Dana Blankenhorn

Persistence vs. Passion

What America teaches me is that persistence, the lean of the majority, overcomes the passion of a minority.

Read any newspaper from the 1850s. Many northerners had sympathy for the South. In the South, Union sympathizers had to either keep quiet or pretend toward Confederate sympathy to survive. We all know how that turned out.

But the same thing happened in the 1890s, and the 1930s. Populists were always more passionate than progressives. Those opposing FDR were always louder than his supporters. Majorities are slow to move, and for those passionate on the majority side it’s frustrating.

The best lesson from my life was the 1960s. Those opposed to Vietnam were far more passionate than the “silent majority” who saw it as a Cold War activity. The War side won. It kept on winning for a generation. Pundits came to assume it would always be that way. Most still do.

I’ve tried to explain the back-and-forth in terms of what business needs. Cash crops like cotton represented the highest value of the 1840s. Railroads replaced them. Then utilities replaced the railroads, manufacturing replaced utilities, and resources replaced manufacturing.

Throughout my working life, technology has been rising. It now dominates. Politics is leaning toward what technology needs. That means immigration and education. It means climate activism and social equality. Clouds can leverage a single great mind to the value offered by thousands of mediocre ones.

Slaves of the News Cycle

The most common mistake consumers of news make is being a slave to the news cycle.

It’s true on every beat. Business, technology, entertainment, sports, and politics. You focus on what’s happening right now and you miss the longer term trend. It’s the longer term trend that will make you, that will make your career, and that will make history.

When it comes to business and finance, my current beat, the dumbest thing you can do is to obsess over the day-by-day changes in the stock market. Traders are paid big bucks to follow the daily gyrations. They will get in ahead of you on any move. They’ve got you outgunned.

But the daily moves tend to even out. What you want to find are companies that are market leaders, in trends that last for years, with bosses who understand that long term. Just accumulate them. Let time work for you. Then, sell on your schedule, when you need the money, preferably on a day when the market is rising.

Moore’s Law of Politics

There is no Moore’s Law of Politics. Quite the opposite.

As I have sought to explain in my continuing rewrites of my Moore’s Lore book  the values of our youth are taken into age. Longer lives mean obsolete beliefs bedevil democracy.

My own views were shaped by this generational delay. I believed that Democrats had a real shot in 2004, because we were a full generation removed from 1968. In fact, the 1960s dominated that campaign. So it was that when Barack Obama won, a man born in the 1960s I thought, well we won’t have Vietnam to kick around anymore. Again, I was wrong. The 2016 campaign was fought over the same old ground.

There are still voters who remember the 1970s, even the 1960s. I am one of them. But we’re finally a minority. While half the electorate was still over 50 in 2020 the median voter still had no memory of the Moon Landing.

Peace is also unknown to the average American voter. Most us of us grew up in the era of resources, of wars for oil, or the Cold War.

A Few Words on Afghanistan

I’m not a foreign policy expert. But this much I do know.

The greatest threat to life on Earth is the War of All Against All. 

If the world doesn’t unite against the common enemy of climate change, human life will be impossible on this planet within the lifetime of your grandchildren.

It’s already becoming intolerable. The east sides of our continents are flooding. The west sides are burning. COVID-19 is accelerating the change, pushing people away from mass transit, pushing them into further-off suburbs. We wait hours in our cars for take-out.

Afghanistan wasn’t even a war for resources. Afghanistan was purely a war for power over people. For 20 years America was told to believe we could make Afghanistan “free” through military force.

We couldn’t. We can’t. No one can. That’s a job for the Afghans. Liberation is an internal process. You liberate yourself, and only then can you liberate your neighbors.

The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan for a decade and disappeared. We have now done it for 20 years. Our democracy is more threatened today than it has been since World War II. We could lose it. I would argue we are in the process of losing it.

What disgusts me, more than anything, is how the Washington “press corps” is pretending that we “abandoned” Afghanistan, and Joe Biden has diminished our power in leaving. Abandoned to who? Diminished for what?

When I was starting my reporting career, the very word “Afghanistanism” meant events happening so far away as to be irrelevant. If terrorists based there try to come after us again, we still have the option of killing them. But occupying territory won’t kill them. It only kills us.