Dana Blankenhorn

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.

The Second American Civil War

History will record that the United States has been in a state of civil war for eight years now.

It was announced through Sarah Palin, grew during the Tea Party days, and has only gotten worse since.

The fuel for the war is Antonin Scalia’s decision in D. C. vs. Heller, announced 8 years ago this week, which overturned 220 years of jurisprudence and held, for the very first time, that the Second Amendment gives Americans a legal right to own a gun.

The decision applied only to handguns. It was limited in scope. But it was seized on by modern day secessionists to mean they could all arm themselves to the teeth, and that they had a natural right to revolt against the government.

The Google Content Fund

It’s ironic that a company founded in Atlanta wound up breaking journalism.

Doubleclick was launched in early 1995, in Atlanta, but moved to New York shortly thereafter. It was bought by Google a decade later.

Doubleclick sold ads based on intrinsic targeting. The system used cookies to learn things about you, then buyers took out ads aimed directly at what you were doing. This led to things like a mother being offered cookie recipes at a gun site, or a gun owner being shown a magnum when he’s looking into champagne vacations.

These kinds of ads are intrusive. They invite blocking. They’re irrelevant to where your head is right now and their performance is thus very, very poor. But this doesn’t matter to an advertiser who can buy 100 such ads for what a specific web site on, say, guns might ask for a single impression. They get it back on volume.

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.

The Reluctant Detective is Good Summer Reading

Hey, fans!

I have a new work of fiction out on Amazon.

Tech Must Lead

Some 40 years ago, at a comparable point in America’s political history, I was a student at Rice University, in Houston, Texas.

At that time Houston was just starting to flex its political muscle as the center of the oil industry. It was building architectural wonders as great as technology is building today – what is Apple’s “flying saucer” headquarters but a Ringworld version of the Astrodome?

To those accusing tech moguls today of living in “a bubble,” allow me to welcome you to River Oaks, Houston, circa 1976. Let me introduce you to people like Robert Mosbacher (here with George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, and his then-wife Georgette), to the heirs of Sid Richardson, or to the partners at Vinson & Elkins, to the great and the good of the oil industry during that time.

They lived in a constant state of luxury, on private jets, and while for many years they had sought to be left alone, they had recognized by this time this was impossible.