Dana Blankenhorn

Trump-ism and the Overton Window

Here’s something I never wanted to write, and something it will pain you to read.

Donald Trump is the most consequential President of our lifetime.

He has done far more than Hillary Clinton ever could, ever would, or ever thought of.

Yes, it’s all terrible stuff. Consequential doesn’t mean good. It means significant. Adolf Hitler “won” Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” multiple times. That doesn’t mean he was good, or that Time liked him. But when it comes to the history of the 20^th century, he was consequential.

Like Hitler, Trump is doing truly terrible things. Constantly. There’s not enough time to list it all.

Moore’s Third Law of Management

What other analysts call “big tech” I refer to as “Cloud Czars.”

I do it for a reason.

What distinguishes Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook isn’t their managements’ “ruthlessness.” It’s their heavy investment, over many years, in cloud computing centers.

Even early in the 2010s, it took $1 billion of capital each quarter to get into the cloud market. That has only increased with time. Now it averages $4 billion each quarter.

The money must come from somewhere. Cloud is a capital-intensive business. If you’re handing out dividends, it’s because you don’t know what else to do with the shareholders’ cash.

The 1944 Game

Where are we in terms of confronting the Trump Crisis, the great political challenge of our lives?

In terms of my parents’ generation I’d say we’re in 1944. In terms of their ancestors, it’s 1864.

We’ve passed the turning point. The death of George Floyd, the botched response to COVID-19, and the Administration’s response combined to help us turn a corner, as when the graph of the Georgia pandemic peaks at a great height and seems to turn. They were D-Day.

But we haven’t won yet. And we’re exhausted now, just as we were then.

My family is especially pessimistic. They see Trump controlling the agenda, they see his acolytes running police and the military, they fear the 2020 election won’t happen. These are reasonable fears.

But we had similar fears back in the day, easy to see by just looking at what people were doing at the time.

Movie goers remember 1944 for Going My Way,” with Bing Crosby,  or Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland, movies where the war had little or no role. It’s also remembered as the year of Bogie and Bacall, in To Have or Have Not.  Film noir, created mostly by German emigres, was rising even as the war ground on.

Good Trouble

My Congressman died last week.

John Lewis wasn’t built to be an executive. He was a legislator, the conscience of his time. He absorbed the blows and lived to become an icon.

John Lewis believed in “Good Trouble.” He practiced it, for longer than any other American, 60 years. In time, that’s the distance between Thomas Jefferson’s election and that of Abraham Lincoln. It’s the distance between Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. From lunch counters, to city streets, to the U.S. Capitol, John Lewis never let up.

Good trouble means pushing people in power to do more, being a pest even to your allies. It means confronting evil, standing for what’s right. It means being unafraid, in the way Gandhi was unafraid, in the way Dr. King was unafraid.

In the way John Lewis was unafraid. Whenever I met him, he was gracious, wise, and conscious of his life’s meaning. He always humbled me.

But John Lewis was no plaster saint. When he wanted something, he could be ruthless. This is told in a story I witnessed. While it didn’t make his obituaries, it was featured in that of the man whose career he ruined, Julian Bond. 

Public Goods and Private Goods

Democrats re-made Woodrow Wilson into a liberal to win the peace of WWII.

The myth was that the peace of the Civil War, and that of WWI, were punitive. This hurt economies and led to new war.

Determined not to make those mistakes again Roosevelt called his alliance against Hitler the “United Nations.” His wife, the forever-underestimated Eleanor Roosevelt, was a key actor in creating today’s UN. FDR’s top general, George Marshall, became even more important after FDR’s death because of the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan did more than just pour money into Europe’s economies. It created a new economic model. It assumed that, while private goods are important, there should also be growing demand for public goods. These include education, health care, infrastructure, defense, civil law, and the environment.

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.