The GOP is at its core the party of corporations and of the wealthy, and its problem has always been how to convince large numbers of people to vote for it. This has become more and more of an issue for them as income inequality has increased.

The Southern strategy is essentially the same answer to the problem that was pioneered by the Nazis. It depends on making a lot of poor white people believe that they have more in common with rich white people than with poor blacks, immigrants, or (at times) even the urban working class.

That is why cultural issues have been so important. They enable the GOP to address those folks and say, "See, we share the same cultural practices and the same religious beliefs and *they* don't."

The South has served two roles in this strategy. One was that it was more effective there than any place else, because of lingering racism, so it turned the South into a solid voting block except when the Democrats ran a southerner themselves.

But the other was that the South validated the cultural argument. It served as *proof* that the GOP consisted of "real Americans" up and down the income scale and therefore made it more acceptable for low-income whites elsewhere to vote Republican.

This is why the GOP is so terrified of anything that looks like class warfare. They know that if voters start voting according to class solidarity instead of cultural solidarity, they don't stand a chance.

This is more acute for the GOP because a lot has changed for the worse since the pre-Southern strategy days of the 1940's and 50's. The small businessmen who used to vote Republican have been crushed by large corporations. The white collar professionals who saw themselves as a cut above blue collar union members now realize how marginal and exploited their lives have become.

It people voted according to class interests today, the Democrats would win every election with 90% of the vote. There are several reasons why this hasn't happened and isn't going to happen -- habit and tradition, the fact that Democrats have their own corporate ties and aren't as clean as they might be, and perhaps just the natural human tendency to want to choose up sides and go at one another on a roughly 50-50 basis.

But if it happens even to a degree -- which is what I think we have seen this year -- it completely demolishes the Southern strategy. DU has been full of anecdotes about Republican relatives and acquaintances reluctantly deciding to vote for Obama because he is better for their own interests and for the welfare of the country as a whole.

And there's a feedback mechanism built in as well. The more the GOP falters, the more it intensifies the Southern strategy -- as it essentially did with the selection of Palin. And the more it intensifies the Southern strategy, the more it will alienate those who haven't bought into its Nazi-like myths about the solidarity of "real Americans."

There's no reason at all to write off the South. But we do need to shift the center of gravity so that we're not driven by southern imperatives and can say instead to southerners, "Hey, why be left out? Come along and play our games. You'll find they're more fun and get you further."

You can see round one of the shift -- don't laugh! -- in 1930's cartoons.

Disney cartoons from the early 30's are all rural and small town -- with farm animals, rustic scenes, maybe at most a small town garage -- and project a sentimental small town sensibility.

Betty Boop cartoons from the same years are far more urban and rooted in the immigrant experience -- but they also have a somewhat musty, old-fashioned feel to them.

Warner Brothers cartoons from the late 30's, though, start to become fully "modern." They're urban, wise-cracking, and sophisticated. The stars may still be the funny animals of yore, but somehow they're now hanging around in department store window displays or hobnobbing with gangsters.

The country had changed long about then. Instead of a nation of "real Americans" (Disney) and slightly alien city-dwellers (Betty Boop), it had become a unified community of people who all listened to the same radio shows and could parrot back the same gag lines.

But somehow, the change didn't fully take. Or it more be more accurate to say that it did take -- except for that 30% that now forms the Republican base. It's those people, living in the "pockets" that Palin extols, who never fully became part of modern America -- even when the Rural Electrification Administration came through to wire them up -- and who both fear and envy that larger world they missed out on.

But things are starting to change again. The pocket-dwellers know in the depths of their apocalyptic little souls that their old world is about to be swept away -- and they're fighting that loss of identity tooth and nail.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party, looking for a winning electoral strategy in the late 60's, threw in its fate with the 30%. The world has held still in many ways for the last forty years -- in fact, the nation's slow economic decay means that the modern world may have actually receded further from those pockets rather than sweeping in to engulf them, as would have happened in more expansive times -- so the strategy has persisted.

But the fate of those remaining pockets is finally upon them. They're doomed, destined for the dustbin of history, ready to be swept away by the overwhelming intrusion of the Internet, wind and solar power farms, and whatever else it takes to bring the last pockets of tribalism and primitivism into the modern world.

But as that happens -- and it surely is happening right now -- they will become even more rigid, more dogmatic, and more xenophobic until their resistance finally crumbles.

Already they are operating as bitter-enders and not as any sort of viable alternative to mainstream 21st century culture. And for that reason, if no other, more cosmopolitan Republicans have less and less in common with them, less and less ability to make even McCain's devil's bargain for electoral profit.

Intellectual Republicanism has its own problems at the moment stemming from the failure of the free market. I don't doubt that, as in the 30's, Democrats will manage to patch some form of capitalism back together and a new generation of Republicans will arise to idolize it. But the alliance with the bitter-enders will not recover, because by then it will be far too late.

There's mathematical truth behind that old saw about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If it weren't for income redistribution, all wealth would accumulate in a few hands and society would grind to a half.

Except for the simplest nomadic groups that don't stay in one place long enough to accumulate material possessions, every society has practiced some form of income redistribution to keep this from happening. Traditional methods were such things as gift exchange, potlatches, having the richest family in town put on the yearly festival, or having the king give away his weight in gold on every birthday.

As societies got more complex, this worked less well -- which may be why "charity" became a central focus of religions like Christianity beginning 2000 years ago. Giving to the poor, tithing to the church -- it was all a form of income redistribution.

What really disrupted the system, though was capitalism. Before that, no matter how rich you got, all you could do with your excess gold and jewels was heap them up in a cave, like Smaug. But once capitalism was invented, you could invest whatever you weren't spending on yourself -- and just get richer and richer without limit.

At that point, the rich got stingy. At first, some of them still gave things away -- like the original 19th century robber barons founding museums and libraries to try to improve their reputations. But that era is long past. Now they don't even feel they have to pretend to be charitable any more -- wealth is its own justification.

In addition, this wealth isn't based on gold and precious jewels. It basically exists on paper and therefore can -- at least on paper -- be multiplied indefinitely. This means that not only can the rich enjoy a level of wealth that is nominally beyond the value of the entire planet, but they can do it without actually reducing the rest of us to total penury.

That whole house of cards is now collapsing. The subprime mortgage crisis -- in which derivatives come to be valued at many times the actual worth of the houses on which they are nominally based -- is a perfect metaphor of this unsustainable divorce of wealth from real value.

But even as this crisis plays its way through, we should be very aware that the failure of older redistribution mechanisms is one of the major causes behind it. If we are to solve the underlying problems, we need income redistribution as an essential tool. Only by creating a society in which wealth is regularly siphoned off at the top in order to till the soil at the bottom will we create a sustainable system, one that is both in touch with the actual value of our world and responsive to the needs of its human population.

This is neither wild-eyed idealism nor "Marxist" resentment by the undeserving poor of the success of the rich. It's simply the result of considering what is necessary to preserve the health of the system as a whole rather than to paper a small subset of anomalously lucky individuals.

After I finished the above post, I kept wondering why, if I was right in what I'd written about free market capitalism being a major cause of the breakdown of the old tribal/aristocratic model of government, the free market fanatics have largely been supporting the Republican party.

It occurred to me as a possible explanation that those people -- libertarians, mostly -- idealize the completely unregulated, Wild West image of the free market and are afraid of any new social model that would make the markets part of a re-integrated whole with the power to set standards and objectives.

This is why the libertarians have been willing to cast in their lot with the traditionalists -- the social conservatives and would-be aristocrats. Even though they don't have much in common with them overall, they've been united by their attachment to the current broke-down form of things-as-they-are in preference to any more effective replacement

There's been a tension there going back to at least 1969, when the libertarians walked out of the Young Americans for Freedom and joined up with the left-anarchists. (There's some interesting history on this that I hadn't previously known at http://www.spaz.org/~dan/individualist-ana... including a fascinating description of the young Dana Rohrabacher as "a charismatic campus activist" who traveled around the country singing folk songs and "converting YAF chapters into Libertarian Alliances." )

But like Rohrabacher, most of them turned into ordinary Republicans, and it's been only with this year's Ron Paul uprising (and the complete capitulation of the McCain campaign to the traditionalist right) that the split which began 40 years ago is looking like it could become permanent.

For an actual realignment, of course, the libertarians and the liberals would have to find common ground. That's where the current economic breakdown could be crucial, if it convinces the libertarians that some degree of regulation is necessary to keep the markets from diving into a ditch or being eaten alive by raw greed. Ron Paul himself isn't ever likely to get there -- but under the right circumstances, many of his followers might.

(The next step, of course, would be a conversation about how the profit motive isn't the best way to assure that attention is paid to urgent social needs -- and the possibility that if current business norms could be rejiggered so that drug companies, for example, put less money into curing erectile dysfunction and more into research on sickle-cell anemia, then government would be able to do a lot less tax-and-spending to take up the slack. But that's another topic for another day.)

Thinking about the idea of "tribes" some more -- tribes aren't natural groupings. Human beings originally lived in small hunter-gatherer bands of maybe two dozen closely-related individuals -- and sociologists say that's still the effective limit for a working group in any organization.

Tribes are fictional. A tribe is basically a bunch of people who believe they share a common ancestor somewhere back in the mists of history. Tribes make it possible to organize people in larger groups -- whether villages or far-flung nomadic clans. They can also lead to wars and other us vs. them nastiness, but on the whole the effect has been a positive one, and the development of human society beyond the hunter-gatherer band would not have been possible without them.

On the other hand, you can only go so far on the level of the tribe, and ever since the start of civilization there has been a tension between large states and the tribes that comprise them. It's been suggested that the pyramids of Egypt were built at such an early date because there was a need to get people from all the tribes together working on a common project in order to establish a unified state. Just this week, I've seen stories about DNA research showing that both the people who created the terra-cotta army in China and the people who lived at Machu Picchu in Peru were drawn from all over those respective empires -- suggesting that there was a deliberate policy to break tribal bonds.

At the same time, the ruling class of each of those early states formed a kind of super-tribe in itself -- a group of aristocratic families, often considering themselves descended from the founding ruler, or at least closely related by intermarriage -- which was capable of ruling the state as a whole because it were not bound by loyalty to any of the regional tribes.

This two-pronged system of a central aristocracy dominating local tribal groups took a little while to get going (which is why early civilizations tended to fall when under stress), but once the bugs were worked out it kept chugging along smoothly for the next 5000 years. In the last few centuries, though, it's seriously run out of gas -- not because it was evil, but because it couldn't deal with the growing complexity of free markets and the global economy. We've seen revolutions and the rejection of the very idea of aristocracy, and its place we've been putting together new institutions that don't depend on tribalism -- democracy, constitutional rule, professional bureaucracies.

The trouble is that we're still in a transitional stage. We don't have kings and aristocrats officially calling the shots -- but we do have a ruling class which in many ways retains a tribal structure, where they go to the same schools, belong to the same clubs, and respond to ties of marriage and friendship more than to the national interest.

We've had corporations amassing an enormous amount of wealth and power, which both prop up the old ruling class and in themselves are largely run by tribal notions of loyalty and favoritism rather than according to democratic or professional ideals.

Making things worse, we've had an administration in power the last eight years that runs on cronyism and loyalty to the person rather than to the institution, and which has done its best to trash the professional bureaucracies within the government.

And as the residual tribal impulses break down in most of society without yet having an equally powerful replacement, we often find ourselves at the mercy of those who still maintain tribal discipline -- whether it's some fundie church taking over a local school board or the military-industrial complex sending us off to the same old us-vs-them wars against people we can be persuaded are foreign and dangerous.

The best I can say about all this is that things never go backwards, and modern societies are far too complex to be managed by the 5000-year-old patch job of tribes-plus-aristocracy. It simply can't hold on much longer -- and in fact, the 2008 election may prove to have been a pivotal face-off between the old and the new, and the current economic turmoil a crucial next step in the centuries-long process of putting together the next level of organization.

And when that happens -- when we've figured out a way of doing things that combines the self-organizing principles of the Internet with an appropriate degree of formal administration -- the residual tribal structures will lose whatever power still remains to them. The fundamentalists -- or at least their children -- will put aside their fear of science and their apocalyptic dreams and become citizens of the modern world. The ruling class will also lose its tribal cohesion -- which means there won't be any need for revolutions to pry their fingers from the levers of power.

I can't say that this will happen overnight or that their won't be messy spots along the way -- perhaps even the sort of painful widescale suffering that humans often need to prod them into making major changes to their way of life. I can't even say whether democracy as we presently conceive of it will survive the transition or will turn out to have been merely a first, fumbling attempt at something more comprehensive.

But I do know that it will happen -- because change always happens. The universe has been steadily getting more complex for untold billions of years, and new forms of organization have always emerged to handle that increasing complexity. And we're not going to be stuck on stupid forever.

The basic assumption behind it is that there's a tendency for a large unit like a modern nation-state to separate out into smaller, more tribal groupings -- which then form alliances in order to obtain a majority and achieve their shared objectives. But how that works is far from clear.

There's one theory that the basic division in this country is north vs. south and that it goes back to Puritans vs. Cavaliers in 17th century England. There's a related theory that in the early 20th century, the Republicans consisted of the ruling class in the north plus the southern underclass (blacks) while the Democrats had the allegiance of the southern ruling class plus the northern underclass (workers and immigrants.)

But as southern blacks moved north, they became part of the New Deal coalition, along with the unions, and a generation later this led to the South largely becoming Republican -- and the Republicans then doing their best to pick off northern working class voters.

The trouble with that on a theoretical level is that by the time this was happening, in the late 60's-early 70's, a lot more was happening as well. In response to the turmoil of the 60's, the corporations were becoming politically active to an unprecedented degree and now form a major Republican mainstay. Surburbanites have become a large part of the population, with uncertain loyalties and very different concerns from either the old ruling classes or the old underclasses. And we've seen the rise of identity politics, and the conservative reaction against identity politics.

These days, it often seems as though the Democratic Party consists of, roughly speaking, "New Economy" business people -- Internet, media, and "green" industry -- progressive suburbanites, and gays and other "cultural creatives." While the Republicans get the "Old Economy" oil and extractive resources types plus the guns-and-religion left-behinds of decaying small towns and ever-emptier farm country.

But I can't see that as a stable, long-term situation. If nothing else, the old economy will pass, the new economy will be everywhere, the car-based suburban lifestyle will become untenable, and a neo-Rooseveltian push to get high-speed broadband into the boondocks will change the face of what is now rural America.

So where do we *really* go from here? One problem is that as people become more mobile and transient, the old tribal-style groupings of people who have all grown up together and share a common heritage can no longer function as the primary basis for party politics.

(The Republicans are in trouble right now because they're still relying on the communal bonds of those tribal groupings which barely exist any more. The evangelical churches are the final remnant of the old tribal structures which have largely disintegrated on the social level -- a last gasp rather than a sign of strength.)

The current alternative is ideological politics -- for example, free marketeers vs. believers in an activist government -- but there's something profoundly superficial about ideology. For one thing, as the OP pointed out, it's being made mincemeat of by the current financial crisis. Even in more stable times, it's very skin-deep, because it isn't rooted in permanent characteristics of personal identity. It can wind up looking like playground politics -- essentially random teamss of fundamentally identical players who are willing to divide up into us vs. them for the purpose of getting on with the game.

It may be that things will never be as fixed and stable again as they were over the past few centuries -- that we will have floating alliances based on short-term interests and issues of the moment and that this will come to seem right and proper and normal. I don't know.

But I do know that the Constitutional democracy that we take for granted has been dependent all along on a variety of completely extra-constitutional mechanisms to make it work -- so if those mechanisms aren't going to last, we need to make sure democracy itself doesn't get lost in the transition.

Just as US-style democracy can't work in a society like Iraq that is *too* tribal, it's possible that it won't work in a society that is not tribal enough. We won't know until we get there -- but we could certainly use to start thinking about it right now.

I figured that distinction out years ago when I was trying to understand what drove the plotlines of various authors. But it applies to politics just as well.

Liberals tend to be love-based -- helping, caring, compassion, bringing people together, peace-making. All of that.

Libertarians tend to be freedom-based. From a liberal point of view, they can get a bit obnoxious about it -- but they're also a valuable counter-balance to the liberal tendency to get a bit smothering or busybody-ishy.

Conservatives are power-based. At best, they see life in terms of a military model -- clear lines of authority, assigning roles in order to get things done efficiently, and so forth. But all too often, they're just about domination, control, and random ass-kicking.

Like the balance of powers among the three branches of government, each type is useful to offset the weaknesses and limitations of the others. The problem is that right now, our society has gotten out of balance, with the worst kind of conservative power-trippers exercising disproportionate influence.

But there's something beyond that going on with Palin. That is, she's making appeals to both the love thing (handing the baby around) and the freedom thing (the whole mooseburger trip) -- but you just know that down at her core she's about nothing but power. That falsity may be why she can come across as evil.

The Nixonland quote in the OP says "The Young Republican National Federation was shot through with so much chicanery that its 1963 convention turned into a chair-throwing brawl."

I was recently looking into a man named Stanton Anderson, who is currently both an influential lobbyist and a major McCain fundraiser, and found that he was executive director of the Young Republican National Federation in 1963-65. I didn't make much of that at the time, but it seems it might be more significant than I realized.

Anderson went on to work in the Nixon administration as a staff assistant to the president and then as a deputy assistant secretary of state under Henry Kissinger. He was also active in the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign and transition team and was described in a Newsday article at the time of the 2006 Dubai Ports deal (for which his firm lobbied) as a "longtime Bush family ally."

In 2003, Anderson became executive vice president and chief legal officer of the United States Chamber of Commerce. There he's been involved in many of the Chamber's stealth and astroturf operations -- such as coming up in 2005 with the idea of founding a newspaper in Illinois solely for the purpose of promoting the idea that trial lawyers are evil and class action lawsuits are a major national crisis. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/business... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia... )

I started looking into Anderson because the Chamber of Commerce is threatening to pour tens of millions of dollars into this fall's election, most of which is likely to pay for advertising by pro-business and anti-Obama front groups. (See http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na... )

If Anderson's roots are in a slightly earlier phase of the same dirty-tricks milieu as Karl Rove's -- as that Nixonland quote might suggest -- that could explain a lot of what we are dealing with from the Chamber currently. Karl Rove isn't the only dirty trickster who later went bigtime with what he learned way back when.

But there's a big missing step, in that after the 1980's, the trail of Casolaro's Octopus goes totally cold. The CIA Old Boys' Network types like Ray Cline and E. Howard Hunt get old and retire or die. The slightly younger Enterprise figures like Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines also pass from the scene -- Richard Secord running around Azerbaijan in the early 90's is about as late as that lasts. BCCI falls and no other bank obviously replaces it.

Around the same time, the old-time mobsters die off, generally after being hounded into irrelevance by the Feds -- Lansky in 1982, Trafficante in 1987, Marcello in 1993. Even the Reverend Moon, one of the last survivors of that era, goes all sort of global and starts running high-level seminars for second-tier world leaders instead of setting up Iran-Contra front-groups.

This is why sites like NameBase aren't up to date -- the networks it tracks are very much *then* and not *now."

So I keep sniffing around like an old hound dog trying to find the trail, looking back and forward and trying to figure out who might be whose heirs.

One thing that's clear is that the Russian-Israeli Mafia is doing a lot of what both the CIA and the Mob used to do -- drugs, assorted rackets, money-laundering. I think there was a crucial transition in the late 70s/early 80's when the Israeli spooks and the CIA/Enterprise types were involved together in Latin American drugs-and-arms running, but after Iran-Contra came to its inglorious end, the US people got out of the business while the Israeli end got privatized.

Another is that money-laundering is no longer dependent on having a single major bank, like BCCI or Nugan Hand. Instead, there are all these little island nations, like the Caymans -- or not-quite nations, like Jersey and the Isle of Man -- or non-islands like Liechtenstein -- that have realized money-laundering is a far better way of supplementing the treasury than selling postage stamps to 12-year-olds.

A third is that the GOP seems to have inherited certain pieces, partly by way of all the eager young New Rightists of the 80's who were involved in the Iran-Contra front groups and have since soldiered on as GOP operatives. People like Roger Stone, who links Watergate, the 2000 recount, and Indian casinos.

It still doesn't quite add up, though, because there is no obvious global power center, and yet the black economy grows larger and larger. Last I looked, both drugs and arms were bigger than the planet's #3 money-maker, which is oil, and gambling and other vices made a substantial contribution as well. That's an awful lot of money, and even if much of it goes to the local suppliers and dealers, there's still got to be enough skim to buy a lot of small nations outright and significantly influence the policies of larger ones.

But who's buying what -- and why? The networks of the current black economy have been a-building since the 1930's -- but who controls the networks? Does anyone? Or is it just a kind of water main that's there to be tapped by anyone who's savvy enough to know where the levers are and ruthless enough to use them?

This is what drives me nuts. Watergate taught us to follow the money -- but these days, the money just seems to run in circles, enriching a lot of crooks along the way but not obviously landing anywhere.

There are too damn many mysteries out there -- not least being the spinelessness of the Democrats in Congress -- and a lot of them might be answered if certain people were being bought. But by whom, and to what ends remains as murky as ever.

I also read Havana Nocturne recently and was particularly struck by this statement:

These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion.

Gaming and leisure were only part of the equation. The idea formulated by Luciano, Lansky, and others was for Havana to serve as the front for a far more ambitious agenda: the creation of a criminal state whose gross national product, union pension funds, public utilities, banks, and other financial institutions would become the means to launch further criminal enterprises around the globe. The Havana Mob could then bury the profits from these criminal operations underneath the patina of a 'legitimate' government in Cuba and no one would be able to touch them.

That got me checking my files for related materials -- and one of the more interesting items I found was this piece from 2006 on Indian casinos:

http://www.alternet.org/story/30612

When sleaze meets sleaze, magic happens. One glance across a crowded room, and they instantly recognize kinship. But when supersleaze teams up with supersleaze, a fusion-like chain reaction flashes to life, consuming everything in range. And that's what happened when Jack Abramoff met Indian gambling. . . .

This is how Indian gaming began. After being chased out of Las Vegas and New Jersey by state and federal heat, the mob discovered Indian reservations. It was like a gift from the Mob Gods. One mobster testifying before Congress was asked how the mob viewed Indian reservations. He replied, "As our new Cuba."

That's because Indian reservations are sovereign nations within a sovereign nation. The mob could set up casinos, pay off tribal leaders and skim casino proceeds with impunity. If the FBI showed up, they had tribal security usher them out the gate, because they had no jurisdiction on reservation property. . . .

Indian gaming proponents are quick to counter, "That was then; things have changed." They've changed all right; they got smart. The likes of one-time Republican National Committee chairman Frank Farenkopf, and later, GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, stepped in. While Democrats saw Indian gaming as supporting another downtrodden minority, something "we have to put up with because of how we screwed the American Indians in the past," the GOP saw it another way. The GOP saw Indian gaming the same way the mob saw it: as a cash cow.

It sometimes seems as though everywhere I look for Jack Abramoff, I find traces of Lansky. It was Lansky who first set the Seminoles in Florida up in the bingo business, even before the casino boom got underway. And, as Daniel Hopsicker discovered, Abramoff's mob-connected associate in SunCruz, Adam Kidan, had previously worked in a casino on St. Maarten's for a one-time minor Lansky associate, Rosario Spadaro. (Spadaro was the former partner of Eduardo Cellini, whose more prominent brother, Dino Cellini, had run the Riviera Casino and Tropicana Club in Cuba and was later connected with Operation Mongoose.)

(There are even rumors that Lansky got the Israeli Mafia going when he was hiding out there from the feds in 1970-72, but I'm not sure the LaRouchies didn't make those up. They like to start Lansky rumors because he fits into their conspiracy theories -- though they do have to strain a bit to tie him to the British royal family.)

Lansky was also a money-laundering genius. Starting when Al Capone was sent away for tax evasion in 1931, he began looking for ways the Mob could conceal its profits, and when Switzerland invented confidential bank accounts in 1934, Lansky was one of the first to recognize their advantages.

It's starting to seem as though the CIA had two primary sources for its later money-laundering expertise. One of them was this skinny Jewish kid from the Lower East Side -- who first formed an alliance with the OSS during World War II to uncover Nazi sabotage on the docks -- and the other was Allen Dulles, who had spent the 30's plying essentially the same trade on behalf of Nazi industrialists. There's probably a moral there somewhere, if I could only figure out what it was.

About a century back, there was a major dust-up between the mechanists and the vitalists, with the mechanists coming out on top.

The vitalists believed there was some sort of vital principle informing life, guiding both the growth of the individual and the further evolution of the species, acting as both the motivating force and the source of order.

The mechanists thought the universe was nothing but atoms randomly bumping together, and explained the existence of life with a lot of hand-waving and metaphors about monkeys on typewriters producing the works of Shakespeare.

The mechanists never did come up with a proper explanation of how order could grow out of disorder through random permutations -- or how doing significant damage to existing, well-functioning genes could lead to individuals of superior fitness. But at the time that didn't really matter. The real argument was between the those who claimed that science could explain everything and those who insisted science must break down at a certain point and fail to explain life, or consciousness, or whatever other sticking-point seemed handy.

The mechanists decisively won that argument back about 85-90 years ago -- because the 20th century was determined to throw its lot in with science, and the mechanistic view of evolution seemed to be the purest and most scientific available. But it was also narrow, limited, and dehumanizing -- which is why the creationists and IDers are still around. Mechanistic evolution just left too much out of the equation to provide a satisfactory explanation of the abundance and potential of life.

Much of the new evolutionary thought today harks back to the vitalistic ideas that got tossed in the dustbin during the 1920's. Form, for example. In everyday experience, you know that if you're going to cook, say, an apple pie, you'll do best if you have both an idea of what an apple pie should look like and taste like and also a set of detailed step-by-step instructions. However, mechanistic evolution insists that the instructions are all that's needed -- and if they're perfectly written and perfectly adhered to, the result will be an acceptable apple pie. But that sort of perfection doesn't exist anywhere in real life. It's not the way cooking works -- and it's unlikely to be the way evolution works, either.

The problem, of course, is that at this point we have a fairly good idea of how DNA might encode the instruction set for making certain proteins in a certain sequence until you get a certain result. We're a lot less certain of how form could be encoded. But that just means science still has a lot to learn -- it doesn't mean that science itself is inadequate, that "God" is necessary to monitor the kitchen, or that evolutionary theory is a racket.

Another issue is that Darwin's survival of the fittest has been interpreted too narrowly. It has been taken to mean that the survival of the individual always takes precedence over that of the community or the ecosystem. It has also been taken to mean that individuals strive to stay exactly as they are and have offspring that are just like them, instead of incorporating any impulse to improve and evolve. And because of that mechanistic image of living things as the biological equivalent of atoms blindly bumping together, anything that benefits the larger community or leads to further evolution has had to be considered an accidental by-product of fundamentally selfish behavior. Even human beings have to be interpreted as blind to the consequences of their own actions, or the mechanistic model won't work.

In addition to the harm it does to our scientific understanding of evolution, this narrow, individual-centered concept has also served as the justification for free-market economics. The assumption has been that individual selfishness is the only "natural" behavior -- that we resist it at our peril -- but that larger social and evolutionary benefits will inevitably arise as natural by-products of selfishness.

That's an assumption which is clearly false and which we very much need to get away from. Luckily, as with form, it turns out that there's nothing "unscientific" about assuming that these larger values can be hard-wired into us. Quite simply, over millions of years, those organizations which optimize their environment are more likely to survive than those which degrade it, and those which readily evolve to meet new challenges are more likely to survive than those who do not. We don't yet know all the mechanisms -- some of it may involve certain genes operating differently under conditions of stress -- but we can be confident they exist.

In recent years, the creationists have been quick to pounce on any sign of weakness or self-doubt in evolutionary theory as proof that the whole thing is about to crumble -- and evolutionists have tended to dig in their heels and hold onto the old mechanistic formulations in self-defense. But that's been changing around the edges, and hopefully this conference means it's starting to change more publicly.

We desperately need a *real* theory of evolution -- one that would unify our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe and give us a sense of direction in our undertakings. Religion no longer does that the way it did once upon a time. Progressivism originally grew out of the 19th century idea of social progress, but since that collapsed under the weight of mid-20th century disillusionment, liberals haven't had a solid justification for their policies.

Merely insuring a decent quality of life and opportunity for everyone is not enough. We need to be about something larger -- and that has to be grounded in a sense that we and our society are capable of genuine evolution. For that reason, if no other, evolutionary theory desperately needs to get its act together.

I don't shop much, mainly because I don't have the money, but I've had to make a few major purchases lately for my house -- like upgrading the storm doors to keep the heat in next winter -- and I was surprised at how really *good* it made me feel.

In thinking about that, it struck me that there's a basic hunter-gatherer imperative involved here. If you're a hunter-gatherer, you go out in the morning and you bring back *stuff* -- roots, seeds, turtles, baby kangaroos, whatever. You hunt or you gather and then you come home to show off your prizes.

Holding a job doesn't really satisfy that urge to bring stuff back. You're earning a paycheck so you can put food on your family, but you have nothing tangible to show for it. It's not until you go out and spend that paycheck in exchange for *stuff* that you can see the tangible fruits of your labors.

Only now something dangerous has happened -- because earning and spending have been separated from one another. What is a single set of daily routines for the hunter-gatherer has become dissociated for us. That leaves us open to be manipulated, because we have certain emotional needs that earning alone doesn't satisfy. It also makes us vulnerable to spending more than we earn -- both because credit lets us do that and also because spending is just so much more *fun* than earning.

I don't see any easy answer to this. It's the way modern life works. It allows us to have a far wider ranger of options than if we were limited to what we could personally hunt for or gather, and we're not going back to the old ways. But if we can at least become aware of what we're experiencing, we may be less subject to manipulation -- and we might also be able to come up with less risky ways of satisfying those ancient emotional needs.

In the late 60's, I only knew one person who would admit to being a hippie. The writers and artists and underground publishers who were doing real creative work never called themselves hippies. "Hippie" in those days meant something more like "flower child" -- it was the teenage runaways and other drifters and wannabees who used the term. And those people did burn out, or moved on to the next hot fad, or went back to the suburbs and the rewards of materialism.

The inward turning that happened around 1968-70 also made sense at at the time. If you're trying to fight the system, and you find that the protest movement you're part of is just as hierarchic and patriarchal and violent as the system you're fighting -- well that's something you've got to stop and think about for a while.

The point where I really see things as having gone wrong is when Reagan was elected. Until that happened, I was convinced the 80's would be the time when the people who'd had a decade to work things out would come back and be more creative and productive than ever.

But instead, history played a nasty joke on us, and it turned out to be the anti-hippies who dominated the 80's -- the uptight New Rightists, who'd even kicked the libertarians out of their movement for liking drugs and sex too much, and their younger siblings in the College Republicans, like Karl Rove and Charlie Black.

While we'd spent the 70's out in the woods thinking about things, they'd spent the decade being lavishly funded by people like Scaife and Coors and setting up a network of think-tanks and foundations and taking over the public discourse.

Did we make a mistake in ceding the battlefield to them? If we'd gotten more political in the 70's instead of less and started fighting back, would it have made a difference? Or would we have been outclassed, over-spent, and demonized in the eyes of the Nixonian Silent Majority no matter what we did?

In the long run, though, we may not have been wrong. The Republican Party is imploding on its own greed and corruption, the New Right is out of ideas and baffled by the challenges of the 21st century, and the pendulum is swinging back.

But the real judge will be history. If the solutions we need turn out to come from the people who have spent the last 35 years thinking about the environment, a sustainable economy, and a more humane world order, then the time and effort won't have been misplaced. The veterans of the 60's will belatedly be recognized as honored pioneers, and the history books will explain (as they always do) why it was all inevitable.

On the other hand, if this last 35 years turns out to be a lost generation, with nothing to leave to posterity, then history will note the 60's as one of the great missed opportunities and wonder how so many bright and talented people could have been so wrong.

No doubt, we'll know within the next 5 or 10 years how it will be seen.

At least in theory, I'll take a self-organizing system over centralized planning any day. Excessive faith in centralized planning led to the downfall of communism and the discrediting of socialism, and in this Internet-driven era of distributed networks we're not going to retrace that path.

That said, however, freedom from central planning is very different from the kind of "freedom" that the Gingrich's of this world seem intent on -- freedom from every kind of regulation, from labor standards and minimum wages, from environmental accountability, from any kind of redistribution to keep the rich from eternally getting richer and the poor poorer.

I think the central arguments of the next couple of decades are not going to be for or against free markets but about what kind of free markets we want. In some areas, you are going to see even the left argue for more freedom -- for example, when it comes to intellectual property -- and in other areas for more regulation.

Among other things, government action to break up monopolies -- or the control of, say, the broadcast media by a small number of closely aligned companies -- needs to be recognized as promoting the free market, although right-wing free market ideologues seem to have somehow convinced themselves that even the most bloated of monopolies ought to be sacrosanct.

The public/private issue is also going to be crucial. My own sense of things is that free markets work best for innovative, entrepreneurial, highly diverse and competitive situations -- while strict governmental control may be essential for the necessities of life, especially those which are scarce or lean towards natural monopolies.

Reaganism somehow managed to take over the heart of the national discourse in the 80's, while the left wasn't looking -- most likely because of its lingering fixation on the solutions of the early 20th century. If we are going to avoid a shock doctrine dystopia, we have to recapture that discourse -- and that means not rejecting free markets, but possessing them and humanizing them and making them our own.

Markets are just people, after all -- people interacting peer-to-peer with other people. That's a hell of a lot more human than corporations, which are soulless monsters that eat people for lunch. And that difference is where we need to focus our attention as the US economy totters on the edge of the abyss.

I woke up this morning thinking about how the right undermined Jimmy Carter and sabotaged Bill Clinton. There will be no honeymoon for Obama either -- no easy hundred days during which he gets a chance to introduce his team and implement his starting agenda. He's going to have to hit the ground running -- and so will we. We're going to have to have his back but also keep his feet to the fire, to make sure the solutions he offers are genuinely progressive ones.

What this means in practical terms is controlling the discourse. As long as the media controls what gets through -- and as long as the "non-partisan" experts invited to explain everything are actually right-wing hacks -- we don't have a chance. So we need to start thinking right now about how to handle that next January.

One thing that will obviously help is if Obama is swept into office on a wave of public approval and interest so intense that the networks have every incentive to run his speeches and press conferences live in prime time. But even if that happens, we'd need to keep up the pressure to make sure they keep doing it -- or if they don't, we'd need to push them hard to change. (My recollection is that Clinton got much less live coverage than Bush has, and that this made a significant difference in the apparent failures that led up to the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994.)

A second thing we'll need to do is to stay on our toes as far as the pundits and "experts" are concerned -- to be aware of what false messages are being presented and by whom and to get the word around to both the blogosphere and our allies in the media and cut them off at the root. The right has enjoyed an echo chamber where something like, say, the War on Christmas (to take a fairly trivial example) can start with a couple of exaggerated or even manufactured incidents, flow through Drudge to Fox News, and wind up as conventional wisdom before we know what's happening. That has to end.

But perhaps the most important thing is that we'll need to have our own experts and talking points to counter the right. It's well-known that the Democrats have tended to put their money into political campaigns while the Republicans were building up an infrastructure of think-tanks, policy institutes, and astroturf front groups, all of them prepared to offer an easily-digested opinion on any topic of the day. That's one of the things that has given them such an advantage in the perception wars.

We're not prepared to create an equivalent network -- we don't have either the time to do it or the friendly billionaires to fund it. But over the last few years, we've build up an impressive list of people and groups on the left with the knowledge and credentials to make our case in public. Whether it's to support an Obama administration initiative, to push for a more progressive approach over a more centrist one, or to suggest bold new solutions for the intractable problems of the environment, the economy, and the global community, those people will now have to be on the front lines. And the rest of us will have to do our part to make sure they get the visibility and positive feedback they need.

We know how to do all those things -- we've done them here at DU many times. But we've never done them in a focused, coordinated, rigorous way, because we've mainly been playing damage control against the horrors of the Bush administration. During an Obama administration, the function of communities like DU will clearly have to change, and I am suggesting that one of the things we can do is provide a conscious movement to control the larger public discourse, using all the tools we've developed over the last seven years.