Sometimes it seems like we’re playing the 1942 game.
There are few people alive now who remember what 1942 was like. After Pearl Harbor, it seemed, the Axis and the Japs were on a constant march forward, while America and her allies were in constant retreat. Freedom hung in the balance, The Man in the High Castle was about to become a real future.
We got through 1942, and I believe we’ll get through 2017. I believe 2017, like 1942, will also teach us enduring lessons, lessons three generations of Americans will retain for the rest of our lives.
The global threat of Trump, the reality of a Trump presidency, is teaching us those lessons.
First. The American System is more than the Presidency.
It’s more than Congress, more than the judiciary.
The American system has robust checks and balances everywhere. There are institutional checks throughout the bureaucracy. There is the voice of the people themselves. There is Wall Street and technology. There is the media. America is a highly complex system. Journalists and pundits oversimplify it to our peril.
The power of the Presidency rises and falls based on the character and popularity of the President. Barack Obama embraced the complexity. He was a successful President by any measure. You may not like his program, but he got it through.
Trump is finding that incompetence and lack of popularity are causing power to flow right through his tiny hands. He thinks he took absolute power. He didn’t. He took relative power, and that is different.
A lot of people around Trump are surprised about this. So are a surprising number of people in the media, who have become accustomed to seeing a President’s orders carried out, even if those orders are for wars based on lies.
All this is good news. It’s also important news.
America is more resilient than you were taught it was in high school.
Second. Our Hamiltonian system provides the greatest check on political power. Jim Cramer thinks Washington’s financial policy doesn’t impact Wall Street, but it does. The impact is delayed, but it’s real. We’re heading into a recession.
The Hamiltonian center of America will forgive a lot from the Jeffersonian center. What it won’t forgive is losing money. You start costing Wall Street money and Wall Street will take you out, especially if they’re the ones who put you in. They took out the Clintons during the dot-bomb, they took out Bush in the Great Recession. They’ll take out the Russians and the Republicans once they learn that they can’t trust them with their money. This time, they won’t forget that lesson.
The same is true in the tech sector. The founders of our five largest tech companies have financial power that the Kochs and all their oil buddies can only dream of. They can reverse the political impact of Citizens United at a pen stroke. They haven’t yet because they’re making more money than ever. When that reverses, they’re going to notice the antipathy of Washington to their interests. It’s that relationship that will drive the politics of the next four years.
Tech began with a red tinge. It was a product of the military-industrial complex. Men like Gordon Moore were all Nixon Republicans. Their white shirts and thin ties were uniforms, just like Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck and John Legere’s long hair and sneakers. They signify. Tech has grown increasingly informal in the last decades, because Democrats gave tech what it wanted, almost without asking. Tech is not going to like being told no by political leadership. Not when it realizes it has a veto in its hands.
Third. Liberty is not America’s private property.
The American system brought freedom and democracy to hundreds of millions of people. It has attracted the best and brightest of the whole world to ideals that matter.
Unmoored from American power, freedom and democracy, through technology, are continuing the fight. It’s human capital that matters today, not resources. All this is happening below the surface, just as in 1942, when the arsenal of democracy was gearing up for the fight.
Europe is now the center of the free world, and it is starting to reap economic benefits from that. Canada is balancing the enormous losses from Alberta’s oil sands with new gains in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver tech centers, where U.S. companies are parking an increasing number of their H-1B visa candidates. Justin Trudeau might like to say “Thanks, Trump.” (Pronounced tchump.)
Asia is also gaining. Tech is finding that it doesn’t have to import people to America. It’s learning it can hire them where they live, for less, and it’s doing that. Their dance with China is not America knuckling under to tyranny. It’s a far more delicate dance in which freedom is a commodity, where code is power. This dance is being danced across East Asia. Freedom is expanding with code, becoming more secure, even while idiots in the U.S. fear it. A new form of West Coast law is being born there, whose impacts we have yet to imagine.
Africa is growing, thanks to code. South America is growing, thanks to code. There are new economic power centers, and new technology opportunities, wherever business is being done, wherever people are free to code. This is the new world order, the real “rise of the rest,” a transnational order that begins with cloud, code and devices, creating wealth that can counter, even contradict, authoritarian power.
None of this would have been visible if we were still locked into the pre-Trump order. It’s easy to go with the flow. It’s easier to let America decide, when America is benign. It’s easy to take freedom for granted, when it’s granted and seen as natural by everyone.
It is when these things we take for granted are threatened that we rise, that we grow, that we find our power as people. It is the fight that makes the warrior.
That fight is now on. It’s global.
I believe that we will win. I believe freedom is going to win the day. I believe Trump, Putin, and all their authoritarian allies are going to lose. They don’t know who they’re messing with, or what.
