Dana Blankenhorn

The 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues

We are 8 years removed from the last generational crisis, but the underlying issues of that crisis have not yet been dealt with.

Welcome to the 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues.

In 1940, the demagogues were organized. Germany, Japan and Italy were on the march. France was overrun and Britain was invaded. This made it easy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eligible for a third term, to pivot from being “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win the War,” although there remained Republican isolationists, and even some who questioned the premise of democracy, against whom he fought a propaganda war with help from German refugees and British patriots like Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Foreign Correspondent”  remains a classic of the genre.

Bridge to the Founders’ Generation

During my vacation this year, I surprised myself by delving into early American history, and found some comforting parallels to our own time.

Specifically I read The Quartet, by Joseph Ellis, about the four key figures who drove the creation and adoption of our Constitution, and John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit by James Traub.

What I found was the pre-history of my own profession, journalism, and the press.

In the late 18^th century, and early 19^th century, journalists were simply the owners of printing presses. They were little more than local bloggers, and their opinions were often for sale to the highest bidder. There was no one doing “objective” news. People understood broad events like the French Revolution, but what they thought of those events was driven by money, specifically that money put into driving opinion by printing press owners and by politicians controlling them.

Over the last 20 years, American journalism has moved strongly back toward that model. That gatekeeper function, the pride of The New York Times and even CNN in the 20^th century, turns out to have been a mere product of successful business models, which aggregated an educated readership and then sold access to that market, for a premium price, to advertisers.

I asked, 20 years ago, how hungry publishers were. I encouraged them to take the opportunity the Internet offered to drive their readers further down the sales funnel, not just selling billboards along the roadside by engaging in real commerce.

How It Can Still Be Lost

As this was written, the Presidential race looked to be all wrapped up.

Hillary Clinton will be the 45^th President. I thought that in January, and the polls show it to be true in August, when it counts. Donald Trump is the most unqualified candidate since Andrew Johnson, and most writers can’t find anyone to compare him with.

But the Republican Party is not imploding. Far from it. What Trump has done is attach a host of moochers onto the Party of Bush, and below the Presidential line that alliance is holding. Trump voters are going GOP down the line, even for candidates who oppose the programs they depend upon, and regular Republicans are planning on showing up for the down-ballot races.

People talk about this being a McGovern election, but they forget that Nixon was so obsessed with his own performance that the Republican Party that year made no gains in Congress. As a result, the Watergate Committee, and then the House Judiciary Committee, both had Democratic majorities. This killed Nixon. Nixon may have thought that the alliance with Southern Democrats that had gotten his agenda through would hold when he was under direct assault. He was wrong.

If we have a McGovern election in November, Republicans will be able to play the same game over the next four years they’ve played over the last eight. Obstruct, refuse, and blame Democrats for the failure to progress. Eventually, they will get their act together, take the White House, and do most of what Trump proposed this year.

There are two ways to fight back, two elements that are essential for the rest of the campaign.

The Illegitimate Fears of Trumpistan

I spent this week in Minnesota, preparing my son for the rigors of graduate school.

I met a lot of people.

I met a woman in a hijab at our hotel, working the desk, and another in the halls, preparing to clean rooms.

I met another immigrant in a sandwich shop, working the register. And I met others at gas stations along the way, stocking the shelves.

I heard Mandarin in the street, on the campus of my son’s university. I heard it a lot.

When Trumpistanis talk about refusing entry to immigrants, we hear them cheer The Donald calling Mexicans “rapists” or those with hijabs “terrorists.” The press thinks they want to restrict specific types of immigrants from getting into our country, but when they chant “build the wall,” or curse Khizr Khan, I think they’re saying something else.

They’re not really saying no to specific immigrants over understandable concerns like crime and terrorism. I think they’re saying no to all immigrants, because they see the bright futures of their children being stolen before their eyes.

White Lives Matter

That’s a pretty nasty headline, isn’t it?

All lives matter. Obviously.

A friend was offended, however, when she saw demonstrators recently chanting “Black Lives Matter.” She made the same point as above. All lives matter, she said.

I lit into her, but good.

Of course, all lives should matter. But black lives still don’t. There is abundant evidence to that effect, far too much to recount here.

I have written several times in the last decade that we’re now in a “fourth riding of the KKK,”  and events have borne that out. That’s how history will record our time.

Hillary’s Burden

The Presidents whose elections validate what I call a generation’s political Thesis – a set of assumptions about myths and values that create power – have a very poor record in office.

Just look at the list.

George H.W. Bush. Harry Truman. William Howard Taft. U.S. Grant. Martin Van Buren. James Madison. They moved smoothly into power by validating the beliefs of crisis leaders. Nixon and Reagan. FDR. McKinley and Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Jackson. Thomas Jefferson.

This is the spot in my children’s political lives Hillary Clinton seeks to fill. Not my life, my children’s lives. History says it’s a very bad spot to hold. But her task is made more difficult by her own long political history.

The End of the War

As of December, the U.S. will have been in a state of perpetual war for 75 years.  We have been in a low-grade Civil War for about two-thirds of that time.

We committed to this course in 1968, when America elected Richard Nixon on just such a platform. Order at home, American order abroad. Vietnam was a Cold War activity, and even before it ended we had started another one, in Afghanistan, a war that even a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama, has found unable to end “with honor.”

Peace with honor, to Americans, means peace with a promise by the other side not to attack us again. We left Vietnam, the North took over, but they have kept that promise and we have no problems with them today. Afghans won’t make that promise. They never have, they never will. So that war goes on.

What of the war back home? That war seemed to end in the 1970s, but it never really did. It remained a low-grade conflict under many names, the most common being The War on Drugs. The name of the drug changed, but the battlefield never did. It was poor people, brown people, often Hispanic people that generations learned to fight, hate and fear.

In 1864 the Civil War seemed intractable. It had been hiding under the tables when the Constitution was written. Slavery’s hands are all over the document. So that war had been going on, with increasing intensity, for a lifetime by 1864’s battles. That was to be war’s bloodiest year, and the outcome wasn’t certain until the November re-election of Abraham Lincoln. That result was made certain by some of the bloodiest battles of the war, especially one that destroyed my own home, Atlanta, and which is still remembered with an annual celebration that is taking place now.

In 2016 the Second Civil War also seems intractable. So, too, the foreign war. But as in 2016 we may be closer to the end of both than we realize.

The Downside of Tech’s Dominance

Back when I was at Rice, 40 years ago, oil was a fairly benign political force. Or so it seemed to me, lost in my studies, surrounded by oil money, which was rapidly building the huge Texas Medical Center before my very eyes.

We know different now. We know how power corrupts every industry, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. We saw that with George W. Bush, the spoiled son of an oilman, installed in power by a Supreme Court created through political action, unelected by the people. Since then we’ve seen Iraq, we’ve seen Katrina, we’ve seen the Great Recession. We’re seeing climate change, threatening the whole human race.

Worse, we’ve seen D.C. vs. Heller, idiots thinking Thomas Jefferson wants them to own AR-15s as some natural right. We’ve seen Citizens United, billionaires who think they have an absolute right to control us with their dollars, simply because they have them. These last injuries will abide. They are examples of how the oil industry, which took political power only to be left alone in the 1960s, eventually abused it to the detriment of the whole world.

Just as railroads pushed farmers and working people too far in the 19^th century, and utilities collapsed the economy in the 1920s, just as manufacturers used political power to go to Vietnam in the 1960s, so oil eventually became a noisome element in the national political equation, and was overthrown by technology in 2008.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

History does not repeat, but it rhymes.

I have learned that in my own studies here over the last decade. It’s our ability to learn from history, and so step back from the brink, that is the secret of America’s success.

The present political conflict has elements of the Civil War and World War II in it. Like the Civil War it’s primarily a sectional struggle, this time between cities and suburbs, and also (so far) primarily a political struggle. At the same time it’s also a global struggle over values, with people around the world wanting to tear apart the post-war order and so make war upon one another. It will be America’s job, over the next four years, to offer a credible alternative.

Also, as with previous crises, this one has roots going back a generation. The Civil War followed a generation of compromises between North and South, brokered by the West. World War II followed the harsh peace of World War I, and the rise of Empires (including, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, our own).

Similarly, everything we’re seeing now is an outgrowth of what I have called the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. 

Let’s remember what that was about.

What Political Validation Looks Like

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When the political winds change, and everyone can see it, I call it political validation.

This only happens once in a generation. It is a climactic event.

Before validation, reporters and pundits will come to their work with an assumption that the political winds are blowing in one particular direction. After validation, they will always come to their work with an assumption that the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Their successors will take this new direction as a given.

After Nixon won in 1968, Democrats refused to believe for a decade that the New Deal Coalition was truly dead, and could not be recreated. The truth only dawned on them after Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and his emphatic re-election in 1984, validated the strength of the Nixon Coalition. He had been considered extreme, “the man who nominated Goldwater,” and his natural caution kept him from entering the 1968 race until it was too late.