Grassroots Solutions in an Age of Centralization

William Schambra in a presentation to Chicago Grantmakers for Effective Organizations July 1, 2008, suggests that strategic philanthropy working from a grand theory of social change, will almost always founder. There are simply too many variables, and they all interact. History shows that central planning, whether by government or foundations will fail.

What foundations can do, I would suggest, is to be serious, quiet, attentive students of their surroundings, watching carefully for opportunities to enhance slightly the trends that they applaud, and diminish slightly the trends that they deplore.

...This approach – watching for opportunities to make small differences – applies not just at the grand policy level, but at the grassroots level as well. Here, I heartily recommend a new book entitled Grassroots Philanthropy, written by Bill Somerville, founder of Philanthropic Venture Initiatives in San Francisco.

Rather than having the experts at foundation headquarters draw up a grand strategy for transforming a neighborhood, he suggests, it would be far wiser for the philanthropist to get out of that comfortable chair in the foundation office and spend most of her time quietly and discretely poking around the neighborhood.

The point is to find the unsung community leaders who have particular, concrete ideas about how the neighborhood can be improved, and who can do a great deal with a small grant at a particularly critical place and time.

These small, quiet interventions certainly don't add up to a coherent, unified strategy. But they do modestly enhance favorable trends and diminish unfavorable trends in the manner appropriate to the status of foundations as relatively minor players among other, more important players.

The additional virtue of this approach is that it opens itself to the civic engagement of citizens who have otherwise often been marginalized by the larger social policy actors, and thus helps meet the pressing national need for democratic renewal.

"Sweetness and light" was a Roman conceit: The diligent bees go from flower to flower. They create honey (sweetness) and wax (light from beeswax candles). I am not a grant maker, but in sales promotion, the proven best practice is not for the Home Office to tell those in the Field what will work and make them do it; that almost always fails. Rather we who would promote sales circulate among the best advisors to find out what is working for them. Then we share what works, and draw attention and support to those who are most successful. The spread of ideas and best practices is lateral, and in all directions, merely supported from "above." I would think the same would go for encouraging social change.

I have noticed that conservative thinkers tend to say that progressives are in favor of scientific management, large governmental programs, theory-driven grants, and top down, technocratic solutions imposed upon ordinary people. I can see why conservatives would say that, thinking of the New Deal, central planning in socialist countries, strategic big foundation philanthropy, and the aftermath of the civil rights era, when populist gains were translated into laws and into Great Society social programs.  But you could make a similar charge against Fortune 100 companies, with their hierarchical command and control org charts, their interwoven mesh of media, advertising, intellectual property restrictions, privatization of public goods, lobbying, legislation, court-packing, and revolving doors, all leading to more wealth and power in fewer hands. We have seen a considerable centralization, verging on monopolization, of power into fewer hands on Wall Street and inside the Beltway, under both parties. Globalization is producing an elite, a Superclass as David Rothkopf calls them, that is worse than Federal, it is countryless, and nomadic, and beyond the reach of voters, and often beyond the reach of any nation's laws.   

I truly wonder if we could make common cause, all of us, who believe that solutions for us, in this country, start on main street, in community with others, who work out the solutions among ourselves, rather that coming to us from, say, Home Office,  Davos, or DC? Or, from Ford Foundation for that matter? If we agreed on the decentralization of wealth and power, on the rule of law, including international law, and on a level playing field, would libertarians, main street conservatives, Lou Dobb's populists, small business owners, internet utopians, and (at least some) progressives make common cause? And if so, who would the "other" be? Presumably, the bi-partisan, global, forces of centralization, now in the ascendant?

How to promote such grassroots bi-partisan alliances? Well, encourage small gains, when we find them, I guess. 

Comments

[Jay Taber]

I have witnessed respectful philanthropy succeed. I have also seen dominant philanthropy fail.

My philanthropic advisor friend once told Wilderness Society that small grants to freelance researchers would pay off in the Wise Use wars. One $1,000 grant she helped facilitate toppled Wise Use political operatives in fourteen counties.

Likewise, centrally planned grants to public interest advocates statewide to the tune of twenty grand each accomplished almost nothing, while my unfunded friends worked wonders with a few hundred dollars from garage sales and a well-researched grassroots strategy.

[phil]

Exactly. Good examples. Finding and funding those who are determined to do what they can with or without funding seems an excellent strategy. I truly wish that more progressive funders operated this way. Maybe they do, and I just don't know about it.

[Jay Taber]

Yes, the problem as you have observed previously, is that such noble heroics are not sustainable. Nor are they able to perpetuate the continuity of knowledge and skills learned. As a starting point, funders could find the "determined" as you call them, find out what they need, and host a gathering of them to create a synergy lacking due to isolation. Effective partnerships would likely follow.

[Phil]

You and are talking in the huge cone of silence, as you may have noticed. We are talking in public about what is best not discussed at all. Philanthropy is happy talk about making the world a better place. You are talking about the corruption that taints public life in all kinds of unseemly ways. Wouldn't it be better to pass over that ugly stuff in silence and get back to making the world better?

[Jay Taber]

I figure our odds of getting one million-dollar fairy godmother are better than getting a million one-dollar donors.

[Phil]

Thank you for what you do. I wish there were more assistance I could give in locating funders.

[tom]

solutions for us, in this country, start on main street,

Given the advanced awareness of this blog with regard to society as spectacle, the name as brand, how do we discover a "main street" that is not already preoccupied?

[JJ Commoner]

Oniko Mehrabi runs Main Street Fashion in Pineville, Oregon ?

All is lost .. the furriners have even taken over small business on Main Street. Screw the grassroots solutions, lock yer doors.

[tom]

JJ - thanks for alerting to the potential for the jingoistic shanghaiing of the sense of my comment, heh. Given the repression of any open contestation of top-down, managing, scripting, commercializing, branding agencies that pre-overdetermine our efforts to occupy a neutral space of discourse (imagine Joe Lieberman as God), perhaps it's no surprise that USians turn upon the Mehrabis with a species of exasperated helpless vehemence -- as if they -- rather than the forces under examination in this blog -- caused the disabling of voice and of openness itself.

[Phil]

Tom, I take your point about Main Street itself being a cliche, and how the real Main Streets are changing. In real life I work in a firm whose clientele is 80% business owners on Main Street in towns and cities all over the country. These are family owned firms like lumberyards, plumbing firms, franchises, car dealerships. What we are noticing is that more and more often these firms are being displaced by or sold out to national outfits with money from Wall Street. "Rollups." Currently, according to a talk I recently attended by two attornies who work in this market 62% of GNP is still from family owned firms. That is "Main Street," but it is changing to be more centralized. Think of how local banks sell out to bigger banks, and how local hardware stores go under, replaced by the big box retailers. That is not so good for democracy. When you work with small business people you notice that they may be "conservative" socially and fiscally, but they are as independent and cussed as are writers, or activists. They don't work for anyone else and they don't take orders from anyone else. That is a good thing for us a country. One of the chief damages of Wealth Bondage is how it socializes us into a hiearchy as employees in such a way that we learn "which way is up." We become meeker and more obedient, the whole system is designed to produce that result: "Kiss up and kick down." JJ can speak to that, I am sure. The science of creating malleable employees is quite advanced, even more advanced than is marketing, advertising and propaganda, which which consumers and the electorate are molded.

As for the furriners, the truth is that they are a big part of Main Street, and good for them. Motels, dry cleaning, liquor stores, lots of businesses. In fact, if you get deep into it you will discover that low end motels are often owned by Asian-Indian families who form their own mutual credit associations to keep from borrowing from banks, and they employ each other and each other's children. And, believe me, they can get very very wealthy in the process. All that is healthy. The depressing part is the pressure small businesses are under to compete with firms which have access to lower cost of capital from Wall Street (accessing foreign capital markets as well as domestic).

From C.A. Fitts I have learned that the most important political contrast is not left and right, or even up and down, or red and blue, but centralizing versus decentralizing. That rings true to me. Decentralizing wealth means decentralizing power. I am all for it, and am quite happy to find myself in the company of hard headed small business owners, along with the Dumpster Dwelling, equally independent free range intellectuals and activists.

We (the left and right branches of the decentralizing movement) may react against one another on cultural grounds, but our self interest is often aligned across these divides. A commitment to democracy or civil society or rule of law, and Constitutional guarantees, all unite us, we the little people living our ordinary lives in a world where power has gone elsewhere. The other side might be DC, Wall Street, Davos, the national and global forces that centralize power in a few thousand pair of hands. Sadly, you get to vote between two candidates run by the centralizing powers.

[phil]

I would love to hear Schambra address "Centralizing" versus "Decentralizing" forces at play in "Philanthropy and Civil Society." If he looks at the Hudson Board he will see the forces of centralization well represented. How, then, can one promote decentralization, except by straining at the limits of the leash, or by co-opting Toqueville style civil society for purposes congenial to, say, the Kravis family, or Richard Perle, or until recently Lord Conrad Black of Cross Harbour, now in jail? Families with dynastic wealth and the world powers represented at Davos seem to presage a world in which democracy is little more than parade down Main Street on the fourth of July.

[JJ Commoner]

but centralizing versus decentralizing. That rings true to me. Decentralizing wealth means decentralizing power.

Bingo !

.. and yes to this

As for the furriners, the truth is that they are a big part of Main Street, and good for them. Motels, dry cleaning, liquor stores, lots of businesses. In fact, if you get deep into it you will discover that low end motels are often owned by Asian-Indian families who form their own mutual credit associations to keep from borrowing from banks, and they employ each other and each other's children. And, believe me, they can get very very wealthy in the process. All that is healthy.

.. quite advanced as a process up here in the Great White North, and for the better of our society in my opinion. It has been interesting to watch over the past decade-plus, as the children of the furriners occupy more than their fair share of the top spots in the law, medicine and business schools.

But back to the key issue .. yes, the process of centralization and standardization is an important anti-democratic force, and one that is actively encouraged by the governance of the day, and not for the betterment of our respective societies.

[Phil]

"Test every student every year," to make sure they are obedient, dutiful, and well drilled. No time for critical thinking. The higher ups will grade us. Those who do as told will rise.

[tom]

The more I absorb what seem to be the classicistic resonances of the Shambratic mode, the more vomitous the symptoms.

Why should change, commitment, vision, be reduced to

small, quiet interventions
small, quiet interventions
small, quiet interventions
small, quiet interventions
small, quiet interventions
small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions small, quiet interventions

furk him and the furking small quiet intervention he rode in on.

[O Lucky Man]

"62% of GNP is still from family owned firms"

Does life make sense?

Would most of these folks answer immediately, "Yes"?

Would their employees, also - or be more likely to than those employed outside this "main street"?

What's your sense?

[O Lucky Man]

Does Mr. Shamrock wake with a big smile, a big stretch, and a big "Yes!"

God Bless!

[JJ Commoner]

Further to tom's intervention about interventions, is WB's Deputy Editor Schambra's valet ?

[Phil]

Yes, life makes sense when you get news from Fox, and values from the pulpit, and your community includes Rotary. The silent majority. My point, though, is that this constituency has been strongly conservative and republican. It is a constituency that Bill Schambra can embrace. But there is now great tension economically between Main Street and Wall Street. As their is great tacit tension between the Machiavilli, Strauss, Perle, and Jesus H. Christ. I am happy to be "embedded" with Main Street conservatives. I don't see how Bill Schambra can serve them and the Hudson Board both, unless by co-opting the Main Street base for the monied wing of the party. On the other hand, I think his intellectual commitments are indeed grassroots.

As for small grants and small aspirations, I actually share that. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is written from amidst South American revolutionary movement, the revolts of the peasants. The key point made is that the peasant cannot be led from above. He or she must be included dialogically in a conversation by which the poor are changed, one person at a time.

If we see radical change from the grassroots up, it will be from small pieces loosely joined. Giving circles, blogger circles, Solari circles, reading clubs, all the Toqueville stuff that Bill Schambra and also Bill Somerville, along with C.A. Fitts, and Tracy Gary support each in his or her own way. Bill S., I think, is doing the field a big service in being as open as he is to ideas from all comers. We all gotta serve somebody, but we can work at the limits of our respective leashes.

[tom]

Phil, to be clear, the small pieces part of the matter of radical change is not what's galling the kibe; it's the inferred presumption that we will not only, in a sort of toppish-down way, dictate that "radical" change shall be accomplished through "slight enhancements" but also that it shall do so to the soft, decorous tune he pipes - the mellow muzak of EZ listening, so that the great man in his country house, sitting nobly behind his Stately Frontispice Of Poor is not disturbed, put out, or even mildly distracted by the sound of transformation on main street. Can the Sham leave no part of this to anyone other than his own style polizei?

[Phil]

Still, what if Bill were to give more and more attention to figures from his own conservative constituency who feel betrayed by the neocon, Wall Street, Davos crowd? I had dinner a couple of days ago with a guy who writes about gold. A former trader. Very conservative business outlook. Always had voted republican. He said he was voting for Obama because he sees that the markets he follows are rigged. He has testified before congress. He talks with sovereign wealth funds. He has conferred with Bush's people and had faxes back and forth with Bush's office, but no satisfaction. There are smart conservative entrepreneurs who see that they are being played for Fools by their peers in higher places and they are pissed. Of the radicalized people I know, these are the most potent forces for change. They are tough minded, know how to get things done, have access to money, and understand what they are up against. They know that the Oligarchs fight dirty. They may accept Bill's premise that change happens from the bottom up and that we encourage the good at the margins, but they won't be satisfied unless we get transparency, balanced budgets, and the rule of law, and accurate government accounting, along with our rights and freedoms back. They don't talk about philanthropy so much, but they do have networks, readers, conferences and they are pissed. Getting progressives to work with these people is impossible right now, for the most part. Too many cultural differences, but I work at it. I see Bill Schambra as a potential bridge, or convener of such discussions.

Tom, maybe what I am trying to suggest is that there is the role and the person in the role. Bill's role is what you describe, that is how he makes his living, and he must be comfortable with most of it, but he himself is maybe not reducible to that role. At least he has gone out of his way to engage with marginal figures like me and Albert or Sean at Tactical Philanthropy.

More and more as we approach really hard t times, I am looking for people who can move things in a good direction even a little, or provide visibility for our lucubrations, whether they are "of our camp" or not. On the great ash heap, I don't want to be fighting old battles about conservative versus progressive. How about rights, rule of law, food, water, gasoline, and survival?

[tom]

Hard times are often when people make the wrong moves out of impatience, desperation, fear. Your cool-headed pragmatism will only be more valuable as things race to the pit.

One caveat could be that someone like your gold trader is upset mostly about the economy and about the particular scam that got him. Would he be so stirred were it only happening to other people and their money? Hard to tell where concern ends for one's own arse and begins for the commonweal. Once his issue is resolved, what then?

Egad, Phil, you're out there trying to make connections, pirouette across chasms. Not easy in the best of times. I need not remind you of the tyrannies of style. Have at it, godspeed.

[phil]

Thanks, Tom. Here is the were the logic gap opens up in the grassroots conservative conversations I have been involved in. What they deplore is the break down of certain public goods like rights, transparency of markets, government accounting, the currency. They fear markets are rigged and see how a small group at the top work invisibly and sometimes illegally among themselves and with governments, with secret government enforcers, and perhaps with criminal elements such as drug lords and the financial firms that are their laundromat, to get things done to the detriment of their competitors, who play by the old rules, or are not insiders. So, what is the private solution to these public ills? Where can they buy a solution or provide one with a company? The only real solutions are political at the level of constitutions, and laws opening government up to public accountability, and these foundational changes must start with grassroots pressure since the politicians of both parties are presiding over the looting of America, as they have over the looting of other countries in the inexorable march of Freedom a la the Chicago school, as understood by Pinochet. The only counter-measures to our increasingly oligarchic system then are grassroots and probably cut across current party lines. They see that but don't really know any better than we do how to make it happen. Plus they detest progressives for the political correctness and the bullshit idealism that has no courage to really change or question much of anything.

My suggestion at a practical level is for these people to do their personal planning with an eye to investing where they can in creating grassroots change. They are doing that, actually. Solari circles, gold conferences, newsletters, radio talk shows, slow food, local food, ethanol production. I am personally pleased because these are the kind of people who are good company under great pressure, and intimidation. They remain what I thought Americans were, too tough to have their liberties taken away by anyone. The progressives will simply retreat into consciousness circles. They will change the world without risk by channelling cosmic energies, and trading hugs, and
"body work." I prefer the toughness of the entrepreneurs who start with zip, makes tens of millions, lose it, and start over with a newsletter or whatever. Those people know how to move forward under pressure.

Would Schambra be pleased? I wonder. His vision of a peaceful 1950s American Hometown is idyllic, but would he embrace what it will take to preserve or restore it?

[roybelmont]

My idyllic vision is unboundaried unpopulated unpolluted unknown country viewed from a high mountain pass by a small tribe of the fit competent and self-sufficiently tested, back when things were just barely post-glacial. The early Holocene's my heart's Main Street. Before the pigs took over the human race.
Now those simple dreams seem unattainable - so then what?
The dead bigot Jesse Helms is currently being celebrated for his uncompromising attitude, or his attitude of refusal to compromise. A racist pig honored for his stubbornness. Jesse Helms had a big house on Main Street back in 1950's America, which he maintained right up until he croaked.
Replica architecture offers the cash-ready the colorless semblance of small-town life, because the illusion's all they're capable of delivering.
Read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Read it twice.
Some child will go on living. Some children. That becomes the only realizable furthering path. This way is done.
How far we take it before we drop, and how much we give them to go on with, may be the only accurate measure of our probity.

[JJ Commoner]

One caveat could be that someone like your gold trader is upset mostly about the economy and about the particular scam that got him. Would he be so stirred were it only happening to other people and their money? Hard to tell where concern ends for one's own arse and begins for the commonweal. Once his issue is resolved, what then?

I'd spell that caveat with a capital "C". I suspect that very few people remember, if that's the right word, what commonweal actually means, looks like, feels like any more. The corruption has been around for a long time, in my opinion .. it's just that it is now becoming more extreme, to the extent that it's even being noticed in the US. The New Deal of long ago was actually pretty mild stuff, just enough to keep the liberty ordered.

See roy belmont's eloquent reporting on the celebration on Main Street of Helm's attitude and steely nature.

There are smart conservative entrepreneurs who see that they are being played for Fools by their peers in higher places and they are pissed. Of the radicalized people I know, these are the most potent forces for change. They are tough minded, know how to get things done, have access to money, and understand what they are up against. They know that the Oligarchs fight dirty. They may accept Bill's premise that change happens from the bottom up and that we encourage the good at the margins, but they won't be satisfied unless we get transparency, balanced budgets, and the rule of law, and accurate government accounting, along with our rights and freedoms back.

Phil you do indeed go to significant lengths to bridge significant gaps. I don't trust much on the conservative agenda ... look at where it's taken us to (even acknowledging that reportedly some conservative-minded people don't like what they've seen over the last few years.

Nixon
Ford
Reagan
Reagan
Bush
Clinton
Clinton
Bush
Bush

Conservatives all the way down, almost all of my adult life ... sure, things have gotten materially better for many, thanks to easier and easier credit and an expanded concept of "money", but less freedom, . less rights, more debt, less real character, less acceptance of differing points of view from the PTB, more lying , more apologies, some kind of relatively outrageous transgression or scandal every other week.

Again only an opinion ... beware of steely-minded pragmatism, there is much to be accounted for by tossing aside reflection, dialogue, debate and stumbling together towards "good enough for all". Beware of knowing how to get things done with access to money.

I know I am yelling faintly into a Cat 5 hurricane ...

[Phil]

The culture wars, the civil wars, the religious/secular wars, have divided us reliably into voting blocks that can be swung behind a Bush by his Southern Strategy, or the others you list above. What I am trying to point towards are extinction level issues that bind those of us without lifeboats. That includes our favorite enemies, the ones against whom we define our rectitude.

I was at a progressive gathering last summer at Hollyhock an island near Vancouver. The comments there about my Dallas Cowboys hat led into a conversation much like the one on this thread. So, I basically shut the meeting down by asking for a show of hands, "How many here feel morally superior to working class Southern men?" Many hands went up, though the eyes glared back. I said, "Yes, the civil war, reconstruction, civil rights marches, affirmative action, busing, all prove that. They know you feel superior and they resent it. Can you blame them? You have disrespected and humiliated their culture."

My point was not to defend racism or religious bigotry but to push them on their concept of "diversity." I had opened by exercise by asking, "How many white evangelical christian conservatives are in our circle?" No hands. "So how diverse are we, really?"

I think we have to recognize the differences, hold up our end in conversation with conservatives, but also to recognize that anyone without a lifeboat has something in common with all others who will go down with this ship.

Those with lifeboats are also divided neatly into "conservative" and "progressive" and they stage their rituals to win a voting block. But in reality those with a lifeboat are another class with another destiny. That is the real cleavage in our society. So, I am happy to make common cause with others who are looking for a way to survive on Main Street. And, yes, I know very well what the Main Street looks like in Estell, SC, or Savannah, Ga, or Birmingham, AL, or Tyler, TX, having made sales calls with life insurance agents up and down those streets on high net worth blue collar business owners. Given a choice of going to hell with them or with the Board at Hudson, or the Democratic Leadership Council, I would choose our local rednecks over the Superclass as represented by either party.

JJ, think of Bageant on Deer Hunting with Jesus. When things get tough, the progressive take prozac. The Scotts Irish look for someone on whom to avenge themselves. Usually that is those below them, sadly. I would like to see them look up and see who has really sold them out. C.A. Fitts carries that point.

[JJ Commoner]

Phil, I remember your reporting on the HH trip, I remember various times your stated disdain for (or non-alignment with ?) kumbaya-drinking hairy tree-huggers.

Yes, I understand, been there and gotten the t-shirt ... and agree with much of what you have written.

I have also been in the company of, and at times worked with principled and practical "let's get to it and get 'er done" people whose politics and many ofg their values I did not share so much .. and I respect people with principles and practical drive.

And I understand the issue with the deep cultural issue(s) re: Scots-Irish and christian orientation and the deep animosity felt for (mostly) liberal elitist superiority. Two different worlds indeed .. BUT two different worlds operating in what is supposed to be the shared context of the UNITED S of A.

I don't think I will be able to be as articulate as I want to be on this point, but this is (for me) a place / issue where DEEP and probably only semi-conscious context matters a lot.

And I think the best way I can begin to try to explain myself is by offering you and your readers a couple of links:

The difference between a nation / culture founded on the idea of liberty (bot h ordered and "don't tread on me" and one founded on humanism

1. One New World, Two Big Ideas (read page 2)

2. "In Defense of Public Education", by John Ralston Saul (13th video clip down the page at that URL)

I don't think (tho' I may be wrong) that pointing to this video clip is a non-sequitur regarding the subject of this thread. Raul does what I consider an excellent job in explaining why (more or less) the neighbour to the north is quite different than the US of A, and I think the philosophical dfferences he puts forward re: the whys and whats of public education and their extension into establishing a society's identity, values and principles for governance are actually quite telling.

I think maybe we (up here) have a different concept of what is a lifeboat and indeed, why a lifeboat for others not like us. This is basically the part of the USian conservative agenda I dislike intensely .. the win-or-lose orientation and the "our way (even if principled and practical) is the best or (sometimes imposed) only way".

So ... maybe the viewpoint you offer re: practical conservatives with access to money and a get-up-and get-it-done orientation is somewhat US-centric (and after all you ARE indeed talking about philanthropy in the US, and you are careful in the post to circumscribe the action on Main Street to your country).

I know or believe that you yourself aren't blinded to all outside the US, but you are also talking about "the world we want" and "happy talk about making the world a better place" ( I do agree that there's a fair bit of this, though I am not an insider).

Other countries and cultures come to grips with issues in different ways, that to my view are often not as hard-nosed as the pragmatic christian conservatives you hold up as models. Then again, there are other countries and cultures that accept and promote even harder-nosed ways of creating the societies they want.

At the end of this wandering diatribe ... I do think that principles, character, and an orientation towards constructive action on Main Street will all be very necessary components to any righting of the ship that is the US of A that may happen, be they in the form of many small quiet interventions or a big bang or two.

If you have the time and inclination, please do watch Saul's discussion of why Canada's conservatively-oriented and small-p practical (and bureaucratically oriented) parliamentary democracy works relatively well. I found it engrossing when watching him live.

[phil]

Thanks, JJ, very helpful comments. I read the first linked article carefully; could not get the video link to load. I found the many views of liberty in the article really helpful. Interesting to recall the challenge Champlain and Jefferson had in building a foundation for a country. And isnt that the key point today? That our constitutional rule of law in the US and elsewhere too is under pressure, and is yielding to brute force, not to some high toned alternative conception of political liberty, but to top down force that claims a state of exception and uses that pretext to preside as if a CEO, and one without a Board? If that breakdown of the rule of law, a breakdown actually of legitimacy, is the key issue, then who will push back? We all must. That would bind, say, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Code Pink, and my Main Street friends in the common purpose of protecting the constitutional framework that allows us to live together in this ever conflictual but now waning democracy.

I could not get the public education video to work, but your point makes sense even without it. Something has to bind us together in one culture despite our differences. Could be marketing, tv, superbowl, brand "experiences," money/markets, common enemies (terrorists), but beyond a constitution it would be nice if we had a "canon" in common, however much we might disagree in our interpretations of it.

"Can we agree that we need a framework within which to disagree constructively?" that is a question that bedeviled the founders, and they answered in the affirmative. Today's reframers like John Yoo, Bush and Cheney have no such liberality. Machiavelli's, Schmidt's, and Strauss's Manly Prince is more to their taste. That view should be extruded from our commonwealth and denounced for what it is, a defense of tyranny. I believe we must put our internal differences aside in order to re-establish the constitutional container within which we may continue to disagree for another 300 years. Fat lot of good our differences will do us under martial law or within a state more responsive to concentrated corporate globalized power than to the "citizens" it uses as consumers.

[phil]

To your question about what most upsets the gold trader: the breakdown of transparency, the rule of law, and a reasonably open market. He feels the economy is increasingly rigged by insiders. In his particular area of expertise he cites chapter and verse. He feels the market is locking up (as it has with subprime loans and auction rate securities and as it did with Bear Stearns). He expects that to get worse and that we will all lose whatever net worth we have, either to asset devaluation, falling dollar, inflation, or defaulted obligations cascading through the derivatives market. He sees a rigged and gamed system on the verge of collapse.

[Roy Belmont]

The Scotts Irish look for someone on whom to avenge themselves. ?
Nothing inherent in that ancestry, I'm sure you intended to mean, but their, my, our position in the hierarchy now. A result of some few centuries of consistent and until recently militantly violent oppression and persecution. The Highland Clearances alone an inarguable explanation for something. There is much more than the historically simple and obvious behind their, my, our, present circumstances.
There's now a large reservoir of analogous Latin American drones of the white empire, Indios cut loose from their traditions and cultural supports, who are evil incarnate by action, and blind followers of rancid authority by profession. You can see their faces in the backgrounds of news photos from down there. Uniformed-up and armed, with blank ignorant staring eyes. Dogs on their hind legs, obedient and unthinking, narrowly and immediately loyal.
So much of the awfulness of contemporary human affairs is explainable reaction to and from past evil. Cruelty parents itself, becomes its own child.
The ancestral grace strength and vital dignity of those Celtic orphans is remnant now mostly, little fires kept in awkward new-age pseudo-Druidic covens or bastardized into ignorant pseudo-American patriotic bigotry. The persecution was pretty successful in that sense. But in no way morally justifiable.
The same pattern of "shit flows downhill" you indicate in the Scots-Irish exists all along the bottom edge of contemporary human presence.
Nothing ethnic about it, it's economic in the widest sense of the term.

[phil]

The choleric temper of the man who sees a man poorer than he from another ethnic group get the job, for a little less an hour, and no benefits. Does the man displaced hate the bosses, of his own color, or the man from another race, or across the border who displaces him? How predictable is this, and how easily manipulated by the boss or the politician. "White trash" is a topic treated by bell hooks in her Where We Stand: Class Matters. The poorest white, she says, can still insult the most successful black, and will. Snopes.

And yes, Roy, the point I am floundering towards is exactly what you say: them is us, we is them, and the line of social class is drawn across these differences of race, education, tribal identity. "Nothing ethnic about, its economic in the widest sense of the term." We are all disposable in this flat world, and a whole lot of us are drifting downwards towards what they make and how they live in the slums of India. I am trying to say "we."