In his effort to maintain power through the pandemic, Trump deliberately divided America.
He got the smaller piece of it, and figures that’s OK, because Wall Street is behind him.
But that’s not where the money is. It’s why he’s going to lose.
Trump’s economic policies favor investors, Wall Street, and those who can work from home while paying our bills. By pushing out trillions of new dollars, mainly to people who didn’t need it, Trump brought the stock market back. He thinks the stock market is the economy.
It isn’t.
If you can’t work from home, if your work requires you getting close to people, being out there in the world, you’re suffering. Unemployment is 20%, and unemployment insurance will expire around November. Even those who can work are suffering. Many are risking their lives for what amount to starvation wages, when spread across the average family of four.
There’s a second cut Trump is taking. This is the division between rulers and ruled.
Trump has been very, very good to generals, if not to the common soldier. He has been very, very good to cops. It’s the one union he stands behind. He has also been very good for preachers, offering long-sought policy goals like the subordination of women, discrimination against gays, and obligation-free access to government funding.
The result is an alliance any Latin American will relate to. On one side are the oligarchs, the church, and the military. On the other side, everyone else. Where the people object too strongly, when they gain too much power due to the failures of church and business, the military and police put them down.
It’s working in South America. Brazil is run by generals who stand behind the fig leaf of an election that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power. Bolivia staged a coup. The military rules there, too. Even in Venezuela and Nicaragua, ostensibly socialist, the military has a veto over everything.
This is the policy the United States has been pushing south for 200 years, ever since James Monroe promulgated John Quincy Adams’ “Monroe Doctrine.” It told Europe hands off the Americas. It told American Presidents hands on. The United States has been orchestrating coups throughout the region ever since, first to extend slavery, then to gain trade concessions, finally in the name of fighting “communism.”
This is what Trump has brought to the United States. Even in liberal cities like Minneapolis and New York the cops, through their unions, have a figurative veto. They can kill with impunity. Courts won’t stop them. Demonstrations on behalf of the New Order are tolerated, even when the demonstrators are armed. Demonstrations against said order are met with violence. The New Order is also enforced, on a day to day basis, by police with a license to kill.
This is the Jim Crow order that ruled the American South for nearly a century. Black people, once a majority in many states, were pushed north by violence and intimidation. They left behind a narrow white majority that, fearing the “other,” could be cowed by police and economic oligarchs, despite persistent white poverty.
It was air conditioning that opened the South. Air conditioning, four-lane highways, and cheap labor turned the North’s manufacturing jobs into non-union jobs. That brought down the executives, the real estate men, and turned Yankees like Newt Gingrich into good old boys.
Trump and his party are fighting to take Jim Crow nationwide, to make the United States a Latin American country. Wherever Republicans hold sway voting rights, union rights, and human rights are suppressed.
But there’s an economic force that can turn this around.
That force is technology.
Tech rides on human talent. Not muscle, on brains. Trained, empowered human minds, are what make tech work. It’s not like manufacturing, where most workers have limited skills. It’s nothing like the resource economy, including farming, where control of the land is paramount.
The gating factor in technology is brainpower. In a brain-based economy, attracting, and empowering minds are the key to wealth. Money no longer comes out of the ground. It rains down from the clouds.
That’s why tech centers are liberal bastions. It’s not just true in California and Washington state. It’s true wherever tech lives. Cities built around tech, university towns built around research, they’re all relentlessly liberal.
Tech is where the money is. This means tech will be where the power lies.
The tech model is incompatible with Trumpism. America’s future prosperity is incompatible with Trumpism. Take away the liberty technology depends upon and even the Cloud Czars fall. Trump has told the Cloud Czars they need to take power.
Idiots have adapted the Trumpian moniker of “Big Tech” for the sector, and bigger idiots on the far left have echoed it. They don’t like billionaires, even when those billions represent founder control without which those companies become vulnerable to the short-term thinking of Trumpian hedge funds and vulture capitalists.
Technology is for any reform that can smooth the way to harvesting brainpower. It’s for guaranteed health care, for better schools, well-funded universities, for immigration, and for the guarantees of individual liberty which great minds need to thrive. Had Elizabeth Warren not gone on the warpath against Amazon, she’d be the nominee now. Tech’s first choice was Kamala Harris. If you want to know what tech thinks, read The Washington Post.
Tech can’t live with Trump. That’s the key message of 2020. Tech is filled with immigrants like Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang. They don’t like being targeted. Neither do gay men like Tim Cook. Tech doesn’t want its supply of great minds constrained, and it won’t accept those minds being constrained. Tech can beat China, but only if tech rules.
Many liberals want to make Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook a counter example, but Facebook is no longer a social media company. Its cloud network has made it a global communications company. Its self-interest lies in cooperating with any government whose people need communication. Facebook was hurt by losing China, it’s not going to lose India. It’s not going to lose Africa or Southeast Asia. If that means following fascism that’s what Mark Zuckerberg is willing to do. He’s AT&T.
The other Cloud Czars, along with the application companies that ride on those clouds, and the equipment makers supplying those clouds, are different. They need brainpower, not just communication, to make their living. That will make all the difference.
As oil felt forced to take power 40 years ago, tech is being forced to do so now. It will do so because American democracy runs by the golden rule.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
