Dana Blankenhorn

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 Twilight of Nationalism

If mankind still exists in 2119 their historians will write about this era as the Twilight of Nationalism.

Nationalism was essential when economies were based on resources, machines or muscle. In the era of clouds and devices it’s increasingly irrelevant. The global nature of our existential crisis makes nationalism an outright impediment to the survival of mankind.

Thus, it’s no coincidence that nationalism has been a rising force in the decade now ending. Just as it concentrates the mind to know you’re to be executed in the morning, so it is for leaders and political movements. Seeing sunset in the distance you do what you can and ignore the consequences you know are coming.

The Trump election acts as a midpoint and permission slip for all this. Nationalism was already on the march, in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia, through the agency of Russia, when Trump came to office. But Trump has given nationalistic impulses around the world permission to act. There is no American opposition to ultra-nationalism anywhere, no alliance worth protecting, no counter example to follow.

Thus, nations push their boundaries outward, fearing any force that might threaten their power, and ignoring the natural internationalism essential to economic growth and climate action.

That’s why Brazil is going after its rain forest. That’s why India is going after Kashmir. It is why China is going after Hong Kong. That’s why England wants to detach from Europe, why Eretz Israel is a thing, why Saudi Arabia seeks dominion over its whole peninsula. If you can afford it, nationalists think, seize the day. The window is closing.

One Nation. At War. With Itself

In August of 2019, the United States is a nation at war with itself.

We are at war with fundamental changes that must occur if the country, and the world, are to be saved from the Industrial Revolution.

We’re also at war with the essentials of economic growth in our time.

As I have written many times, the gating factor in technology is human capital. Trained, eager, free minds, willing to think the previously unthinkable, to model it and make it reality. This is where money is made today.

The more such people you have, the fewer of the other kind, the more money you make. The more freedom these people have, the greater their access to money, to new ideas, and to one another, the more your society prospers. This is Israel’s secret sauce.

Resources don’t matter. Machines don’t matter. Muscle doesn’t matter. Minds matter, more than anything.

The 2020 Game

The Tell on what will happen in 2020 came in late July of 2019.

Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, attorney general William Barr and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin (far right), issued existential threats against the Cloud Czars. Under Trump’s orders.

The Cloud Czars, for those unfamiliar with my current work at InvestorPlace, are Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Google, Apple and Facebook. As technology has come to dominate the economy, the Czars have come to dominate technology.

They’re the Cloud Czars because the tool which dominates technology is cloud computing. It combines parallel processing with virtual operating systems and open source techniques to hold down costs.

The 1979 Game

An industry’s takeover of politics tends to be defensive.

It happens when that industry seems to be riding high. It acts against leaders whom neutral observers may credit with that rise.

I covered this story 40 years ago. In Houston.

The oil industry did great in 1979, despite Jimmy Carter’s cardigan sweater. Saudi Arabia, more Texas’ ally than America’s, had proven the economic power of resources with its 1973 embargo. Iranian mullahs believed they could use the same economic force against America. Oil understood this as a threat to its interests. Carter saw oil’s profits as leverage he could use against the Iranians.

Tolerance, Technology, and the American Hitler

Donald J. Trump is the closest thing to Hitler America has yet produced.

He is the crisis. In becoming the primary object and fascination of the world, Trump has revealed both his character and that of everyone supporting him.

He is a racist. He is a fascist. He seeks dominion over the world only to seize its wealth for himself and his friends. His allies use power only as a tool against other religions, or other races, or against strawmen (and women) of their own devising. They beat the chains of their followers into swords.

We know this, now. In the summer of 2019, many believe there’s nothing to be done, that his final victory is inevitable. They see Democrats as feckless and divided. More important they see technology as Trump’s ally.

It’s this last point I come to challenge. While there are features in technology that assist any surveillance state, and the war of all against all, technology as an industry is the greatest boon to human liberty yet created.

The reason, as I’ve written here many times, is that human capital is now the gating factor to economic growth. It’s the human mind’s ability to conceive of new problems, and of ways to solve those problems, that delivers economic growth. Access to capital, and to other minds that might execute on plans, becomes a multiplying factor.

But first comes the idea. First comes the experiment. First comes science, and engineering. Later you need money, and marketing. All these things are maximized where human minds are free, where capital can choose its own home, and where people can choose their own leaders.

Capitalism. Democracy. Liberty. The more of these you have, within an ordered system, the more growth you have. It’s the need for order, for restraint, that has many people confused into thinking China’s rise at America’s expense is inevitable.

Fall of the House of Oil

There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.

It’s happened.

Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.

The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago. 

FUD the Free Web

It shocks me how many tech writers and self-proclaimed liberals have joined the recent attack on the Free Web.

That’s what Facebook is. That’s what Google is.

They’re the free web.

They don’t charge you for using them. They’re free. Access isn’t free, and neither is most of the information the Web provides. Most of the news today is hidden behind paywalls, available to subscribers only.

But Google and Facebook are free.

The attackers say that on these services “you are the product.” They like to say that because they can afford the cost of subscribing to all the things which interest them.

Google and Facebook have built over $1.3 trillion in market cap, and almost $200 billion per year in annual revenue, with an advertising business model. They won the market and invested their money in building what we today call the cloud. Unlike the phone companies and everyone else, they invested ahead of their growth. Facebook put $1 billion/quarter into its server farms before it had the revenue to back it up. These are risk-takers. They’re what capitalism is all about. They’re Amurica.

This Medium Cries Freedom

Throughout the decade now ending there has been a steadily growing drumbeat of elite opinion to the effect that this medium enables tyranny.

I blame Trump. The Russian manipulation of Facebook made Trump possible. Now tech must live down that legacy.

It means every collection of private data, whether by corporations, government or hackers, whatever the motive, is seen as evidence we need to throw our computers out the window. Every new technology meant to thwart abuse, meanwhile, is seen as a threat to human liberty.

Tech can’t win.

Technology can, in the hands of a ruthless dictator, enable terrible abuses. But there’s a limit.

The Political Triumph of Tech

Some 40 years ago, when I was commuting up the West Loop of I-610 for the Houston Business Journal, oil seemed to be in big political trouble.

We know how that turned out.

Today, in 2019, it seems that “Big Tech” is as friendless as “Big Oil” was then. But history sort of rhymes. These only seem to be different days, and you don’t have to be able to rhyme benzodiazepine to figure it out.

Reporters without brains call the reaction against tech their big story. But it’s the reaction to the reaction we need to be looking at.