Dana Blankenhorn

Imaginary Crisis

One thing I have learned reading American history is that every generation feels it’s in an existential crisis.

Usually, they’re right.

In the Founders’ generation, John Adams passed a Sedition Law against Thomas Jefferson and his supporters. Then James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” lost a war and saw his Capitol burned. America was only saved by Bonaparte’s downfall, which caused Great Britain to lose interest in us.

Jackson Democrats saw Whigs as oligarchs, looking to destroy the poor for the benefit of a few. The death of Whig President W.H. Harrison in 1841 destroyed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s faith in democracy. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig, then 1 in every 50 Americans died during the Civil War, which was nearly lost.

Securing Democracy

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

 – Martin Luther King Jr.

This King Day, I’m angrier at Democrats than at Republicans. Millions share my frustration.

The Democratic Party made a mistake in 2021. They assumed democracy could be secured by elites. That’s not the case. It’s the people who secure democracy. No one else can do it for us. By pretending otherwise, Democrats from Joe Biden down did us all a tremendous disservice.

King Day 2021 was a celebration. It was assumed then that Democrats controlled the Congress and the White House. It was assumed that whatever Republicans tried, Democrats could checkmate it. It was assumed then that democracy had won.

The Limits of Rage

American history is littered with periods of intense rage.

But they fade.

I lived through one myself, the anti-war movement of the 1960s. (I was a kid, but I was there.) Anger peaked after Nixon’s election in 1968, but it faded. He didn’t need to cheat to win in 1972.

The same happened with the rage of the 1930s, when democracy seemed about to crumble under the twin tides of communism and fascism. It happened in the 1890s with the populist movement.

Rage is a drug. You need bigger and bigger doses to stay high. That’s why Trumpian Republicans keep raising the ante, keep growing more outrageous. Democrats are socialists. No, they’re anti-American. No, they’re Communists! We should put them in jail. No, we should kill them, kill them all!

For both the infected and the infecting, it’s exhausting. In the end, it’s self-defeating.

The Hidden Cost of Long Life

When I started this blog, I was looking for history to turn.

I thought the Iraq War would be a turning point. I thought the election of Barack Obama would be a turning point. I thought Hillary Clinton would be a turning point. I thought January 6 would be a turning point.

None of that happened. The reason is that we live so long. Maybe we live too long.

Look at President Johnson addressing Congress on voting rights in 1965. Notice the weak old man in the upper right-hand corner of the picture. He was John H. McCormack. He was the Speaker of the House. On that day he was 74 years old.

Today Joe Biden is 79. Nancy Pelosi is 81. Even vice president Kamala Harris, at 57, is older than then-vice president Hubert Humphrey, who was 54.

We live longer than ever today, but our beliefs don’t change. They harden as we age. Only the grave takes those beliefs out of the system.

For too many Americans today, politics remains stuck in the 1960s. We remain stuck in Vietnam, in the lessons and the assumptions of that time. To be liberal is to be for disorder. To be conservative is to be for order.

That’s not true anymore. Quite the opposite.

But January 6 didn’t change anyone’s views on that. Joe Biden’s speech today didn’t change that.

What will change it is the continual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. What changes it are new lessons learned by new generations.

The COVID pandemic is what will change our future history. It will remove over 1 million Americans before it’s over. Most will be older Americans. Most will be people who refused vaccinations. Most will be Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, a new generation is coming to power. It’s a generation that has been denied the full blessings of our economy for their lifetimes. Millennials are not as rich as their parents. Millions still don’t have careers, only gigs. I have two living in my house right now. Those born after the millennials have it even rougher, and they’re angrier about it. I don’t blame them.

We know how these people are voting, and we know what they’re thinking. The status quo won’t answer for them. They demand action, as they should, to save mankind from its destruction by the oil powers.

Every day, a few old boomers die. Every day another member of Generation Z comes of age.

That’s how change will happen. It’s time for my generation to get out of the way and let the kids take over. The kids are all right.

Clouds Rule the World (For Now)

Some Friday thoughts on the clouds and the Cloud Czars.

America’s economy rules the world, and the Cloud Czars rule the American economy. Rather than celebrate this, we seem more interested in ending it.

The Czars seem happy with the status quo. They shouldn’t be.

Our measurement of tech’s impact is completely wrong. We measure it by market cap. We should be measuring it in productivity, which thanks to tech is growing worldwide. When productivity takes people out of the middle class, they turn against tech. Tech needs to be wary of that.

How can they be wary? Instead of just asking what government asking what we can do to tech, we should be asking how government can help tech toward more useful innovations.

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.