As soon as it became apparent that Democrats would win the U.S. House, analysts began asking whether this was a “wave” election.
It wasn’t. It was a tsunami.
It’s easy not to understand this because most political scientists aren’t taught the difference between a wave and a tsunami.
The waves that daily hit the shore of the Bonzai Pipeline, on Hawaii’s northwest coast are often 12 feet high. But a wave, no matter how high, will break upon the beach and do no damage, except perhaps to the surfer who doesn’t catch it right.
A tsunami, on the other hand, is caused by forces deep inside the Earth. A tsunami may be shorter than an ordinary wave, but it will do tremendous damage, because of the enormous power behind it.
The 2018 election was the first step in a permanent realignment in American politics, bringing technology to the fore, dooming those political interests tied to oil. It’s driven less by tech billionaires than by tech workers, by programmers and scientists and other professionals, who understand that trained, active, creative, and free minds are the gating factor to economic growth, and see the Republican Party standing against that reality.
The most destructive thing Trump has done, politically, is to wed his party to these older economic forms. His denial of climate science, or science generally, is driven by religious convictions that are steadily losing their hold on the American middle class. Religious groups affiliated with Trumpism are often regular church goers, but their numbers have been declining for years.
Trump has done for these people precisely what Jimmy Carter did for older voters in his time. Carter won in 1976 by re-creating the New Deal coalition and wedding it to a new generation of ideologues. But those older Democrats were already aging out. They were being replaced by younger voters wedded to growth made possible by control of resources. The “Sun Belt” phenomenon was all about making greater use of fossil fuel energy, driving long distances, from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned offices. You would “drive until you qualify” and, if the central city office became too much of a burden, you’d build a career in the suburbs, as my own father did.
This is Trumpistan. It still lives in exurban and rural America. You’ll find it in Riverside County, California, or Cherokee County outside Atlanta, where people still want the lives their parents had. But the jobs were the white-collar bedrock of these places, in real estate, retail, insurance and banking, are being replaced by apps and aren’t coming back. People see these changes overtaking them, replacing them, and they’re resentful. Trump took advantage of that resentment.
By contrast the “creative class” that arose in the 1990s, is built for 24-7 lifestyles. We need proximity. This has caused an explosion back into cities large and small. Gentrification has lots of negative side-effects, but it’s replacing neighborhoods that were mostly burned-out by suburbs into something comfortable for middle class lifestyles.
I call these places TechLandia. In TechLandia, creativity is prized, and we can’t waste time worrying about the containers that creativity comes in. Black, white, brown, male, female, gay, straight, it doesn’t matter. Your value is based on the ideas that you can turn into products, the concepts you can invent out of whole cloth.
Economics drives demographics, and demographics are destiny. My own kids can’t imagine living in some distant suburb, but they want their city homes to be clean. They’re willing to pay for that with smaller homes, but the living standards within those homes will be up to suburban standards.
Thus, we have the 2018 electoral map. Suburbs are becoming urban places. University towns are becoming economic hubs. Cities are increasingly dynamic, wealthy, and centered. This is where the economic growth is, not only today’s growth in silicon but tomorrow’s growth in biology and biochemistry. We’re inventing new materials, and new types of life, replacing fossil fuels with technology, slowly turning around the climate crisis.
TechLandia is now where the makers live. Trumpistan is where the takers live. The formulation of Mitt Romney in 2012 has been turned on its head. His people are now the ones turning to government, for welfare, for education, and for solutions to the opioid crisis. They’re not getting those solutions. They’re getting excuses, attacks on the people in TechLandia, and while this seemed to work in 2018, just as Carter’s claims that Republicans represented Joe McCarthy and Bull Connor in 1978 seemed to work, it’s just not economically tenable.
So, between now and November 2020 millions of Trumpistanis are going to die, some from old age, others from drug abuse or violence. Between now and November 2020 millions of new TechLandians will enter the workplace, and the voting rolls. The progress of this change can be slowed, by racism, sexism, even by fascism, but it can’t be stopped, because the economic changes in our society can’t be stopped. Nor should they be, because growth depends on leading, on the leading edge of change.
Everything else is details.
The size of the 2018 tsunami was smaller than I thought it would be, a voting margin of just 8%. Blame gerrymandering, blame Jim Crow, blame a campaign of fear that made millions of knees jerk just one more time. But it’s the encore for the Nixon thesis. The show is over
The tsunami will grow from here. When my kids look back 10 or 20 years from today, they will see 2018 was a turning point, the point when we began to understand that, politically, TechLand’s time had come.
