Dana Blankenhorn

The Illegitimate Fears of Trumpistan

I spent this week in Minnesota, preparing my son for the rigors of graduate school.

I met a lot of people.

I met a woman in a hijab at our hotel, working the desk, and another in the halls, preparing to clean rooms.

I met another immigrant in a sandwich shop, working the register. And I met others at gas stations along the way, stocking the shelves.

I heard Mandarin in the street, on the campus of my son’s university. I heard it a lot.

When Trumpistanis talk about refusing entry to immigrants, we hear them cheer The Donald calling Mexicans “rapists” or those with hijabs “terrorists.” The press thinks they want to restrict specific types of immigrants from getting into our country, but when they chant “build the wall,” or curse Khizr Khan, I think they’re saying something else.

They’re not really saying no to specific immigrants over understandable concerns like crime and terrorism. I think they’re saying no to all immigrants, because they see the bright futures of their children being stolen before their eyes.

Final Warning

I have said before that America is a fortunate country.

The so-called United Kingdom is proving that right now.

The Brexit vote is a warning. It shows what can happen if income inequality becomes too large, and leads people to believe in demagogues.

The same trends that caused this catastrophe are alive in our own country. They were alive in the Bernie Sanders campaign, whose British analog is Jeremy Corbyn. They were alive in the Brexit campaign, the American analog being Donald Trump.

A Week in Ireland

My late father was German, but my mother is a full-throated Irishwoman, born Mathilda Gertrude Edwina O’Donnell. You don’t get much more Irish than that without potatoes coming out of your ears, a shillelagh whipping the kids’ backsides and “Danny Boy” playing through the speakers of your mind at full blast. (That's Tillie on the left, Fred on the right, with me and my wife between, 

Now, a caveat. I was named for my mother’s grandma O’Donnell, who was born Anna Korzeniowski, in New Bedford, Mass., in 1867. Anna’s dad was Polish, her mother English. Dana is a Polish name, and sounds as much like Anna as my sister Michael’s name sounds like Mathilda. It took me six decades to figure all this out – the Polish origins of Dana are why I’m the only Dana Blankenhorn you’ll ever see or hear from (a great present from my mother to the Internet age). But my grandmother was born a Cooney, and they’re even more Irish than the O’Donnells.

What this means was that I just had to make a pilgrimage to Ireland. I had to go to Ireland, in the worst way.

The Age of Human Capital

The 20^th century was dominated by resource capitalism. The great wars of that century were all built around a desire of great powers for direct access to natural resources – coal, gold, diamonds, and most especially oil.

The crisis we have just passed through, the one that began with the economic collapse of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama, is the last paroxysm of this old order.

Oil’s control of our economy is fading, just as manufacturing faded in the 1970s, production economics faded in the 1930s, and unregulated monopoly faded in the 1890s.

What is Money?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

On my new beat, at Seeking Alpha and TheStreet.Com, people talk about money all the time.

Money is, in fact, the great mystery of my working life. What is it?

Is gold money? Is a dollar money? What makes them money?

What makes them money is that they're a store of value people understand and accept. There's an assumption that if the world comes crashing down tomorrow people with gold will have money but people with paper won't.

I no longer think that's right, because the only value gold can store is excess value, and if there's no excess value to store it's not money.

England and the Threat from Immigration

When Americans think of a “threat” from immigration, we are thinking demographically. (Click below to meet the two gentlemen to the right.)

We think, rationally or not, of millions of low-skill workers, either taking public services from us or low-wage jobs. “They're too lazy to work. They're stealing our jobs.” 

England is a completely other country, especially in its politics, and I sometimes wondered why until I came across the story of Yougov.

I was mainly looking for an interesting Seeking Alpha story, some hidden gem that just reported earnings. That's not Yougov.

Oh, it is of some mild interest that they're buying up U.S. market research outfits like Harrison Group and Definitive Insights, so that it now has more employees here than in Old Blighty.

Unemployment and Mexicanization

Here's something no conservative will tell you.

There is no such thing as unemployment. Not in America.

There is, instead, a mismatch among our skills, our expectations, and the political value of work.

Go into a restaurant. Order lunch. Now, if you can, go into the kitchen. Chances are most of the people there will be Mexicans – cooks, dishwashers, everyone behind the scenes. Mexicans probably butchered your meat, picked the vegetables on your plate, packed the fruit. It's likely they, or their Central American brothers and sisters, mowed your lawn today, and wiped the butt of your aging mother in her nursing home. They may be caring for your kids right now.

Mexican labor is everywhere. Wherever there are employers who want to exploit workers in order to increase profits and keep prices down, you'll find Mexican labor. In Europe, it's Turkish and Serbian labor. In Japan, Philippine or Chinese labor.

It's not an immigration problem. It's a market problem. Employers aren't paying wages Americans will accept. If Americans took those wages they'd be living like Mexicans.

But when you drive labor costs down, you degrade the market you're selling to.

Mbeki Ate My Book

Regular readers may wonder why you haven't seen any fiction here for a long time.

The reason is Thabo Mbeki.

When I began The Chinese Century, then The American Diaspora, I was trying to distance myself from the reality around me, and building (in my mind) a different kind of utopia on a foreign shore. I recognized that from the start, but it didn't stop me. When I picked up The Duke of Oil it was with the intention of finishing that story out, embracing the idea of a different energy future and tracking the fall of the Bush Administration characters who had brought us to this end.

But as I wrote the idea of a South African utopia, as opposed to the dystopian reality, became less and less possible to me.

The reason was Thabo Mbeki.

The American Disease

I have no scientific proof of this, but I have long believed ADHD to be the American Disease.

Up to 5% of Americans are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm one of them. I'm creative, I'm quick, I tend to being a polymath. I also have trouble finishing anything longer than a blog post, I'm quick to anger, and I have enormous trouble concentrating on anything I'm told I have to concentrate on (as opposed to what I want to concentrate on). I am very difficult to compel.

In other words, I am both hyper-focused and distractable, I can be charming but I'm prone to depression. These are symptoms typical of what I call "male" ADHD, the kind you hear about and read about most often. I have likened it, most popularly, to having Robin Williams in my head. (This also brings a tendency to self-medicate. Robin's had two stints in rehab.)

There is another kind of ADHD, which may be dramatically under-diagnosed. I learned about it from my daughter. I call it "female" ADHD. In this version you become Robin's audience. You're lost in your own world, and breaking out into the real world can be a struggle. This often comes with learning disabilities -- dyslexia in my daughter's case.

So why do I call this the American disease? Partly because very few Europeans have it. To many Europeans this proves Americans are making the whole thing up. But think about it. If you were living in, say Germany or Italy 100 years ago, or in Ireland or Scotland 200 years ago, or in England 300 years ago, and you had ADHD, what's the first thing you'd think of doing?

Right, getting the heck out of there. Going to America.

This Week's Clue: Parti le Confédéré

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 26  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of July 2.

Enjoy.

---

 

It is very seldom that national parties collapse. The most recent such event I can recall is the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada,  which ceased to exist as a national force in 1993. A successor party finally came to power last year.

Usually, failed national parties go through a long period of reform and come back wearing new clothes. This is what Labour did under Tony Blair. It's what the nation's Conservatives are now trying to do under David Cameron.

But can that happen when the party in question finds itself isolated to a regional base, more important to an ethnic base? That's what is happening to the Republican Party, which is devolving into something like Canada's Parti Quebecois, only based in the old Southern Confederacy. (To the right, that party's favorite for the Presidency.)

In the Midwest, farmers are abandoning Republicanism. The Mountain West is suddenly friendly toward Democrats. The Midwest sees Republicans on the run in most every state. The party is nearly extinct in the Northeast. On the West Coast, only Alaska remains GOP country, and that party may soon be speaking from inside a jail cell. Republicans who succeed outside the Confederacy  (like Arnold Schwarzenegger) do so only by leaning into the prevailing Democratic thesis, accepting its premises and seeking moderation.

But in the old Confederacy, and especially in the Deep South, where I live, the Republican Party is advancing across a broad front. In Georgia's 10th CD, for instance, Democrats didn't even make the run-off. Mississippi is now seen as a model for Republican governance, a model Louisiana seems anxious to emulate. In Florida and Tennessee, the Republican Party is strong, in South Carolina and Texas it's dominant, and everywhere else in the South it is competitive.

Outside the old Confederacy, this is just not the case. And one can argue that some of the party's dominance in the South is attributable to Washington largesse, largesse you can expect to be pulled by a future Democratic government.

This is the bargain Nixon made. This is the final nail in the coffin of the Nixon Thesis. And there's a reason for it.

Race.