Dana Blankenhorn

The Ghost of the Eternal Now

I’ve been a reporter for over 40 years, and I’m still angry at the same thing that upset me in journalism school. (That's me on my first journalism job, wondering why someone is taking my picture.)

This is the attitude of an eternal now. It’s driven by this old chestnut – a journalist is someone who works for someone who buys ink by the barrel. The key to that sentence is the phrase “who works for someone.” Journalists are supposed to leave their minds and hearts at the door of the newsroom.

Reporters are taught to have no sense of history, or of the future. Mainly we’re taught to pretend we know nothing, and everything we’re told is equally valid. As a result, most reporting has no context, and we can’t call out stupid when it’s right in front of us.

That’s how Trump gets away with it. Any reporter who likens what he’s doing to Jefferson Davis or Adolph Hitler is accused of malpractice by agents of stupid at The New York Times. We’re just supposed to print what he says and repeat what he does, like good little stenographers. Then let Bret Stephens or Ross Douthat tell us what it means. Everything’s fine.

It’s even worse in business, which is my beat. Because we are taught to ignore the broad sweep of business history, we send readers down blind alleys. We pretend that making cookies is as cutting edge as writing software.

The past and the future have always been there in front of us. It was clear in 1979 that oil was taking over from manufacturing, but people reported from Detroit then as if that city could be saved. It was also clear that oil was a boom-and-bust business, but I was told to report from Houston that the boom would go on forever.

The Twilight of Nationalism

If mankind still exists in 2119 their historians will write about this era as the Twilight of Nationalism.

Nationalism was essential when economies were based on resources, machines or muscle. In the era of clouds and devices it’s increasingly irrelevant. The global nature of our existential crisis makes nationalism an outright impediment to the survival of mankind.

Thus, it’s no coincidence that nationalism has been a rising force in the decade now ending. Just as it concentrates the mind to know you’re to be executed in the morning, so it is for leaders and political movements. Seeing sunset in the distance you do what you can and ignore the consequences you know are coming.

The Trump election acts as a midpoint and permission slip for all this. Nationalism was already on the march, in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia, through the agency of Russia, when Trump came to office. But Trump has given nationalistic impulses around the world permission to act. There is no American opposition to ultra-nationalism anywhere, no alliance worth protecting, no counter example to follow.

Thus, nations push their boundaries outward, fearing any force that might threaten their power, and ignoring the natural internationalism essential to economic growth and climate action.

That’s why Brazil is going after its rain forest. That’s why India is going after Kashmir. It is why China is going after Hong Kong. That’s why England wants to detach from Europe, why Eretz Israel is a thing, why Saudi Arabia seeks dominion over its whole peninsula. If you can afford it, nationalists think, seize the day. The window is closing.