Dana Blankenhorn

The Gun War is a Race War

 

This is something not enough people say out loud.

The “Second Amendment” bullshit of the modern GOP was always meant to create a race war.

The plan was simple. Flood the country with guns. When white people use guns, defend them regardless of the circumstances. When black people use guns, attack not just the users of those guns but their political leaders, the places where they live, and any liberal impulse.

In today’s Republican Party whites are always the victim, blacks always the perpetrators. It’s precisely what southern Democrats did after the Civil War. Eventually, northern Republicans anxious to do business relented, ending Reconstruction and damning U.S. Grant before history along the way.

When I moved to Atlanta, historians were still in the thrall of Henry W. Grady, who edited the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s, soon after Reconstruction ended in northern defeat.

His “New South”  speech basically said, “We still hate n%*## but we’re ready to do bidness.” There’s still a statue to Grady in downtown Atlanta, although his name was recently taken off the high school my daughter graduated from. For his time, Grady was considered a liberal. This is what Republicans now have in store for everyone, if the current "Second Reconstruction" can be beaten back. 

The GOP plan, using the Grady approach, is the same false choice employed by autocrats around the world. Divide and conquer. If you shout loud enough, nuance looks like weakness. If you shout loud enough about victimhood, even genocide can be countenanced.

The Biden response is to get past the virus and get people back to work. The question is whether that will be enough. Election Twitter seems to believe it won’t be. Lefty Twitter is increasingly in agreement. 

But if delivering jobs and prosperity is worthless in the face of a race war, maybe democracy isn’t a good system of government after all. Maybe, in that case, strong man rule is the only possible outcome, hoping that the strong man has smart Mandarins behind him.

If the President is wrong, maybe it’s time all of us learned Chinese.

Bubbles Don’t Really Pop

History will record that the Trump Bubble burst on January 6, with a coup attempt organized by Donald Trump. (The picture is from Doc Searls' blog.)

I have seen many bubbles pop in my experience as a business reporter. The best-known was the dot-com bubble. It popped on January 10, 2000 when Time Warner announced it would “acquire” AOL.

The precise date of the popping is only remembered in retrospect. At the time, business went on. That spring I attended a trade show called ad:tech, on my employer’s dime. Even a year later I was able to take my wife on a trip to Hawaii because of an Internet commerce conference on the Big Island.

My most vivid memory of that ad:tech conference was on a bus, heading back to our hotel after a day spent on the water, sponsored by an Internet ad agency that eventually sank with the rest. A young entrepreneur was complaining that each new round of funding was requiring more equity from him and generating less cash. “It’s unfair,” he whined.

I’m a cruel man. I laughed until I cried. Later, at the event’s award show, a block “CNN” ad won awards for creativity. I laughed until I cried again. The people around me thought I’d gone crazy. It was just that I saw the handwriting on the wall.

The point is that even after a bubble pops, many people will remain unaware of it. They will continue to take the bubble as a real thing. They’ll go in even-deeper. They’ll consider falling prices an opportunity, telling folks to “buy the dip.”

#NeverAgain

If #NeverAgain doesn’t apply to everyone it’s just special pleading.

This statement that nearly got me fired last week, from both my jobs. It’s a stance that, if made to a conservative Israeli in 2021, gets you branded an anti-semite.

Of course, even that term is loaded. Anti-semitism refers to prejudice against any semitic people. Palestinians are semites. So are all Arabs. How Israelis can commit daily outrages against Palestinians and call their critics anti-semite is beyond me. But there it is.

In saying this, I’m not denying the Holocaust or diminishing it. Most of the people I grew up around were children of survivors, or the soldiers who liberated them. But genocide is not the unique property of Jews. Armenians were victims of a genocide years before Hitler, no matter how much Turks reject that even today.

White Americans committed genocide against the native Americans, a fact obvious whenever you look into the eyes of Mexican immigrants. Most are descended from Indians. We killed ours. The Spanish just enslaved theirs.

America’s genocide, meant to create “living room” for European settlers, became Hitler’s model for his eastern war, German “lebensraum.” Another American idea that turned out to be nonsense was “eugenics,” the idea that certain races were genetically superior. (In fact, genetic diversity makes a species stronger.) Hitler adopted that, too.

The Holocaust was born in America.

We still hear echoes of it in Republican rhetoric. They won’t be “replaced?” By whom? Immigrants are as human as Tucker Carlson.

Genocide is more than prejudice. It’s more than oppression, or murder. It’s mass murder, meant to exterminate an entire race of people. Americans are committing genocide as I write this. We make guns into totems and kill 100 Americans each day with them. We ignore science and have lost 550,000 in one year. Why won’t Republicans speak out? Because most of the victims are black or brown or immigrants. Never again? Really?

Class Struggle in the 2020s

In the 2020s there are generally two classes of people. (The Class Sketch was first broadcast in 1966. See the whole sketch here.) 

There are the highly educated with their hands on the code. Then there are the uneducated whose actions are controlled by the code.

The result is that instead of having three economic classes in America we mostly have two. Both sides feel bad about it.

The controlling class, understanding that human potential has value, support all kinds of aid to the controlled. We’re liberals. We’re “woke.” We oppose discrimination because it’s inefficient. We support education because we want more of us. Health care, infrastructure, all the social costs that let us focus on the work we do rather than the rest of life, we’re all for it.

The controlled class sees accepting aid as demeaning and they have they pride. It may be all they have, but it’s a potent political force. Knowing that they lack skills, they’re also deathly afraid of being replaced. They lash out in anger at anyone they think might do this – at minorities, at gays, at smart women. They’re focused on protecting what they have.

Tech Needs People

On the surface the economic policies of Joe Biden, Ronald Reagan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt look very different.

They’re not. Each path has been designed toward the same aim, benefitting a dominant industry.

Today that industry is computer technology – chips, software, and the cloud. Look at the latest Forbes 400. That’s where the money is. Found a tech company and, if you’re lucky, you can become a billionaire. Jeff Bezos likes Bidenomics.

What do tech companies need? What is the gating factor to their growth? It’s people. To be specific, smart people. It doesn’t matter what color the skin, what the brains’ sex is or who they love. Can’t get out of your wheelchair? You could become Stephen Hawking.

Educated, motivated, empowered minds are what make technology happen. What do such minds need? Security, challenges, the ability to chase their dreams, unencumbered by other worries. It’s true they need the three-legged stool of capitalism, democracy, and personal liberty. But they also need time to focus on the task at hand, all the time they can get. If you’re worried about your kids or your parents, if you’re worried about your health, that’s mental energy that’s not going into the work. Tech needs all of that it can find to discover the next big thing.

Redistribution of Technology Wealth

The redistribution of technology’s wealth is indeed trickier than I thought. 

When I first began covering open source in 2005, Amazon.Com was worth $19.6 billion, Google had just passed $100 billion  and Facebook was a start-up.

The “incumbent” software companies of that time were IBM, which was worth $140 billion, Oracle at $63 billion, and Microsoft at $273 billion.

Open source was an underdog technology. Closed source or “proprietary” software was where the money was. You licensed software. The company that developed it accepted all the costs of growing and maintaining it. The cloud was barely a gleam in Larry Page’s eye, a headache made necessary by Google’s roaring success in search.

Adam Smith Was Wrong

Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations is treated, by conservatives, with the reverence Marxists offer Das Kapital.

Both are books of political philosophy. Both are also wrong.

Smith’s mistake is the most important one today. He believed that prosperity would naturally incline the wealthy toward the common good. This is true, for some. For Bill Gates, wealth is a responsibility, as it was for John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It’s a tool to be deployed toward the good of all.

But that’s not true for all wealthy people, especially in technology. As a political force, wealth has generally been deployed on behalf of more wealth for the wealthy. In our time this has created a self-perpetuating economic elite, where heirs have greater fortunes than the men who made them, and greater political power to pile ever higher on their own children and grandchildren, while billions remain Les Miserables,

For capitalism to resemble a moral force, this needs to change. It needs to become as easy for people to fall as to rise. Right now, rising to wealth is a long, long shot, and wealthy wastrel bros go on-and-on. Having power invested in people with no interest in the common good isn’t democracy, it’s feudalism.

The Trump years made this clear. Money can’t be our god, an end unto itself. That’s what Adam Smith believed. Adam Smith was no Marxist.

This Will Get Me in Trouble

Asked what his members wanted the answer of union legend Samuel Gompers was simple. “More.” 

Despite being encouraged by liberal interests, unions are the most conservative institutions society has. They advanced most during the 1930s, when manufacturers sought to control input costs and keep production going. Remember, too, that the Great Depression was caused by deflation. Labor assured limited inflation.

While Cloud Czars like Google and Amazon create deflation, they also fight unions because unions limit the flexibility they see as essential to their mission, fostering rapid change.

Some act surprised that Amazon is fighting this battle in Alabama. Bessemer is next to Birmingham, the state’s industrial heart. Birmingham was first called the “Magic City” because the steel mills there seemed to spring up by magic. It’s not an antebellum town. It was, for many years, a union town.

The Big Political Story of 2021

Money is walking away from the GOP. (Shown, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.)

This has been going on for some time. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and New York, the places where money is made, generally vote for Democrats. They do this because Democrats deliver what technology wants. Tech runs on brains. It’s always in the market for more of them. Brains need training, they need to be empowered, they want to be recruited, they like to be comfortable.

This is the big economic change of our time, a move from resources to brains as the gating factor to growth. Resources need force to secure them. Manufacturing needs hands to run machines. Tech needs brains.

The news hasn’t gotten to everyone. Wall Street sharpies think they know more than the market. There are tech executives who want to corner the market on brains and think other brains are a threat.

These views are wrong for the economy.

Still. It’s hard for money to switch sides. The Republican Party is the natural home of money. That’s been true since the 1860s. For generations, however, money sided with progress. Progress is the root of the word progressive. Both Roosevelts ran as progressives. They wanted progress. So did most businesspeople.

The Golden Rule

American politics has always followed the Golden Rule.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

We have always lived with Jeffersonian ideals in a Hamiltonian system. When enslaving people seemed to pay, slave states ran our politics. When railroads and utilities dominated, they ran it. When manufacturing dominated, auto executives took power. When resources dominated, we were run by oil men.

During my working life, technology has gradually come to power. I’ve written before how Barack Obama was given power by Google, a giant database that could be used to identify and activate every voter. Trump represented a revolt by the resource industries, their bankers, and their backers in the military-industrial complex. More important, he used tech against its own interests.