Dana Blankenhorn

Obama vs. Trump is Google vs. Facebook

There’s a false assumption in the land. Democrats are doomed in 2022.

For evidence, there’s the fact that parties in power lose in off-years. That’s been true 4 times in a row. But in 2002 Bush filled people with patriotic fervor. In 1998 Clinton filled them with anger over his impeachment. The real lesson is that political upsets happen when people are motivated. In or out doesn’t matter.

Republicans are in power in most states. Impunity is getting people angry. And when government is doing what you want, you’re as likely to relax Election Day as to crawl over crushed glass to vote.

The 2022 election will be a battle between Google and Facebook.

Barack Obama won because of Google. After holding a highly-publicized meetup with employees in 2007, the Obama campaign was created in Google’s image. It built giant voter databases, donor databases, volunteer databases. Based on those databases, it activated people through email to call on neighbors. It scaled the intimacy of the 2004 Dean campaign, which ran a popular blog but refused to build the database. It worked.

Donald Trump won because of Facebook. His team hacked the system. They used Facebook’s algorithm to gin up anger, to turn the social medium to their side. Anyone who clicked on a pro-Trump story was run down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They became immune to anything outside the conspiracy. It worked.

Trump ran an identical campaign in 2020. It didn’t work. In 2020 he was the incumbent. In 2020, America was going to hell in a hand cart. Reality triumphed over conspiracy.

Stacey Abrams, who lost Georgia narrowly in 2018 to a Trump-like opponent, drove much of what happened last year. Hers was an inside-outside effort. Inside, her FairFightAction learned how the rules worked and fought to keep them as they were. Outside her databases identified Democrats and activated them.

Eternal White Majority

When my Irish ancestors came to America, this is how they were portrayed.

The whole point of the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was to illustrate the contempt with which the Anglo-American majority treated Irish immigrants. They saw them as black.

The same thing happened later, with the Italians. Then with the Russians. But today you wouldn’t see Bruce Springsteen or Jerry Seinfeld portrayed as anything but white. Like Alec Baldwin. Like me.

When people write that America will soon be “majority non-white” this is what they’re ignoring. People can easily be made “white” when it’s convenient. By being made “white,” these same people can then look down upon other people, darker people.

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.

The End of the Beginning

Every American political crisis eventually leads to violence, to acts of war.

Vietnam was a real war, but so was the conflict over that war here in America. The Progressive Era, at the turn of the last century, saw sporadic violence throughout the period from 1890 to 1915.

Who wins the war is not always obvious at the time. I would argue it’s the side whose values define the next era which has won. Never mind that almost all the violence of the Progressive Era ran against the rights of workers. Their values won. Never mind that Nixon was elected, and re-elected, during the Vietnam Era. The protestors’ values won.

Every political crisis is an opportunity, and an obligation, for a new generation to stand up and be counted, to define what their America is all about.

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.

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.

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.