Dana Blankenhorn

Mark Zuckerberg, Grow Up

So What The Fuck happened?

How in the name of holy hell did Donald Trump, a lifetime con artist who never did a damn thing for anyone but himself, get elected President over someone who had spent her lifetime in public service on behalf of the less fortunate?

It took me weeks, and a full course of antidepressants, to figure it out.

The answer is that he hacked the Internet. Not the whole Internet, but the Internet medium that has emerged to drive politics in the Internet Age we now live in.

Trump’s supporters could do this, because those who created the medium refused to take responsibility for it. The people who built the industry refused to curate the product and protect it from liars.

Bizarro Carter

What happened last night makes no sense unless you believe, as I do, in the life cycles of history. The only way to accept it and to fight it is through an understanding of economic determinism.

First, life cycles. People believe what they believe for a lifetime. It’s why a set of political assumptions, what I have called a Political Thesis, can hold people even after it no longer works. The Nixon Thesis of Conflict stopped working under George W. Bush, so Barack Obama was elected.

Obama was a Reaganesque figure at a time that called for someone who was more like Nixon. We needed someone who knew their enemies and would be ruthless against them. We should have nominated Hillary Clinton in 2008. Obama was too passive in the face of obstruction, too complex as people came to demand simple answers. He will be judged a failure until someone else makes him a success.

My Rebellion Against Trumpistan

I realized recently I have spent my whole adult life fighting quietly against Trumpistan and what it represents.

Now, my late father would have loved him some Trump. Despite an 8^th grade education, he spent his whole life in the middle class. Freeways meant freedom to him. He thought he was being guided by passions, but mostly he was lucky. He was a small businessman who got out of electronics repair in 1973, when it was about to collapse, and used the Small Business Administration to go into the “security business,” buying a lock shop with borrowed money. Dad’s biggest advantage was that he was white. Being white let him buy into a safe suburb, which meant his kids went to good schools.

I didn’t like my dad, for reasons unrelated to this story. I saw freeways as dangerous. Instead of seeking a home in the suburbs, I sought one in-town. Never mind the crime, never mind the blacks and the browns and the dirt. To me freedom meant my bicycle.

Trump’s Rebellion

 I have written here for over 10 years now about the cycles of American politics – crisis, thesis, validation, anti-thesis, excess, and crisis again. Every generation goes through its own version of the fire. Mine has gone through it twice.

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict, which emerged from the experience of Vietnam, was my generation’s first such crisis. It taught many false lessons, but one part of it was true, and was put well by Gerald Ford after Nixon flew away.

“Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” 

While the Nixon Thesis held throughout most of my life, the knees jerking whenever Democrats seemed to threaten, it held because of the Ford corollary. The order we defend is the order of our Constitution, and our laws, which are more important than any man or woman. It’s a theme President Obama has gone to again-and-again as Donald Trump challenged it.

The Limits of Vision

I usually see the future of technology, business and politics pretty well.

But it doesn’t always help to know what’s coming.

It certainly didn’t in 2000, when my predictions of a dot-com collapse came true, and when I went into a profound October depression, seeing clearly both the Bush election and the horrors that would follow it.

Knowing that the “big shitpile” of bad mortgages would collapse the economy in 2006 did not allow me to escape from its impact in 2008, either. My retirement savings collapsed like everyone else’s.

There have been compensations.

My understanding of how urban centers would be rebuilt, based on what happened in Houston during my years there, caused me to buy a house that is now worth 10 times what I paid for it. My understanding of clouds and devices, based on years of careful study of the technology landscape, allowed me to buy the right stocks in this decade and make for a good retirement.

But there are other easy predictions I can’t do anything about.

The Second Debate

The second debate in the race to control heaven, between the Virgin Mary and Satan, was getting off to a rocky start.

For Mary.

“Why am I not 50 points ahead of you?”

“Because I’m smart,” retorted the Prince of Darkness. “Every angel wants to be like me. They want to have my freedom. They want to have my wealth. They are tired of reporting to some feudal lord on high, and eating the same stale, tasteless wafers.”

“The wafers are not stale. They’re the body and blood of…”

How Democracy Dies

One of the great unanswered questions of my youth, when I was a student, was how it was that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan “happened.”

I can now answer that question.

All these horrors were created, as our world is deeply threatened, by a disbelief in objective truth, and in democracy itself.

We know a little about how things went two generations ago. The greed and corruption of democratic institutions, combined with the mass suffering of millions into a thick sludge through which it was easy to sell the idea that democracy was inherently corrupt, that free markets were never going to help people, that even objective truth didn’t exist.

The 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues

We are 8 years removed from the last generational crisis, but the underlying issues of that crisis have not yet been dealt with.

Welcome to the 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues.

In 1940, the demagogues were organized. Germany, Japan and Italy were on the march. France was overrun and Britain was invaded. This made it easy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eligible for a third term, to pivot from being “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win the War,” although there remained Republican isolationists, and even some who questioned the premise of democracy, against whom he fought a propaganda war with help from German refugees and British patriots like Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Foreign Correspondent”  remains a classic of the genre.

Bridge to the Founders’ Generation

During my vacation this year, I surprised myself by delving into early American history, and found some comforting parallels to our own time.

Specifically I read The Quartet, by Joseph Ellis, about the four key figures who drove the creation and adoption of our Constitution, and John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit by James Traub.

What I found was the pre-history of my own profession, journalism, and the press.

In the late 18^th century, and early 19^th century, journalists were simply the owners of printing presses. They were little more than local bloggers, and their opinions were often for sale to the highest bidder. There was no one doing “objective” news. People understood broad events like the French Revolution, but what they thought of those events was driven by money, specifically that money put into driving opinion by printing press owners and by politicians controlling them.

Over the last 20 years, American journalism has moved strongly back toward that model. That gatekeeper function, the pride of The New York Times and even CNN in the 20^th century, turns out to have been a mere product of successful business models, which aggregated an educated readership and then sold access to that market, for a premium price, to advertisers.

I asked, 20 years ago, how hungry publishers were. I encouraged them to take the opportunity the Internet offered to drive their readers further down the sales funnel, not just selling billboards along the roadside by engaging in real commerce.

How It Can Still Be Lost

As this was written, the Presidential race looked to be all wrapped up.

Hillary Clinton will be the 45^th President. I thought that in January, and the polls show it to be true in August, when it counts. Donald Trump is the most unqualified candidate since Andrew Johnson, and most writers can’t find anyone to compare him with.

But the Republican Party is not imploding. Far from it. What Trump has done is attach a host of moochers onto the Party of Bush, and below the Presidential line that alliance is holding. Trump voters are going GOP down the line, even for candidates who oppose the programs they depend upon, and regular Republicans are planning on showing up for the down-ballot races.

People talk about this being a McGovern election, but they forget that Nixon was so obsessed with his own performance that the Republican Party that year made no gains in Congress. As a result, the Watergate Committee, and then the House Judiciary Committee, both had Democratic majorities. This killed Nixon. Nixon may have thought that the alliance with Southern Democrats that had gotten his agenda through would hold when he was under direct assault. He was wrong.

If we have a McGovern election in November, Republicans will be able to play the same game over the next four years they’ve played over the last eight. Obstruct, refuse, and blame Democrats for the failure to progress. Eventually, they will get their act together, take the White House, and do most of what Trump proposed this year.

There are two ways to fight back, two elements that are essential for the rest of the campaign.