Dana Blankenhorn

My Theory of Generational Change

Over the last decade, on this blog, I’ve done a lot of writing which resulted in my generational view of history.

For those new to these pages, a review. It’s history as seen through the eyes of business, because that’s where political power comes from in this country. The business of America has always been business. It’s our Hamiltonian heritage. And it’s still true.

Because America has developed, politically, in relative isolation, since 1788, what happens here is mostly based on what happens here. Europe and Asia had to re-set after both World Wars. Africa still doesn’t rule its own destiny. Most of what happens in Latin America remains a reaction to what we (in our blundering way) have just decided to think, do, or imagine there.

But this country is different. We are less a place than an idea, that idea being that if you accept what we stand for, raise your hand, and take an oath, you’re one of us. This allows America to continually evolve, and to renew itself.

Our Founding generation split politically within 12 years of the Constitution, then ruled for 28 more before the divisions they had papered over required plastering. Theirs was a mostly agrarian society, which fought its political fights over whether it would build the infrastructure needed to industrialize.

A Brief Political History of the Internet

This is the sixth general election since the Web was spun, and the turning point in this history came with Howard Dean.

The Dean campaign was the first in the history of the Web that was based in and on the Web. Its blog, in 2003, was a mind-opening affair, one which allowed ordinary people the chance to actually have influence on a Presidential campaign for the first time.

That summer, around the time I visited their offices in South Burlington, campaign manager Joe Trippi hired a couple of political bloggers to advise him on what to do next.

A Week in Ireland

My late father was German, but my mother is a full-throated Irishwoman, born Mathilda Gertrude Edwina O’Donnell. You don’t get much more Irish than that without potatoes coming out of your ears, a shillelagh whipping the kids’ backsides and “Danny Boy” playing through the speakers of your mind at full blast. (That's Tillie on the left, Fred on the right, with me and my wife between, 

Now, a caveat. I was named for my mother’s grandma O’Donnell, who was born Anna Korzeniowski, in New Bedford, Mass., in 1867. Anna’s dad was Polish, her mother English. Dana is a Polish name, and sounds as much like Anna as my sister Michael’s name sounds like Mathilda. It took me six decades to figure all this out – the Polish origins of Dana are why I’m the only Dana Blankenhorn you’ll ever see or hear from (a great present from my mother to the Internet age). But my grandmother was born a Cooney, and they’re even more Irish than the O’Donnells.

What this means was that I just had to make a pilgrimage to Ireland. I had to go to Ireland, in the worst way.

Why We Are Going Left

Ignorant of longer-term patterns, beholden to their owners, every political reporter on the planet has missed the political story of the year.

The wind that for a generation was blowing from the right now blows from the left.

Whether you’re talking about Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Labour in England, the Pope in Rome or Democrats in the U.S., ordinary people have grown tired of conflict, tired of feudalism, and tired of excuses for prosperity failing to improve their lives while elites play zero-sum games in order to grab more-and-more power.

This wave has been building for a long time and it’s based on an economic fact. The age of oil is ending. The age of technology is here.

For technology to fulfill its potential takes an enormous amount of cooperation. Technology flattens hierarchies, and broadens bases. Technology demands liberty.

I have made my living covering technology since 1982. These trends are not new. What is new is that technology is now at the center of everything. It’s how we move money, it’s how we do science and art, it’s essential to participation in the modern world.

The Death of Nixonism

People usually die suddenly. Political movements die slowly.

The resignation of House Speaker John Boehner represents the death of Nixonism.

Nixonism was, in retrospect, one of the most important political movements of the American 20^th century. It was as important, and long-lasting, as Rooseveltism, which began with Theodore Roosevelt but didn’t really die until decades after FDR’s death, when his party sought new directions through a “liberal” south which finally resulted, after fits-and-starts, in the election of Bill Clinton, whose political legacy was to be an anti-thesis to Nixonism, to lean against it, yeah-but it, adapt to it, and put something of a liberal gloss on it.

The effort failed, as all anti-thesis efforts fail in America. Grover Cleveland, the Democratic anti-thesis to Civil War Republicanism, failed. So did Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight Eisenhower. So, eventually, did Clinton. All were succeeded by men who represented an “excess” of the old Thesis, extending it beyond all reason, making the knees jerk until the assumptions broke down under the weight of new history and required wholesale replacement.