For all the chatter about the world changing decisively after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our reaction to the attacks was conditioned by 20th-century assumptions.

Instead of seeing the spasm of violence as representing something entirely new, President Bush's administration, aided by thinkers sympathetic to its approach, resolutely forced events into the interpretive boxes fashioned in previous decades.

Reactionary terrorists whose actions reflected the weakness of their position were raised up to world-historical status. They were "totalitarians," which suggested that they represented a threat as powerful as those embodied by Hitler and Stalin. They were "Islamofascists," a sobriquet that credited them with battling under the banner of a coherent, modern ideology when in fact they were inspired by a ragtag jumble of ideas rooted in the medieval past.

Osama bin Laden's commitment to reviving the power of the old Islamic "caliphate" was taken to be as real as the danger of Soviet troops pouring across the old East German border or of Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia. The new "global war on terror" was endowed with the same coherence as the old Cold War.

It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions.


He goes on to discuss the "rise of a new architecture of power in the world" with the emergence of India and China, and points out that, while capitalism will not exactly disappear, the so-called "Masters of the Universe" who got us into this mess with freewheeling greed-is-good ethos are going to have to face a brave new world of regulation and accountability.

But what Dionne did not say was that not only has the 21st Century finally emerged to see the death of the Cold War and its mindset, but it has also ushered in a visionary new president who knows that the secretive, bureaucratic, turf-war, creaky method of governing that has slowed down into total gridlock is going to have to be modernized, streamlined, placed on equal electronic footing with the rest of the world--and that, furthermore--voters will be full-on participants in bringing about these changes.

In this sense, he is very much the first president of the 21st Century.  Already, he has revolutionized campaigning--as detailed in Part I--and has set in motion steps to make the actions of congress and various branches of government more transparent and available to the voters.

I'll get into that more in the next couple of parts.

The quote from Lincoln at the beginning of this post came from a fuller quote in a Washington Post editorial from New Year's Day (and yes, most of the links I've provided have tended to be from the Post, but only because so few other papers were savvy to it all):


Some well-known words from Abraham Lincoln, delivered to Congress in December 1862, have been cited often in the past few months. They are worth citing once more on this day: "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

"Disenthrall."

What a perfect word to describe what the pundits and pontificators and legislators and citizens are going to have to do--they are going to have to disenthrall themselves of all the dusty old ideas about such things as the dissemination of news, the participation of a citizenry in a democracy, the boring business of governing.

It is doubtful, for example, that we will ever fight a conventional, WWII type of war again.  Desert Storm was perhaps the last one, and Bush 41st's plan to pull up short of Baghdad in 1990 then gave his son and cronies a rose-colored-glasses view of what war with Iraq would really look like in 2003.  Desperate mistakes were made in the first two weeks of the invasion because the war-planners had a conventional war in mind and resolutely refused to admit that an insurgency even existed, much less that it had to be fought.  And they squandered years and bloodshed trying to figure out how to even do that.

This is just one example of many, but the point is that this is a new century, and the technological revolution is going to change it every bit as dramatically as the industrial revolution did the last one.

Barack Obama knows this, and he has a temperament and skill-set tailor-made for the transition into a new century.  I'll get into that in GROUNDSWELL, Part III.