Dana Blankenhorn

Putting Our 20th Century into Perspective

As much as we’re (rightly) reviling Woodrow Wilson for his racism, he’s still an important figure in liberal history.

Wilson named Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. He initiated the income tax and the Federal Reserve. During Wilson’s term, the 19^th Amendment was passed, giving women the right to vote.

But it’s what was done with Wilson’s memory that we should focus on. Wilson was one of only two Democrats elected to the White House between Lincoln and FDR. In building a history for his own ideas, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have much to choose from. He had also served Wilson’s Administration as assistant secretary for the Navy and tried to succeed him as James Cox’s VP candidate in 1920, running on a Wilsonian platform.

Thus, Roosevelt used Wilson’s memory as a gloss to pass New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which transformed the South. Even more important was how Roosevelt used Wilson’s last crusade, on behalf of a League of Nations. You can see this laid out in the propaganda Hollywood produced about Wilson in 1944.

“Wilson” is garbage as history or biography. It starts in 1912. It ignores Wilson’s racism entirely. But as hagiography it’s first-rate. In it he’s an academic and reluctant politician, incorruptible, a relentless reformer. In life he was nothing of the sort.  

Why Black Lives Matter to Me

You’re looking at the face of an old white guy and wondering about the headline.

Here’s the story.

I was brought up racist, on Long Island. I didn’t think that was the case, but I know now it was. I knew people like Roger Stone, Eugene Delgaudio and David Keane when they were kids. That’s because during the height of the Vietnam era I was part of a group called Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing agitprop created by William F. Buckley when the SDS was getting started.

I’m not proud of it. I got falling-down drunk at age 16, and the hangover lasted until the day after school started. I told my parents I was sick.

We weren’t rich, but we had a lot of white privilege. It helped me get off Long Island and into Rice University, even though my parents had saved nothing for college. It got my dad a small business loan when he fell through a false roof and became disabled. The parents of the girl I married turned out to be well-off too. Most Rice parents are.

I was blind to my own good fortune. I saw myself as an idealist. I went to Northwestern, got a job at a business newspaper, and covered the end of the Houston oil boom.

The Fire This Time

Over Memorial Day weekend, my wife drove my son back to his home.

What none of us knew was that she was driving right into the fire of our time.

My son is now a biochemistry Ph.D candidate at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He wants to work on COVID-19, the virus that wrecked the global economy earlier this year, and that is putting America into its second Great Depression.

As she headed home Tuesday morning, the match was lit a few miles from my son’s apartment. George Floyd was murdered by cops using what had become a standard Minneapolis police practice, but which officer Derek Chauvin took to extremes. As most people know now, Chauvin kept his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes, asphyxiating him. Killing him. Murdering him. Other officers stood by and did nothing.

1918 vs. 2020

There are too many differences between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1918 flu pandemic to count. Here are just a few.

First, the viruses have almost nothing in common except that they’re viruses. No one even knew the 1918 pandemic was even caused by a virus until years later. Over time, virology evolved. We now produce semi-reliable vaccines against mutations in the H1N1 virus that caused the 2018 flu every year.

With COVID-19 we have a lot more tools. But it's a completely different type of virus, as different from H1N1 as you and I are from whales. Still, we had a model of it available within weeks of the outbreak. We understand about messenger RNA and have hundreds of vaccine candidates now going through testing.

But knowledge has yet to bring power. Until science delivers an answer, we’re mainly doing palliative care, just as we did then. That goes for everyone, making this a true global event. But, as it was in 1918, our willingness to listen to what science DOES know makes a big difference.

This time, unlike 1918, many Americans aren’t listening.

Jim Crow America and the Second Battle of Atlanta

A lot of ink is being spilled asking what’s the key state in the 2020 election.

Is it Florida? Ohio? Maybe Wisconsin?

No. It’s Georgia.

I wrote almost three years ago how Republicans are taking the Jim Crow approach to power.

Before Jim Crow, most southerners were black. They held power during Reconstruction and should have held power after it. Instead, Southern whites destroyed their franchise and murdered blacks with impunity. This injustice system existed for almost 90 years, giving southern whites the same level of federal power, as their fathers and grandfathers held under slavery, when black people were counted as 3/5ths of a white person. Under Jim Crow, black people were still counted, but they didn’t count.

The Trump strategy is Jim Crow writ large.

The late George Carlin might say we’re all Trump’s niggers now.

Eyes Wide Open

When idealists and pragmatists are scared, they react differently.

Idealists want what’s best for everyone. When attacked, we ask why and seek compromise. When the attacker rejects compromise, we panic.

Pragmatists will look to protect themselves. They’ll look for the enemy’s weakness and seek to take them down.

The difference between white and black Democrats is just that. White Democrats are idealists. We can afford to be. Black Democrats are pragmatists. They won’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Or even the barely OK. 

My black neighbors never loved Joe Biden. They supported him for practical reasons. He was Barack Obama’s “Uncle Joe.” Polls said he could win. But they also knew that Biden is a white liberal, always ready to compromise, to say “yeah, but,” to seek the good in everyone. Even a snake like Trump.

The failure of other white liberals to back Biden shook these voters hard. They were left adrift. They have one great desire, which is to win, to get rid of Trump. They’re also much more realistic than we white liberals about what might follow a Trump victory.

It’s not that Trump is a Nazi. It’s not that he’s a Confederate. These are the clothes liberals like to put on Trump supporters. That’s not what Trumpublicanism is about.

It's Jim Crow.

Generation Gap

I’m writing this before any caucuses, before any primaries.

But it’s clear to me what the story of the Democratic Primary is going to be.

The Generation Gap.

It’s back, baby.

The mystery of Bernie Sanders’ rising in January’s polls, to the top of the Democratic stack, is all about the Generation Gap. It’s now wider than it’s been at any time since Bernie here was on the other side of it, in the 1960s.

Iowa voters are well aware of how they're talking past one another. While Bernie was beloved of the young folks on Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg, the youngest candidate in the field, was favored by the olds. 

The Big Secret of 2020

The stock market is not the economy.

The fall of Trump is secure because of that.

Trump has long confused the health of the stock market with the economy. But 84% of stock is held by people in the top 10% of income. The bottom 80% own just 6.7% of shares. 

Whether it’s true or not that most Americans own some stock, as the nit-pickers at Politifact want you to believe, the fact is that prosperity is going to fewer-and-fewer people. (Thanks to two careers in tech, some of it is flowing to me.)

This trend has accelerated during the Trump time. Among the hottest stocks today are companies that cater to the needs of poor people. Dollar General is up from $60 to $160 since Trump’s election. A former Dollar General CEO, David Perdue, is a Senator from Georgia as a result. The other Georgia seat is held by Kerry Loeffler, whose husband runs Intercontinental Exchange, Atlanta-based owners of the New York Stock Exchange.

You may think Trump’s base consists of racists and mullahs, but it’s really moolah. A Goldman Sachs client survey shows 87% expect Trump to be re-elected. Hedge fund billionaires love this market, and they love Trump, even though they know his pumping of stock prices must end. 

I’m one of very few reporters working today who was doing this job in 1980. I’m on the same business beat I was on then. I was also politically active in 1980.

The Changing Face of Retail

If all you know of me is this weekly blog, you may not know I’ve made my living for over 40 years as a business reporter.

Even when technology was my focus, from 1983 until 2009, it was always from the point of view of business. My most profitable periods were from 1997-2000, when I covered Internet commerce, and from 2005-2009, when I covered open source and health IT.

These days I make my money from InvestorPlace. It’s a great gig, if a little straitjacketed. They want single-company stories, and they want me to say whether you should buy or sell. I’ve seemed to be a genius, because the market has been rising these last few years. I assure you I’m not.

With all that as background, let me talk about the biggest transformation I’ve seen in my career, which has occurred in retailing.

In my youth retailing was simple. Retailers would buy branded merchandise in bulk, break bulk in their stores, then offer it all up for sale at a mark-up of nearly 100%. My first credit card came from Sears.

Early in my career this shifted with Walmart and “category killers” like Staples, Petco and Sports Authority. But it was still the same game. Companies would buy huge lots of merchandise, break bulk in bigger stores and take smaller markups. Even Costco is like this. The only difference is that they define bulk differently.

What Follows Evil Done in Our Name

What makes America exceptional isn’t that we don’t do evil.

Anyone who has gone through more than high school history knows that the United States is, at its heart, a European empire given a veneer of idealism we have yet to live up to.

America’s governments have endorsed slavery, committed genocide, taken power by force (starting in Hawaii), and overthrown any government of color we didn’t like. You may tell your kids whatever lies you like. Kids elsewhere aren’t fooled.  If anything, the evil done in our name has only gotten worse in my lifetime. Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq are just the highlights.

What’s most interesting is that other societies can call this history what it is, history. When Trump threatened to destroy 52 Iranian cultural monuments, “one for every hostage,” he was talking about something that happened 40 years ago. The median age in Iran is 31. I talked with a Vietnamese math genius last year, age 28, and asked him about The War. His parents had no memory of it. It was from his grandfather’s time.

We’re stuck in a memory hole. The developing world is not.

The year 2020 is a turning point because the gating factor to growth today is human capital. Trained, agile, active, ambitious minds are where the money is at today, not oil.

America has dominated the economy of this century, so far, because we imported such minds. We also offered the greatest support to them, in terms of education, capital, and market opportunity. Trump has tossed things into the fire with everything else. An economic and demographic cliff yawn before us and his supporters don’t even see it.