What Was Lost, and What Can Be

The whole Trump phenomenon is misunderstood.

We talk about the Tea Party. We talk about racism. We talk about everything but what we should be talking about.

What we should be talking about is economics and the world technology has led us toward.

When I went to college in 1973, I left suburban living behind. It seemed like a bad idea. The suburbs were the “Sun Belt” (cities were the Rust Belt). It was the era of White Flight, but what did people do for a living in those suburbs?

A lot of them commuted back into town, to work in middle management. Some worked as travel agents. Others sold insurance. Or they stayed back in the suburbs and did things like my dad did, as small businesses. He ran a TV repair shop and, later, a lock shop.

All these lives were disrupted by technology, which began to accelerate once the Web was spun, over 20 years ago now. The travel agent jobs went. Then the auto and insurance agents were replaced. Car dealers and real estate agents found customers now just wanted them to take orders, and knew more about the merchandise than they did. As soon as you were taught to learn computer-mediated tools in your job, it seemed, those tools learned your job and, once times got tough, you got canned.

Middle management was destroyed, slowly at first, then more rapidly. With each recession, more layers went. After the Great Recession it was all gone, replaced by devices on the sales or factory floor, reporting back to clouds of corporate data and decision trees.

A lot of my contemporaries were left high and dry by these changes. I was happy to report on them, but the failure of journalism to adapt meant my work in tech journalism dried up too, slowly at first and then, in 2010, completely. No one needs to know how to operate a device, and clouds require so much knowledge that if you’re not programming them you can’t talk about them. If my family were depending on me for their livelihood we would not have one, and we would not have gotten through the dot-bomb. I’d be dead.

Fortunately, I took my first advice at the Medill School to heart. If I wanted to have a good living, the late George Heitz said, I should find a spouse with a good job. I proposed that evening.

My wife got lucky. She became a factory girl. She works in a software factory. Atlanta’s current prosperity is buttressed by a host of such factories, large and small, along I-285, running up Georgia 400, and now in parts of Midtown around Georgia Tech. These factories offer the old life, and more. You come in during the morning, leave in the evening. You can even work from home once in a while. Many work from home all the time.

Software is the one product left that is made by hand, and programmers are the one group left whose hand work is worth buying. It’s because software productivity still proceeds arithmetically, not logarithmically as scaled software does, but step by step. And the old code must be maintained.

My wife’s programs process credit card transactions, and getting stuff online is the key to our good life. Clouds and their applications, devices and their apps, networking, the Internet of Things, making the future, once software is put online it scales automatically. Maintaining the code, expanding the code base, handling dependencies – the world needs Jenni Blankenhorn far more than it does Dana Blankenhorn.

For everyone else, this century has been very hard.

There are now too many lawyers. Law schools are closing because there’s less demand. Partly, it’s because there’s less crime. Conservative legislators have managed to close a lot of the civil specialties lawyers once prospered in, making most class actions illegal, and making whole industries immune from suit through forced arbitration. Simple legal tasks like incorporations, wills and divorces have become automated.

There are now too many doctors. People who once were treated as Kings and Queens in high office buildings are now on street level, told by computers and the payment systems behind them what they can do and what they must charge. Routine work is done by physicians’ assistants, registered nurses, and para-professionals. Many specialists are having their bills refused, for the first time, because they’re not “best practices” and they’re not in the insurance networks. Doctors were once entrepreneurs, now they’re employees.

So middle managers, doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, even car dealers and real estate agents – all those people who once had a secure middle-class lifestyle in the suburbs and exurbs surrounding major cities – have all been replaced by technology.

The Sun Belt has become the new Rust Belt. I call it the Asphalt Jungle.

The new opportunities are all in the central cities. An urban explosion began 20 years ago, observed a decade ago by Richard Florida in his “Rise of the Creative Class.”

This is where the money is being made now. It’s in research, and the businesses research spawns. It’s in the creative products that people working on research in the cities want to buy – artisanal food, craft beer. It’s in the services that make the lives of the Creative Class more pleasant – yoga classes, fitness coaches, marriage counselors.

This is great for people who, like me, live in cities and can keep up with its rising costs. I’ve had the same house in-town since 1983. Bought for $49,500 in 1984, it is now worth 10 times that much, and a couple – both high end traveling sales types – just bought a house across the street for $750,000.

I am now surrounded by good restaurants and retail shops. Young professionals ride bicycles past my house each morning, the nearby schools are filled with little kids, and their brothers or sisters are walked around the corner to the artisanal doughnut shop. Their parents walk the dogs in the evening or leave that to professional dog walkers. The cops and teachers and journalists who once were my neighbors have been priced out.

These changes cannot be stopped. Moore’s Law rules. Those middle management, sales, and professional jobs are gone, never to return, just as the Rust Belt factory jobs of a generation ago never returned.

The victims of this change can’t believe it. In their youths they were cutting edge. Now they’re all Ned Ludds looking for a loom to destroy, and finding only clouds.

Their revolts have taken various forms. They were all for George W. Bush, who put the government behind real estate rather than the new economy. Once that crashed the ambulance, they heard the cry of Sarah Palin and joined the Tea Party. In their fear, they became addicted to guns as surely as black city dwellers grew into crack 20 years ago. A lot of their kids became meth heads or heroin addicts. Others were unable to move out of the house.

What these people want is a savior, someone who promises to make it all better, to return life to what it was, back in the day, back in the 20^th century. They’re ripe for scapegoats. The social tolerance of those in the research centers make good scapegoats. The new suburban jobs are unskilled, and Mexican or Muslim immigrants can do them just as well, while the skilled jobs are being seized by Koreans, Indians and Mainland Chinese.

Of course they’re angry. Just like the “Reagan Democrats” of old were angry, because the factories had closed and they had been left behind in the Rust Belt.

This is Trump’s Army.  They come from the Asphalt Jungle to destroy the future, in the name of the past.

A generation of Republican politics have taught these people that politics is war. The Nixon Thesis of Conflict  sowed the idea that those who disagreed were enemies, and everyone inside the tent quaked in fear that they might be thrown out as apostate next. Their faith became absolute, and their politics absolutist. They forgot, or were told to forget, that politics is not only the art of the possible, but that compromise is natural, and that you can’t always get what you want.

No, they cry. We want what we want, and we want it now. Burn down the cities. Build walls against the Mexicans. Kill the Muslims and take their oil. Make life what it was before, in the “good old days” when dads drove to good jobs, somewhere. All the imaginary blessings that were the 1950s during the Reagan years have been transferred onto the 1980s. Make it like that again, they cry, not that it was better, but it was at least familiar. This new world, where pot is legal but tobacco less so, where gay marriage is legal but their daughters can’t find a good man, where everything seems acceptable except their own moral absolutes, make it all go away.

Trump is the Caudillo. He is seeking, not to be President, but to be an African dictator, a Vladimir Putin who will halt history in its tracks and march us all backward. It’s not “Make America Great Again” but “Make Our America Great Again,” suburban America, the America of urban sprawl.

Unless the silent majority in our cities and around our new economy can be activated, that’s precisely what we’re going to do. We’re going to leave the future to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Africans, to the young and the hungry who are willing to adapt, as we won’t be under our one party state, long may our leader live and guide us, Big Brother until the end of time, Amen.

That’s what the Crisis of 2016 is all about. Will we adapt to the future, and validate the Obama Thesis of Consensus? 

Or will we march backwards into a past that never existed? Will we be one nation, or make war against one another, and the machines that serve us? Will our fears lead us backward, or will we be guided by the Better Angels of our Nature?

Can’t we all just get along?

NOTE: For those scoring at home, this should be the first issue in the 20^th volume of my newsletter, A-Clue.com, founded after I lost my last full time job in March, 1997. But who gets e-mail newsletters anymore?