For a big project to get done in today’s political world, it needs support from powerful blocs. That power may be in the form of money, or political foot soldiers, or something else. It may be a multibillion dollar weapons system that the Pentagon doesn’t even want, or the rescue of an auto industry, or the construction of a rail system. But big projects by definition have an established, powerful constituency to push them through.

This also means that big projects by definition are yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s problem, projected forward. Sometimes you get lucky and yesterday’s solution still works. But not always.

The rail solves two of yesterday’s problems: putting construction workers to work, and cramming more hotel, retail, and office workers into the Downtown/Waikiki core. (more skeptically, putting victims of our broken educational system to work)

How much would we reduce our collective carbon footprint if we instead invested $5 billion in providing superfast internet connections to every house on Oahu? If we created, over the course of the next two decades, an educated workforce that could produce high level work for east coast and European based companies on a time-shifted basis?

I work for a firm that off-shores some back office functions to India, and has for several years. I can tell you that large firms are unhappy with the quality level of the work you get, and the price of the shoddy work is rising. Additionally, everyone recognizes that global political risk is increasing. There is potential for a lot of bad, destabilizing things to happen in the next 10 or 20 years.

But this kind of industry (skilled white collar business support) doesn’t exist in any large scale in Hawaii. So they can’t lobby for the things that would make this happen. But construction firms, construction unions, and their bought and paid for elected officials… they do exist in spades. So we will keep producing yesterday’s solutions to yesterday’s problems… leading us to be trapped in yesterday.

This is an incomplete understanding. The pollster Daniel Yankelovich has noted that if one studies changes in the value system of Americans who came of age in the 1960s, a radical convergence. Basically, the right-wing lost the ideological battles of the 1960s in terms of value systems. Sure, maybe in the 1980s there was a political backlash against the liberalism of the 1970s. But if one looks at the values that Americans have adopted since then, one finds a new uniformity. The only exception is to be found in private, personal matters, generally dealing with sexuality, for example, with same-sex marriage and abortion.

Even in something like abortion, however, one could argue that the pro-life lobby opposition to abortion is “more honored in the breach than in the observance”. That is, conservatives get abortions and use birth control, too. In fact, there was an article a year or so ago on nightclubs dominated by the young, Ivy-educated elite who are on the political track. The young Democrats go to Harvard, the young Republicans go to Yale, and that seems about the only difference between the two groups. When the bouncers at the club for the young Democratic elite asked how they act, they stated “They get drunk, snort coke, and have sex with strangers.” When the bouncers at the club for the young Republican elite asked how they acted, they answered “They get drunk, snort coke, and have sex with strangers.” Radical convergence.

What we find at work is what Sigmund Freud referred to the “narcissism of minor difference”. The great hatreds in history were not based on difference, but on similarity. There was much more hostility between Catholics and Protestants than there was between gentiles and Jews. The real hate was between southern Germans and northern Germans, Freud asserts, and between the Spanish and the Portuguese. Because they are so similar, they have to deny the similarity with force in order to reinforce the boundaries.

This helps to explain the Clinton-hating of the 1990s. Bill Clinton got into and stayed in office by appropriating and moderating the Republican agenda. This neutralized the Republicans and sent them into a fury. (Ironically, Democrats in Congress, unhappy with Clinton’s policies, voted for those policies because Republicans were so full of hate for Clinton.) It’s classic narcissism of minor difference. This might also help to explain the “birther” controversy which asserts that Obama is a foreigner, when in fact so many of his policies seem to be Bush’s old policies, only carried out with sobriety.