Dana Blankenhorn

The Enemy is Religious Nationalism

The 2022 election mostly put Trumpism into the rear-view mirror.

What it revealed was the larger political battle of this decade, between secular democracy and religious extremism.

I’m not against God. But there are two problems with religious nationalism.

First, it’s intolerant. Wherever one religion rules, its adherents outlaw any faith but their own. This is true for Hindus in India, for the Russian Orthodox, even for Buddhists in Burma. It’s true for Jews in Israel and for fundamentalist protestants in the United States.

This remains true despite every great religious teacher, from Gautama to Vishnu to Confucius, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all the way to Joseph Smith, teaching first the way of tolerance. Love your neighbor. Care for the less fortunate. Seek the enlightenment of faith for yourself.

It’s the leaders of these faiths, the Popes and the Mullahs, the Rabbis, and the Brahmins, who twist it into something else. There is a reason for this. Those faiths that adhered to tolerance were, over time, wiped out by leaders of the intolerant. This is the true original sin.

The Coup Succeeded

January 6 wasn’t THE coup. It was a coup, an attempted coup, a failed coup.

But there is a coup that succeeded, that toppled American democracy, possibly for all time.

This was the McConnell coup. By succeeding, during the course of 4 years, in getting three unqualified political hacks onto the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell won the power to redefine the Constitution and destroy American democracy.

That work has barely begun.

Hopium and Copium

As the election approached, my fear rose.

I gave up on the news. I turned off the TV. I hid myself away and got high on Hopium.

Hopium is a warm feeling of hope, the idea that people are good, that they’ll see things as they are, that they’ll do the right thing. It came mostly from Twitter, then mostly from Simon Rosenberg, who followed the early vote for The Democrats. They were coming out, he said. Coming out in numbers. Coming out by the millions. Coming out nearly everywhere.

I don’t recall there being early voting when I was young. In New York everyone did it on the day. I remember an Election Day line in 1976, when I was at Rice, but it wasn’t very long and the weather was warm.

The Strength of Autocracy

The strength of autocracy lies in its ability to deny reality and get people to embrace lies.

Putin is losing in Ukraine, but he’s not losing his mandate. Among those Russians who remain in the country, and who feel free to express an opinion, his support remains strong.

Xi Jinping is losing his economy, but he’s not losing his mandate either. Stocks are falling, real estate is collapsing, manufacturing jobs are running off to East Asia and his best minds are fleeing Hong Kong. But his rule faces no threat.

Fog of Global War

This is a depressing day. It’s the day when crystal balls are shattered. It’s the day I expected to happen, but now it’s upon us.

There comes a time in every campaign where you really don’t know what’s going on.

Both sides are spinning small events as big deals. Everyone is talking past one another. Everything is up in the air.

This is October, and it’s the same in America every two years, as people choose what direction they want their states and nation to go in.

But it’s worse this time.

That’s because, in addition to the usual midterm madness, we’re at the center of a global crisis. Russia is seriously threatening nuclear war over its losses in Ukraine. Iranian women are rising and being crushed underfoot. In China, Xi Jinping may become a new Putin, an absolute dictator with no guardrails. Religious dictatorship is rising against democracy in India. We don’t know what’s happening in Brazil. The Sauds are pushing up oil prices.

This is also no normal midterm election. This is an existential battle between democracy and fascism. Major media try to both sides it, but that’s increasingly impossible. Every possible -ism is rising against democratic compromise and common sense – sexism, racism, fascism, Christianism. All the evils bedeviling the rest of the world have come here to roost because Vladimir Putin invited them in.

Cry Treason

My biggest problem with the State of the Union speech was the President’s refusal to directly tackle the elephant in the room.

It’s now clear that a substantial portion of the Republican Party was on Putin’s side, right up to the war.

Putin’s operation to co-opt the party, through Donald Trump, succeeded. Trump was elected. Trump was impeached but not convicted. Trump nearly won re-election. Many of those duped by Putin (through Trump) remain under his thrall.

Even the non-Putin party, at the state level, has adopted a Putinesque policy and a Putinesque stance toward political opponents. It’s treason against our democratic system to call the other party treasonous. I realize I’m doing this now.

That doesn’t mean Republicans haven’t committed overt acts of treason, directly benefitting Vladimir Putin, at his direct or indirect instigation.

All this starts, as I wrote earlier, with Fox News and its owner, Rupert Murdoch.. Any reckoning of Putinism begins by reckoning with Murdoch, just as any reckoning with Bill Cosby starts with his sexual assaults. I think the President should have gone after this more directly.

Anyone involved in the events of January 6 participated in a coup against the U.S. government, instigated by Donald Trump and benefitting Vladimir Putin. The entire Trump Administration was a kleptocratic wet dream. All of it must be exposed. All the thieves must be brought to justice.

Maybe this can’t start until Putin has fallen. As I write this, the war in Ukraine continues. But each day Russian oligarchs, and the Russian people, grow poorer. Each day Putin becomes more isolated. Nuclear disaster is still on the table. But the crisis will end, one way or the other. The only questions now are when and at what cost.

What happens after? Republicans think they can go from being appeasers to being war hawks on a dime. This took four years after Pearl Harbor, as they switched from appeasing Hitler to opposing Stalin, and attacking Democrats as fellow travelers.

Will we let them get away with it again? Will we ever learn from our own history?

There must be a reckoning.

Turning Point

Assuming there’s no nuclear war, the Ukraine conflict is a global political turning point.

Democracy has found its voice. Autocracy has found its limits. Dictators can act while democracies dither, but there’s no constraint on the dictator.

We know the price of that now. Not just in America, but everywhere.

The implications of this realization will spread like the concussive wave of the Tongan volcano. This will leave a mark on the world like that of WWII.

Trump and all his little Trumpkins are now discredited. That’s most of the Republican party, gone. TV is trying to resurrect Mitt Romney, who called Russia our enemy in 2012, as the new face of the party. But it’s a greatly diminished party.

Dictatorship has also been discredited globally. We can now see the dangers inherent in the political systems of Arabia and of China. Unchecked power leads to madness. Dictators also flock together, each endorsing the madness of the others. It’s bad for business. It needs to change.

None of this will happen all at once. We all want things to happen all at once. But the tone of global debate will slowly change. We have seen the strength of democracy. We have seen how people will die for liberty and unite against dictators.

We won’t forget.

Aphorisms for Today

Freedom is never given. It must be fought for. In many ways.

Some battles are lost. The war never is.

We can never again trust oil and gas. But the Sun shines, the wind blows, the rivers roll, and we live on a molten rock.

The further you go down the road to perdition, the harder it is to find an exit ramp.

Diplomacy is about finding that exit.

Evil abides. Good must also.

Buy when everyone is screaming sell, sell when everyone is screaming buy.

Know that there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

Some tunnels are longer than others.

Liberty for me but not for thee spells tyranny.

Feel free to add your own in the comments. 

2021: Intensive Care

Elon Musk is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. He has a fortune estimated at $245 billion. But it’s clear he’s not happy.

America is the world’s wealthiest country. The cloud, its applications, the clients, and the services connecting to it, have made America more economically dominant than ever before. But none of that has trickled down. Even tech executives who would benefit most from the creativity of minds freed from want, have made it clear they won’t let it trickle down.

In a world where the 10^th richest country, Canada, has a GDP this year of $1.6 trillion, four American Cloud Czars – Microsoft, Apple Amazon, and Google -- are worth more. In a country worth $63,000 per citizen, there are children going hungry and 9 centi-billionaires. Our wealth is tied up in assets. It’s not doing any work.

One weird trick is keeping this Second Gilded Age gilded. Punching down. When Elizabeth Warren proposed taxing billionaires, they promised to avoid it, and said go after the millionaires. The millionaires then said they were also adept at tax evasion, so go after the upper middle class. The upper middle class armed itself against the middle class, the middle class against the lower middle class, and the lower middle class against the poor, whose only hope is to reproduce.

We’re all so afraid of losing what we have that we reject anything that would let us create more. In West Virginia one-quarter of the population is missing its teeth, while their Senator rejects dental care under Medicaid.

Bin Laden Won

Twenty years ago, the fall of the American Empire began with the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Osama Bin Laden gambled that Americans would overreact, be driven crazy by the attack. He was right.

As a direct result America began a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that cost over $2 trillion. As a direct result we invaded and overran Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack.

Even after most Americans recognized the overreaction, electing Barack Obama in 2008, half the country remained consumed by fear. It was easy for the resource billionaires funding the Republican Party to transfer that hate onto Obama, then onto his party, then onto its individual members, just as 60 years earlier fear of Communism morphed into McCarthyism.

Thus came Trump. Thus came Trumpism.

Thanks to Trumpism’s excesses, almost half of us remain so tied to hate that we’d rather than die than take a vaccine. Most Americans, even most Texans, are against snitching on neighbors who miscarry. Most of us even believe in democracy. But enough of us stand against progress, and enough of those people are powerful, that as I write this the future of the American experiment remains uncertain.

Thanks to 9/11 and thanks to Trump, America no longer has any moral authority. China can get away with Xinjiang, and with seizing Hong Kong, because we look no better to the rest of the world.

Thanks to Trumpism, authoritarians are on the march and democracy is in retreat around the world. Putin can interfere in our elections, can use trolls to spin lies that tear at the heart of our system and prosperity. But we do nothing in response. Dictators simply close off the Internet from the outside, impose their own censorship on their people, and force feed propaganda to them. There’s an economic cost to all this. America’s technology dominates the world to an even greater degree in 2021 than in 2001. But that doesn’t matter.