Think of this as Volume 15, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Economic changes come before political ones. Leaders follow. The people lead.
This has always been the American political pattern. Since the founding of the Republic. Really, before. The Constitution itself was required by a debt crisis that threatened to destroy the states one by one. Some structure acceptable to all was required.
That's Europe's present predicament. There is an assumption here that Europeans would rather fracture than unite. But they have been down that road too many times. They're going to face their crisis.
Our current politics has more in common with our past practice than what is happening anywhere else. Just as in past crises, a falling economic order first captured political power in order to maintain itself. Slavery to oil is not much different in that way than slavery to cotton.
Just as in past crises, the political order enforced by the fading economic order collapsed. Just as in 1893, when the Wall Street order of unregulated monopoly caused a panic, and bankers resolved to restore order so that mass manufacturing could begin.
After what was economically obvious became obvious, the people revolted against that old order. The election of 1932 was won long before FDR was nominated. The hunger in millions of bellies would have it no other way.
Finally, the people revolt against crisis leaders they find too weak. They demand truly meaningful political change, which coincidentally will be based on new economic arrangements. Nixon looked politically weak in 1971, which is why he headed down the road toward Watergate, but the people had already made their choice. All that scandal, and its aftermath, did was delay the new order, one based on a union between deflationary technology on the one hand and inflating oil on the other.
That's why Jimmy Carter seems like a man out of time to many people, still. He was. He was, on the one hand, of the past, the FDR-era past. He was, on the other hand, of the future. Our future. And there was no way to square that circle.
Just as the right was rising, somewhat hidden from view, in the early 1970s, so is the left rising now. The President's poll numbers, all his political troubles, are caused by what people see as his failure to lead them in the direction they wish to go.
The political winds, in other words, are blowing from the left, not the right. No one in Washington knows this. They are so used to it blowing the other way that they can't imagine things changing that fundamentally. Yet they are always changing.
Why expect a left-wing revolt?
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Median incomes are falling. The political and economic assumptions of the right have failed.
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Oil prices keep rising. What was formerly seen in GDP numbers is now seen on the stock market. People can see the link between oil prices and growth, even if Wall Street can't. That link must be broken.
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Oilagarchs are becoming demagogues. There is a huge disconnect right now between Wall Street and Main Street. The two must be reconciled, to Main Street's benefit, for progress to continue.
The watchword for our political time is unity. The idea is we're all in this together, we rise or we fall together. One nation, one people. As opposed to the divisions that plague us, and have plagued the world for too long.
We have heard echoes of this theme in the President's rhetoric. We have failed to see it in his actions. This is what makes the present Jobs Bill so important. Not for its economic value, but for its political value. It's the frame on which a realignment is slowly being built.
Its relative modesty is the very reason for this. Increasing numbers of wealthy people – Warren Buffett, Jeff Immelt, Bill Gates – are starting to recognize that when the rich get richer while everyone else grows poorer that the market declines in value. It's a bugger-thy-neighbor system that can only lead to autocracy, and an unholy destruction of all we believe in, as Americans.
The country is usually divided 50-50. When a President's poll numbers in a divided country start slipping, it's not usually because a realignment is taking place for the other side. Not when the economic way forward, from that side, leads backward. It's because the rising tide is disappointed, it's because we want more, we know where to go but we want the President to lead us there.
A campaign based on energizing an existing majority is the easiest one to win. There are two ways it can go. With a weak leader, as in 1988, you can win a narrow majority. With a strong leader, as in 1984, you win big. This President has a fairly united party behind him, a wind blowing toward unity, and a program that moves us forward.
What masks the obvious is that the new economic order hasn't taken hold. This was true 40 years ago – technology was not yet the market it would become. It was true 110 years ago – the country was not yet a single unified market. But we were already seeing progress toward energy independence , and only those who only see the past, not the future, are blind to it.
The era we're entering is based on harvesting the energy abundance that is all around us. Civilization, true civilization, is only now rising from the ashes. We are only now coming out of the caves, onto the farm of the world. Our children will be its first generation.
There is no energy shortage. The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock. Creating the devices and infrastructure to harvest this abundance is the greatest economic opportunity in your lifetime. That process is only now beginning, just as the silicon revolution was only beginning in 1971.
We can easily double the production of solar power every year, from now until the foreseeable future. We can easily increase the volume of wind power we produce, the amount of tidal energy we harvest. We can use biomass with increasing efficiency. We have barely begun to tap the energy of the Earth. We need devices and infrastructure to make this happen, not fuel.
What happens when these sources, together, exceed the growth in a year's demand for energy? Only then is the corner turned.
But I can see it from here.
Once we turn that corner, our present oversupply of labor will become a groaning labor shortage. That shortage will demand that the masses now crowding around our borders be put to work, to profitable work, and as the abundance is increasingly harvested to increasingly mental and easy work.
There is a golden age coming. All our leaders need to do is call us to it, all of us, because we're all needed in the peaceful works of harvesting the abundance.
This President is certainly adequate to that challenge. So are we all.
