Dana Blankenhorn

The 1979 Game

When you win the popular vote by 9.5% but still lose ground, as Democrats did November 6, your problems are systemic.

The result underlies tech’s obligation to come out of its shell and fight for the political system that birthed it.

Tech moguls have done some things. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Marc Benioff bought Time Magazine, Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. The key to gaining more power will be in creating journalism business models beholden to tech interests.

Tech must do to Bizarro Carter what oil did to Jimmy Carter, and for the same reason -- to protect its self-interest.

Peak Carter, Peak Trump

One thing that has surprised me over the last two years is how almost no one understood my point right after the 2016 election, that Donald Trump is a sort of Bizarro Carter. 

By that I meant he is completely the opposite of Jimmy Carter. Carter was a Democrat. Trump is an Autocrat. Carter believed in human rights. Trump believes in the divine right of kings. Carter championed the environment. Trump trashes it. Carter said he’d never lie to us. Trump lies 6 times before breakfast.

What they have in common is they represent the end times for the Political Thesis that birthed them. Carter was elected 44 years after Franklin Roosevelt and was the last President to run on those principles. Trump came 48 years after Nixon and will be the last President elected under the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. 

Nature of Money, Nature of Man

When I wrote my “anti-Trump polemic” early this year I thought I was writing about politics.

It turns out I was writing an economics book.

I learned this while reading a biography of the late Jane Jacobs, best known for her fight against the “urban renewal” of Robert Moses. After that fight Jacobs moved to Toronto, becoming one of Canada’s most beloved intellectuals, and there she wrote an economics history book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 

In this book Jacobs identified cities, rather than farms, as the original source of wealth. It was cities that turned wheat into bread and beer. It is cities that transform everything.

True, as far as it goes. But how and why remained a mystery to Jacobs. The nature of money eluded her. It’s something my recent book explains by looking at American history and seeking what I first saw as political patterns in our national life, and later concluded were economic patterns.

The answers, in our time, strike at the nature of money, the nature of man, and why, even after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, there remain people like John Stossel who continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change. 

Wealth, it turns out, is entirely man-made. This is more controversial than it seems. Politicians have always believed wealth to be a product of holding land, or of exploiting it. They see history as great men moving lesser men around like pawns on a chessboard. Social historians, by contrast, focus on the real lives of ordinary people. These are important, but they are no more relevant to economic history than land is.

What Comes Next

Reporters on all beats are so obsessed with the here-and-now they ignore what is going on beneath, the trends that will make up tomorrow.

This has always been my indictment of the business I have called home for nearly 40 years. It’s why I didn’t make more of my news career than I did. I was constantly looking around corners, seeking the future, rather than looking closely at what was in front of me.

That’s OK. I’ve had a good life. No, make that a great life. A wonderful life partner, two great kids, a home we have built together, comfort in our old age, and memories of good times.

But I’m still looking around corners, still trying to figure out what’s next. Ask any old person. Inside them you’ll always find a 20-year old going “what the fuck?”

For a decade now, ever since I began seeing that technology was going to achieve political power, and sustain that power, meaning all that’s happening now is a play I foresaw, I have been thinking about what comes next.

The Internet of Things? Renewable energy? Artificial Intelligence? All these of the now. They’re what is happening. I foresaw IoT nearly 15 years ago now, and reported on it here to you, as “The World of Always On.” I began covering renewable energy just as that area began to boom, and predicted we would achieve crossover with fossil fuels by 2016. As we did. Artificial intelligence? I’d settle for some of the real kind, frankly.

Another View of the Carter Administration

It has been clear to me for years that the 2010s are, in many ways, a bizarre recapitulation of the 1970s.

I just didn’t know how much.

While the 1970s represented the rise of oil, the 2010s represent its twilight.

The 70s were marked by two key crises, in 1973 and 1979, during which supplies were cut and prices skyrocketed.

The 2010s have already seen one price collapse, in 2014. It is going to see another before the decade is out.

It is against this backdrop that I would like to revisit the administration of Jimmy Carter. This time, especially if you’re a liberal, try to imagine yourself in opposition.

This isn’t difficult for me, because I began the 1970s as a genuine conservative activist. My politics shifted left, slowly, during the decade, but I still voted for Gerald Ford in 1976, and still refused to support Carter in 1980. (Sorry, Jimmy.)

What conservatives saw during that decade was just what liberals see today, in reverse. In the 1970s conservatives saw a natural majority growing, with power tantalizingly out of reach. Democrats in 1977 held all branches of government, as Republicans do now, and were very optimistic about putting their program into motion.

Stoopid Does It

Usually an election offers two similar, if contrasting, economic programs, both of which are equally valid.

The 2016 election was different, offering a simple choice between smart and stupid. Voters chose stupid.

So, you’re going to get stupid. I think you’re going to get Stoopid. Trump and his Republican friends are too stupid to merit a correct spelling.

As the advance of technology has accelerated, evidence has become more-and-more important to policymakers. Trump rejects that reality and substitutes his own personality. His followers substitute a rigid ideology.

This is the epitome of Stoopid.

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.

Life After Trump

Donald Trump is not going to become President.

America has not surrendered to tyrants, or would-be tyrants, for 225 years. We are not about to start now. There aren’t enough angry white men in the world to elect him.

The question is what happens to the anger that he generated? We have several examples of that in American history, and none should leave you sanguine.

The most peaceful outcome was what happened in the last turn of the cycle, from manufacturing to oil. War in the 1970s became our chief economic export, but it was at least kept far away. The domestic objections, the anti-war crowd, generally left politics after 1972, gradually accepting their role in opposition, suffering the “hippie punching” that distinguished our politics right until the next crisis, in 2008.

World War II followed the 1932 crisis, beginning first in China, then erupting in Spain, before engulfing the world. World War I came in the wake of the 1896 crisis, preceded by a decade of American imperialism, while Filipinos died, Columbians saw their country broken, and Theodore Roosevelt became the first great avatar of American imperialism.

Also, the Civil War, which began right after the 1860 election.

Solving The Problem of Abundance

Everyone is vulnerable to fighting the last war, and ignoring the conditions of this one.

For investors and policymakers, the great fears remain the currency and the money supply. I read it in every Seeking Alpha discussion thread, a pervasive fear that we’re about to be crushed because no one is going to believe the promises of the dollar, or that we’re running out of something essential whose lack is going to make our dollars worthless.

What this decade has shown, already, just halfway through it, is that those fears are baseless. The problems of scarcity have been replaced by the problems of abundance. There’s too much oil, too many commodities, too many cheaply manufactured goods on the market. There are too many devices, there is too much cloud, there are too many good movies and shows out there and not enough time to see them all.

The Internet at War

I think a lot of historians mistake the point of our periodic political crises.

To me, it’s the point where directions turn that are key. To others, it’s the point at which that turn seeks validation, when it’s challenged, that matters.

So to me 1968 matters more than 1976, and 1932 more than 1940. I think 1896 was a key year for America, and that 1860 was probably the key moment in our entire history.

But others just see directions set in those years. The real crisis, in their view, comes after, when the new assumptions are challenged and things turn really violent. World War II is on The History Channel a lot more than the Great Depression is.