phil:

September 13th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

We have a tendency to think of the conservative and liberal political movements as permanent features of the political landscape, when in fact they are transient and temporary. I’ve come to believe that we are in a very unique time, one that offers us the opportunity to think creatively about government and civil society and how to address challenges that we face. In fact the creative thinking and acting is already going on, but it has not yet resulted in the emergence of new political movements. Complexity, social networks, 4GW, assymetric warfare,”Smart Mobs”, “Army of Davids”, etc. These kinds of things are all attempts to make sense of a variety of emerging social phenomena that are challenging our incumbent institutions and our ways of thinking about how these institutions should be organized and the kinds of actions they should take. We are already seeing the impact of this in business, the news media, and political activism. And in national security we’ve been trying to wrap our heads around a threat that still defies our categories.

And yet, while our society is changing and the kinds of threats we face are different from what we faced before, we are still dominated by two political movements whose ideas are rooted in the reality of the mid-20th century. That is not our reality. We need ideas that are relevant to our reality and new political movements to be vehicles of those ideas. And that will happen. It will take time but it will happen.

So yes, let us recognize the intellectual exhaustion of our political class, left and right. But let’s not lament this, but rather celebrate it as an opportunity to think new thoughts and devote ourselves to the development of the ideas that will provide the foundation of new political movements over the next few decades.

Anonymous:

September 13th, 2006 at 9:02 pm

Interesting post and I agree that both parties are quite lost. However, they might accurately reflect our society as it exists today. We have unimagineable material wealth/creature comforts for the vast majority of Americans that was unheard of a generation ago. Most people want the status quo to continue. As the perception of terrorism as a threat recedes, you can’t get people excited about anything. Therefore, I don’t see a third party coming soon. But I agree the current system is ripe for change. I’m curious how the red state/blue state “divide” will be a factor.

Barnabus

Dan tdaxp:

September 14th, 2006 at 2:16 am

The weak point of a democracy like ours — a system that encourages two parties — is that it is dependent on the minority party. For all the talk of the governing party framing issues, it is the opposition’s choices of where and how to engage which shape the politics. In the 90s, we had an opposition party that chose wisely on trade and poorly on how to deal with a President’s moral problems.

Now, we face something much worse: an opposition party that chooses poorly on economics and suicidally on foreign policy.

The opposition’s failure to engage in a serious manner means the governing party doesn’t have to, either. Hence the malaise.

purpleslog:

September 14th, 2006 at 3:57 am

A visionary could organize around something like:

SLOE/Future

Security
Liberty
Opportunity
Enrichment

à Future Oriented

Security à from bad guys: transnational, national and local

Liberty à free to organize and associate etc as one wants (includes religion, contracts, etc)

Opportunity àall humans should have lots of opportunities to achieve there potential (opportunity creating stuff = good stuff)

Enrichment à of wealth, knowledge, experience etc, for all members of ones community (local, national, global). All humans should be uplifted by the exercise of liberty and opportunity maximization.

Future Oriented à No status Quo! I want 200 year life spans, cheap limitless energy, asteroid mining, orbital communities and mars settlements – a better future of all humanity!

Note is does nothing to prescribe a government run future.

I will give a listen to any pundit with ideas for a SLOE/Future.

Larry Dunbar:

September 14th, 2006 at 5:37 am

“Does anyone out there have a good explanation for the intellectual exhaustion that prevails in our national political class, Left and Right?”
Yes, I have an explanation; it is not exhaustion.

“We have unimagin[e]able material wealth/creature comforts for the vast majority of Americans that was unheard of a generation ago.” Barnabus

I am not sure this is true. This generation has riches that I never had, in ways I’ll never know, but their wealth seems to be tied up in their parent’s generation and that is borrowed to the max. None of my nephews or nieces has families yet and if they did both would have to work just to become middle class. Then tragedy struck, one of my nieces, at 15 years, stuck a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. My 9/11 was on April 27, 2000. Many passed it off as a mistaken long-term solution to a short-term problem, but I am not so sure. The number of her classmates that also died, in a similar manner, before they graduated, was also unheard of a generation ago. I think the world has become so complex in ways that we don’t understand that there is no clear ethical logical message being implicitly past down. Ask what America is a generation ago and I think you would get a different message than the one now. We are conforming to a global-wide complex adaptive system.

Some of the problem is the complexity of the globe. We have lost our identity as a nation-state; we have become a global-wide complex adaptive system. Both parties want the resources coming from Mexico. Both parties want the cheap goods that Asia offers. Both want the globalization sustaining oil from the Middle East, for both plastics and transportation. Both parties want to give up a piece of America to get these things, but both parties want to get elected by their bases of power and to do that under this platform takes some doing.

So they resort to ethics. One is pro-life so the other must be against life. One is against gays, so the other must be pro-gay. One is against Mexicans invading the USA, so the other must be for it. These are really bogus arguments, but no one wants to look at the real issue; both parties are the same because we are a part of a global-wide complex adaptive system and lost our nation-state status.

The pro-globalization people can’t really talk about the issue for fear of destroying our economy. If America were to sacrifice like they did in WWII, the economy would die.

The anti-globalization people are trying to kill us.

But the complexity is really not about globalization; it is about the complex adaptive system that has broken out from the old nation-state boxes.

The thing is the anti-globalization people, at least those of Islamic persuasion, are a part of the same global-wide complex adaptive system. No complex adaptive system can contain more than one set of ethics, logic, or physics that is why we have nation-states to contain them. However, until the resources have been shifted to the winning side they can both be a part of an inter-group tournament (Global Brain, Howard Bloom), and that is what’s happening.

The more nation-states we destroy, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and pretty soon Iran, the larger the complex adaptive system gets. The ethics, logic or physics that wins is determined by where the resources are shifted. To “win” globalization needs to shift more resources to people who support its ethics, logic and physics than those oppose. It is because globalization is a part of the global-wide complex adaptive system that resources are able to shift to the enemies of globalization and towards globalization at the same time.

Right now we have resources shifting all over the world. They shift from China to America, America to China, China to Iran, Iran to Afghanistan, Iran to Lebanon, Iran to Iraq, America to KSA, KSA to America, KSA to Pakistan, among others. When these resources shift and produce a winner, the rules common to the resource also wins. Iran helped set up the government of Afghanistan, and that produced a winner. Iran is helping Iraq set up its government, and that will produced a winner also. We all know where Lebanon is going and what America and Israel is going to do about it.

Sorry I didn’t mean to rant, but the problem is: at a family, city, county, state, and federal scale the USA looks like a nation-state. But when scaled to a world level, the reality of the situation becomes evident; the USA is part of a globe-wide complex adaptive system, which follows a completely different set of rules than a nation-state.

mark:

September 16th, 2006 at 2:29 am

Superb comments all; I can only apologize for my lack of timely response. things will be better in a couple of weeks.