Dana Blankenhorn

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.”

The Big Tech Conspiracy That Wasn’t

Once you show you like something, I offer you more of it.

Is this a conspiracy?

Not unless I’m a scaled Web site. Because this is at the heart of the charge against “Big Tech,” the companies I call Cloud Czars.

• Show a preference for certain videos on YouTube and YouTube offers you more videos like them.
• “Like” things on Facebook or Instagram, and you will get more things like them.
• Follow certain celebrities on Twitter, you’re offered more like them.
• The same with Amazon Kindle books. When you buy something from Amazon, you’ll be followed for days by ads offering the same thing.

The algorithms follow human nature. Chances are that if you like a book about 12^th century monks who solve murders, you might like another one. If you like Henry Winkler, you’ll probably like Ron Howard.

The problem is that if you like crazy conspiracy theories on Instagram, or videos describing the terrors of the Illuminati on YouTube, you’ll get more of them. Like those, you’ll get more. And more and more.

The Caudillo Model

American ideas in governing have been dominating the world for nearly 250 years.

The Declaration of Independence was the first truly revolutionary document, its ideals a model for democracies ever since.

But other American governing inventions aren’t worth celebrating. Our genocide of the American Indian became a model for dictators worldwide. Our Constitution was designed to enshrine slavery. The idea of eugenics, that certain people were genetically inferior and deserved to be eliminated, became Hitler’s model for the Holocaust.

A later invention is now threatening to undo all the work of the Declaration. That’s the Monroe Doctrine.

On its face, the doctrine written by John Quincy Adams and pronounced by James Monroe is nothing but beneficial. It proclaimed that Europe should keep its hands off the Americas. But it didn’t promise that this country would keep its hands off.

Since the doctrine was first promulgated, in 1823, the United States has treated the rest of the hemisphere as its empire. We invaded Mexican, seizing the larger half of it. We created Panama to build the canal there. We acquired Puerto Rico in a war and still hold it.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

The Great Panic of 2020

The 2020 campaign isn’t marked by much movement in the polls.

Joe Biden has been ahead all year by anywhere from 5-10 points. The margin has been increasing, as Trump has acted like every suburban housewife’s abusive ex-.

Yet to read Lefty Twitter, you would be certain Trump is going to be President this time next year.

Uh, no. My guess is he won’t even be alive. When he realizes he’s going to be held to account, I suspect, he’ll take the coward’s way out.

Trump wants to steal the election, and is threatening a coup, because he knows he has lost.

The Tides of History

Ignore the polls that claim there’s a close election going on. Use your own intuition. You can feel the tide under your feet.

2020 has been a shit show. The idea that no one has changed their political views as a result is crazy. Yet that’s what everyone in Washington thinks, including those whose job (or hobby) it is to analyze elections.

Truth is there’s a tsunami out there.

History is made by people who create these tides. Great men (and women) are those who ride them. Villains are those who defy them.