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.
It’s wrong to look at history only through the eyes of leaders, but it’s the only frame we have. History should change, both in how we research it and how we teach it. It’s about the tide, not those who surf it.
Right now, for instance, there’s a desire to put statues of John Lewis across the South, to replace the Confederate generals, militia men and obelisks that had been there. It’s said that Lewis and the Civil Rights cause overthrew the Confederacy.
But John Lewis wasn’t the movement. The Civil Rights movement was people like John Flint, John Shank, Henry Gary, Nellie Harris, Rufus Kight, Cantrell Johnson and Marcelia Maddox. These are neighbors I got to know on Winter Avenue, starting in 1983. These were the greatest generation. They raised me from a naïve racist into what I am today.
A tide, a wave, a tsunami isn’t one man. It’s millions of men, and women, choosing to stand behind a cause, one as inchoate as a better life for their children, as ephemeral as liberty or democracy. It’s not one man’s story. It’s all our stories. Leaders can direct the flow, in some minimal way, but the tsunami is going to come. By teaching history just through the stories of leaders, no matter how “great” they appear to be, this reality is lost.
Trump today is standing athwart the tsunami, shouting “no.” Biden is standing behind the wave, not in front of it. This is what Lincoln did in 1860. It’s what FDR did in 1932. But Biden isn’t Lincoln, and he isn’t FDR. We don’t know what happens from here.
America’s story is less one of men than of tides. There was a tide of slavery, but then one of union. There was a tide of capitalism, and of immigration, leading to a tide of genocide. More recently there has come a tide of technological change, increasing in speed, intensity, and value over time.
These tides have risen in America thanks to democracy.
Democracy isn’t a Presidential election, just as capitalism isn’t the stock exchange. Democracy is flexibility. So is capitalism.
Democracy happens, or fails to happen, in states, counties, cities and towns across the country, all the time. Atlanta will have a mayoral election next year, Georgia a state election a year later. We all have an opportunity to get involved in that process, every day. Citizenship in a democratic society is an obligation, not a gift. It’s something we all must work at to make work. When it fails, we try again. When it fails consistently it’s because we, the people have failed.
Democracy can harness the waves, the tides, and even direct a tsunami. That’s why our system has stood for 230 years. The system is flexible, having been amended 18 times and adjusted constantly by courts.
The present tsunami didn’t suddenly appear. It’s been rising ever since the Republican Party began defying democracy. Trump is the apotheosis of a process that’s been holding power for a generation, one now convinced of its own impotence by its own propaganda.
You don’t need Twitter or Facebook to check the weather. You don’t need them to feel the tide of history, sense the tsunami that’s out there. All you need is a little common sense, “spidey sense” I call it.
I developed my own spidey sense covering capitalism, specifically the tech business. On this beat those who deny the tides are ground under quickly, so you learn to detect the patterns quickly. That’s what I meant a quarter century ago, calling people “clued-in” or “clueless.” If a company provides value, if it delivers productivity in line with what the technology of the day can provide, it will prosper. But its leaders must also be aware of how technology’s tides can shift. Leaders must be alert to opportunity. If a business’ focus becomes internal, if its leaders are worried mainly about their internal bureaucracy, on their perks, on dividends and stock buybacks, it’s going to miss tomorrow, and tomorrow comes increasingly quickly.
When I began my career AT&T, IBM and GE looked unassailable. But in this century, they missed or misread the cloud. All the money and political power accumulated over generations couldn’t save them.
In this way, capitalism is like democracy. There’s nothing constant in it. The process is what matters, its flexibility, the ability to adapt. All the great companies understand and support this flexibility. California, Washington state and Massachusetts are all run by Democrats. So are New York, New Jersey and (now that it’s in Techlandia) Virginia.
Today the Cloud Czars – Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook – stand athwart the world, as AT&T, IBM and GE once did. But they all know there’s nothing permanent about their power. It has all been built in 10 years. Even now, their hardware empires are becoming software, the services they power becoming as powerful as they are. They could easily fall, as IBM and AT&T did, if they don’t adapt to this reality.
It’s because capitalism demands flexibility that Trump is doomed. The flexible political system of democracy buttresses capitalism, as our system of ordered liberty buttresses democracy. Business isn’t about Jeff Bezos, democracy isn’t about Joe Biden, and liberty wasn’t about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s all these systems, working together, adjusting together, under the demands of people and markets that make America great.
Democracy can be denied where capitalism fails. Capitalism can be defied where liberty fails. People can be kept in a state of misery while the world evolves around them. But a great nation, combining the flexibility of democracy, capitalism, and liberty, won’t fall to one man. If it did the best men and women would simply leave, to drive change where the soil is more fertile. Countries must compete, based on the fertility of their soil for dealing with change. There will always be fertile soil, somewhere.
I guess what I’m saying is that the present era of nationalistic dictators is as brittle as the 18th century order of Great Kings, or the early 20th century era of Great Empires.
The people, demanding flexibility, demanding their own freedom to make change, is rising to wipe the old political order away.
That’s frightening. But it’s also exhilarating. Stop being frightened. Be exhilarated instead.
