessly to be Common Folk and likewise lack the genuine touch.

There will be none of that with John and Elizabeth. Get some money, buy a big house. That will be the extent of it.

Maybe it is a karma thing going on with John and Elizabeth; an unlikely change, like the appearance of a Sunday School teacher or a Hollywood movie star as our new President. Wesley Clark and Mark Warner are warrior types but maybe the warrior should work for and show fealty to Barbar and Celeste, the benign monarchs of Celesteville - that would be John and Elizabeth.

Anyway, it could be good - we have seen varied faces of the South since Watergate – Jimmy Carter, Planter and Peacemaker, Clinton, Bush [Jack-Legged, Yankee Interloper, striving to be a regular Texan], Wes Clark, the Southern General, and now John and Elizabeth - they embody the true values of the South - family, faith, community – and up here in New England people seem to like them. There is a common quality to them that defines us as we are and not what we want to be. Wanting to be something else has made us unhealthy and dangerous. Maybe is time for our country to return to itself and more than any of the other candidates, John and Elizabeth bring us homeward.

- Daily Kos and Raising Kaine Diary, 2/3/07 - Recall Mark Warner

I heard John and Elizabeth Edwards up here in New Hampshire the other day and found their new ideas about poverty to be oddly familiar. Then I realized John seemed to be talking about the same set of ideas which I had written about in 1975 in Philadelphia; naive ideas which created an almost permanent underclass and a culture of welfare in the U.S. They are ideas which almost ruined the Democratic Party and sent millions to Reagan a few years later. Simplistic ideas like interspersing poor people into wealthy neighborhoods to end poverty; ideas like everyone should go to college. And funding these ideas with deficit spending. These ideas vastly expanded the welfare state and were wholeheartedly rejected by the Democrats and by most Americans almost 30 years ago. It took decades for some very good universities to recover from them (including my own, U. Mass.) and some have never yet recovered.

I am guessing that Edwards got these new ideas at the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC - Chapel Hill where he was Director until recently. It is a departure from his point of view of four years ago, and it is a vast departure from any Democratic policy initiatives of the last 30 years. Having worked in colleges within the last 20 years I have found that as ideas get rejected by the outside world they became tenurized and live quiet lives exiled in academia, like potted plants. But like the mysterious Corpse Flower that blossoms every 30 years or so at the Smithsonian’s Botanical Gardens, they pop up again as sure as Dave Dillinger (rest in peace) and Jane Fonda are gonna pop up at an anti-war rally 30 years after their hour in the sun has passed (“Max! Its time for my Close Up!”).

Edwards was only 23 when these strategies last failed across America. Perhaps he has been unfamiliar with them until now. He also said things like the U.S. is the only place in the world where poor people live separate from rich people. Say what? Every society in the history of human time has done so. He and Elizabeth presented these ideas as if he had heard them for the first time and was awakened by them and no one else knew about them yet.

This is quite different from the economic populism we’ve been hearing recently from Jim Webb, but Edwards now seems to be riding on the momentum which Webb hatched last Tuesday night in his rousing populist speech in opposition to the President’s State of the Union. But from what I have heard so far I find that they hold quite contrary views - Webb cuts through academic rubric and partisan bullshit to get to the core of things. I was particularly impressed in Webb’s debate with George Allen – before he was cut off – when he talked about the specific responsibility the state of Virginia has to black people as per the specific history of the region. Academia has long extended the cloak of victimization to nearly everyone on every social scale and pay grade and in doing so, has excused itself from the specific responsibilities to its own regional poor.

Indeed, these new ideas of Edwards, which appear to be primarily based in philosophy of the 1930s, are the ideas which sent people like Webb and millions of other plain folk in the rural South and urban America away from the Democratic Party in the first place. Edwards’ new pitch is also vastly different from the talk we hear today from Wes Clark, who brings in a new vision of the Labor Union as a vehicle for the transformation of worker’s lives, not necessarily in opposition to management, but more as a church group does or like the “worker’s circle” in Japanese industry, enhancing cooperation between worker and management and equitably improving the lives of both.

Webb and Clark bring us forward. Edwards brings us back to the failed policies of the Sixties. The Clintons and the DLC reacted to the welfare-state culture of the Sixties, but they went too far and fell into alliance with Wall St. at the expense of the worker and the common people. But there is no going back to failed and finished policies. Webb and Clark offer a path forward to a responsible middle ground.

But after the Democratic National Committee speeches Friday, Edwards, already at 35% in Iowa, seems to be breaking away from the pack.

I was disappointed when Edwards emerged yesterday. I’d hoped Wes Clark would. Among this crop of Democrats only Mark Warner and Wesley Clark have the actual leadership abilities and management tools needed to be successful Presidents. Because it is President, not American Idol. If the Democrats continue with naive and incompetent leadership another four years, the world’s benchmark currency, which depends on a stable tradition of governance, will most likely shift from the dollar either to the Yen or the Euro. The strength and beauty of the U.S. is its multifaceted culture and diverse life force, but that is also its weakness as well - recently, questioned by Bernie Sanders, Ben Bernacke was forced to admit that our only comparable RE wages of rich and poor is Brazil.

The greatest crisis we face today in the U.S. is a management crisis. The other crisis; Iraq, economy, flow form that. We could easily fall into Third World status with continued inattention to management and pushing forth "bodice rippers," “rock stars,” nostalgico candidates (and their wives and aunties), and unelectable candidates representing every ethnic, ideological and political tribe imaginable. If this crowd can’t rise to Clark, Mark Warner must be recalled to service for the good of the country.

The Democrats have taken good strides this past year with Howard Dean’s 50-state initiative, the new Democratic Congress and vital new people with a new Democratic attitude; people like Webb, Carol Shea-Porter, Joe Sestak and Patrick Riley. But Democrats have lost the field 49-1 three times in the last 50 years. One more catastrophic failure and for them the game’s over.