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.

Bin Laden Won

Twenty years ago, the fall of the American Empire began with the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Osama Bin Laden gambled that Americans would overreact, be driven crazy by the attack. He was right.

As a direct result America began a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that cost over $2 trillion. As a direct result we invaded and overran Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack.

Even after most Americans recognized the overreaction, electing Barack Obama in 2008, half the country remained consumed by fear. It was easy for the resource billionaires funding the Republican Party to transfer that hate onto Obama, then onto his party, then onto its individual members, just as 60 years earlier fear of Communism morphed into McCarthyism.

Thus came Trump. Thus came Trumpism.

Thanks to Trumpism’s excesses, almost half of us remain so tied to hate that we’d rather than die than take a vaccine. Most Americans, even most Texans, are against snitching on neighbors who miscarry. Most of us even believe in democracy. But enough of us stand against progress, and enough of those people are powerful, that as I write this the future of the American experiment remains uncertain.

Thanks to 9/11 and thanks to Trump, America no longer has any moral authority. China can get away with Xinjiang, and with seizing Hong Kong, because we look no better to the rest of the world.

Thanks to Trumpism, authoritarians are on the march and democracy is in retreat around the world. Putin can interfere in our elections, can use trolls to spin lies that tear at the heart of our system and prosperity. But we do nothing in response. Dictators simply close off the Internet from the outside, impose their own censorship on their people, and force feed propaganda to them. There’s an economic cost to all this. America’s technology dominates the world to an even greater degree in 2021 than in 2001. But that doesn’t matter.

Persistence vs. Passion

What America teaches me is that persistence, the lean of the majority, overcomes the passion of a minority.

Read any newspaper from the 1850s. Many northerners had sympathy for the South. In the South, Union sympathizers had to either keep quiet or pretend toward Confederate sympathy to survive. We all know how that turned out.

But the same thing happened in the 1890s, and the 1930s. Populists were always more passionate than progressives. Those opposing FDR were always louder than his supporters. Majorities are slow to move, and for those passionate on the majority side it’s frustrating.

The best lesson from my life was the 1960s. Those opposed to Vietnam were far more passionate than the “silent majority” who saw it as a Cold War activity. The War side won. It kept on winning for a generation. Pundits came to assume it would always be that way. Most still do.

I’ve tried to explain the back-and-forth in terms of what business needs. Cash crops like cotton represented the highest value of the 1840s. Railroads replaced them. Then utilities replaced the railroads, manufacturing replaced utilities, and resources replaced manufacturing.

Throughout my working life, technology has been rising. It now dominates. Politics is leaning toward what technology needs. That means immigration and education. It means climate activism and social equality. Clouds can leverage a single great mind to the value offered by thousands of mediocre ones.

Moore’s Law of Politics

There is no Moore’s Law of Politics. Quite the opposite.

As I have sought to explain in my continuing rewrites of my Moore’s Lore book  the values of our youth are taken into age. Longer lives mean obsolete beliefs bedevil democracy.

My own views were shaped by this generational delay. I believed that Democrats had a real shot in 2004, because we were a full generation removed from 1968. In fact, the 1960s dominated that campaign. So it was that when Barack Obama won, a man born in the 1960s I thought, well we won’t have Vietnam to kick around anymore. Again, I was wrong. The 2016 campaign was fought over the same old ground.

There are still voters who remember the 1970s, even the 1960s. I am one of them. But we’re finally a minority. While half the electorate was still over 50 in 2020 the median voter still had no memory of the Moon Landing.

Peace is also unknown to the average American voter. Most us of us grew up in the era of resources, of wars for oil, or the Cold War.

Impunity

Impunity is the essence of fascism.

Impunity is the idea that you can do anything, and never face consequences, because you’re the victim.

With impunity, all things are possible. War is possible. Lynching is possible. The Holocaust is possible.

It’s impunity that Republicans are deploying now in their fight to take back the country.

Impunity is displayed in many ways. It’s displayed individually, in groups, by mobs. When it’s deployed by cops it’s especially dangerous. Police impunity gives others the confidence they need to act out in the same way.

Impunity cares nothing about danger. It’s different from courage. Courage is conquering your own fear. Impunity is believing fear is a weapon that only you can be allowed to wield.  

Dealing with MAGA Abuse

America is in an abusive relationship with most of the Republican Party.

What do you do if you’re in an abusive relationship?

Every expert says the same thing.

You walk away.

This is what Democrats need to do. Walk away.

It’s hard, I know. When you turn away from an abuser they escalate. They scream. They threaten violence. Their lies become ever-more extreme. They’ll even make all sorts of promises if you just give in this once.

It’s hard to leave any abusive relationship. Women have died trying to leave abusive relationships. So have children. That’s why we have so many people doing the hard work of protecting the abused from the abusers. God bless them.

Law & Order Takes Time

Lefty Twitter has its undies in a bunch (as always).

It’s all about Trump and his henchmen. (Law & Order: SVU has now been on the air longer than the original show.)

The complaint is that justice has not yet been visited on any of them. In its way, a valid complaint. The fantasy that Biden might order Trump’s immediate arrest upon taking the oath was always just that.

What’s happening now is precisely what needs to happen. It’s far more delicious than the liberal fantasy.

After January 6, the FBI immediately began its investigations. As requisite prosecutors have had nominations approved, the Department of Justice followed.

Hundreds of insurrectionists have been arrested. More are being sought. Several have begun to squeal. A few have been sentenced. Others are awaiting trial.

Mississippi: The Model Republican State

The Civil War isn’t over. It can still be lost.

The Civil Rights movement isn’t over, either. It is being lost.

Nowhere is this truth more obvious than Mississippi.

Mississippi had about 2.1 million people in 1960. In 2020 it had 2.9 million. It was only two states to lose population during the decade of the cloud. Its economic growth is anemic. Growth is best when federal receipts expand during recessions, or during economic boom times when gambling rises.

If Mississippi were a country, and not getting federal aid, it would be part of the Third World. It tried to build an oil economy, and a lumbering economy, but the big draw is still casinos, which line the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast. What happens when online gambling, and online sports betting, eliminates the need for casinos? It’s a question no one even asks.

Mississippi is a case study for current Republican priorities. Jim Crow never left Mississippi. He just adapted, giving local power where blacks held local majorities, but maintaining power through an all-white power structure that still survives.

Reckoning With The Great Awakening

If any period in American history deserves re-examination today, it’s The Great Awakening. 

Following a similar movement in 18^th century Britain, America’s Great Awakening came in the first half of the 19^th century. Most of our popular Protestant denominations – Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Mormons – had their heyday then.

But the most historically important group were the Millerites. They initially followed a man named William Miller who claimed to know when the Second Coming of Christ would happen, followed by the end of the world. It didn’t happen. But The Great Disappointment led, in turn, to the creation of 7^th Day Adventists.

A version of Millerism has been alive in America ever since. It was the primary reaction to the 1960s. Evangelical and fundamentalist risings occurred in both Catholic and Protestant churches. This was accompanied by rising political involvement, the “Religious Right” that stood behind Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump.

Liberals who pretend that current events are unprecedented, that mass denial of reality hasn’t happened here, haven’t studied the Great Awakening. That, too, was a rejection against elites. Its political tool was Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves, expelled Indians, treated women like dirt, and destroyed the economy along with the Second Bank of the United States. It’s no coincidence that Trump put Jackson’s picture over his desk. His is the same type of movement.

Bubbles Don’t Really Pop

History will record that the Trump Bubble burst on January 6, with a coup attempt organized by Donald Trump. (The picture is from Doc Searls' blog.)

I have seen many bubbles pop in my experience as a business reporter. The best-known was the dot-com bubble. It popped on January 10, 2000 when Time Warner announced it would “acquire” AOL.

The precise date of the popping is only remembered in retrospect. At the time, business went on. That spring I attended a trade show called ad:tech, on my employer’s dime. Even a year later I was able to take my wife on a trip to Hawaii because of an Internet commerce conference on the Big Island.

My most vivid memory of that ad:tech conference was on a bus, heading back to our hotel after a day spent on the water, sponsored by an Internet ad agency that eventually sank with the rest. A young entrepreneur was complaining that each new round of funding was requiring more equity from him and generating less cash. “It’s unfair,” he whined.

I’m a cruel man. I laughed until I cried. Later, at the event’s award show, a block “CNN” ad won awards for creativity. I laughed until I cried again. The people around me thought I’d gone crazy. It was just that I saw the handwriting on the wall.

The point is that even after a bubble pops, many people will remain unaware of it. They will continue to take the bubble as a real thing. They’ll go in even-deeper. They’ll consider falling prices an opportunity, telling folks to “buy the dip.”