Dana Blankenhorn

1876: Original Sin, Republican Hell

Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are not unprecedented.

Republicans have already won twice this century without getting the most votes. Gore outpolled Bush. Clinton outpolled Trump. If just 45,000 votes in a few states had gone the other way, Trump would have won again.

But this isn’t new. Twice in the 19^th century Republicans won the White House while losing the popular vote. The 1888 election, with Benjamin Harrison beating Grover Cleveland, was like 2016.

It’s the 1876 election that is the Republicans’ original sin.

After 8 years of Reconstruction, with the South occupied, Wall Street was tired of it. New York had never been behind Lincoln’s War. The Panic of 1873, caused by New York greed, was still laid entirely at the feet of Washington. Mark Twain’s least successful book, The Gilded Age, is also the one he didn’t write by himself. Charles Dudley Warner, an essayist, was co-author. It’s as if Mozart wrote an opera with Salieri. It's the very definition of gilded, and history isn't fooled. 

But the book’s name became that of the era. The late 19^th century was truly gilded. Wealth was designed to impress, but it was all show. There was nothing behind it. Speculation ran rampant, and big railroad owners were like wolves. I’m considered out of step for saying this but the Progressive Era’s reforms were driven by Wall Street, by men like J.P. Morgan, forced to personally step in and stop the Panic of 1893, acting again in 1907. The only solution for the excesses of the market, it would turn out, was the firm hand of government. When everyone is a crook, civilization requires cops.

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.

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.

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

The Cult of Trump

The most important thing to know about Donald Trump is this.

He’s a cult leader.

There is nothing unAmerican about that. America has been the home to cults since its founding. The first half of the 19^th century was filled with them. The Mormon Church is just one example, but there are many others.

Don’t throw your magic underwear at me for writing that. Most churches begin as cults. Their founders claim to have “special knowledge” and cult leaders pass it to the congregation. The early members gain a special status, because they have the special knowledge. It’s something all western religions have in common. We all want to be the chosen people, because it means that others weren’t chosen, and you’re automatically better than they are.

Decoration Day

The holiday known as Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day.

It was established in 1868 to memorialize the Union victory over the South and the Slave Power.

The pro-slavery attitudes of the South never died, however. It became the “Noble Cause.” It remains ignoble today.

Jim Crow is one testament to it. So is opposition to the Civil Rights cause, the “duality of the southern thing.” Whites prohibiting “miscegenation” made every mixed-race baby a crime until 1967, six years after our 44^th President was born. I’ll explain why this is funny in a moment.

We Are All Founders

There are two distinguishing features to the existential crises in American history.

The first is it makes us return to first principles, causing us to re-examine, criticize, and eventually deify the past.

In the run-up to World War II, a crisis that really began four score and seven years ago, in 1932, there was a vogue for Abraham Lincoln. Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey did popular biopics, and his memorial became a sort of Ground Zero for what was best in our political natures.

In our time, Lin Manuel Miranda did this to Alexander Hamilton while Ron Chernow, who did the biography of Hamilton on which the movie was based, proceeded to resurrect U.S. Grant. The purpose of both these pieces of art was political. Miranda wanted to highlight the importance of immigrants in getting the job done. Chernow wanted to push back against a Confederate-inspired view of history that still, 150 years later, has those who supported human rights being disparaged while those they fought are exalted.

We love to call America the world’s oldest democracy. We revere the founders as giants.  We even call them the Founders.

But the original Constitution was profoundly anti-democratic. Women couldn’t vote. Neither could blacks, nor native Americans. The franchise was reserved for white males, and not even all of them. You had to be a property owner.

The 1979 Game

When you win the popular vote by 9.5% but still lose ground, as Democrats did November 6, your problems are systemic.

The result underlies tech’s obligation to come out of its shell and fight for the political system that birthed it.

Tech moguls have done some things. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Marc Benioff bought Time Magazine, Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. The key to gaining more power will be in creating journalism business models beholden to tech interests.

Tech must do to Bizarro Carter what oil did to Jimmy Carter, and for the same reason -- to protect its self-interest.

The Monument

The Civil War is still being fought. It can still be lost.

One way it’s being fought is through monuments.

Early in the 20th Century, groups of southerners seeking to glorify white supremacy and the “Lost Cause” built monuments in town squares around the country, including in DeKalb County, Georgia, where I live.

Stone Mountain is the largest such monument. There are many others. One sits in front of the old county courthouse in Decatur.

When these monuments are threatened, their supporters swarm, claiming they have nothing to do with treason, or white supremacy, but are simply meant to commemorate heroes and a part of American history.

It’s hard to fight them, on behalf of an empty town square.