According to the Economist, the narrative of Donald Trump as avenging agent of white working-class Americans left behind by globalization and technology is a seriously overstated myth. The great majority of his supporters, the magazine reports, are doing quite well. My best guess is the well-to-do ones are likely drawn to the hideous hotelier by Identity Politics or racial bias. 

In a Newsweek piece, “Trump Revolution Rooted in Resentment of Technology,” Kevin Maney relies on other reports that conversely name a lack of college degree the surest indicator of a Trump follower. The columnist argues that our economy is currently one of Atoms vs. Bits, which means a battle between a declining industrial sector and an ascendant information one. The Atoms, Maney writes, are the truckers, factory workers and other laborers raging against the dying of the light.His theory is an oversimplification as any broadly drawn one is, but it’s hard to deny the societal transformation we’re now experiencing. 

Which idea about Team Trump is more correct? Both are probably true enough to be troubling in their own ways, as the rise of the current hate-filled nationalism knows many parents.

Maney’s opening:

We’ve got two Americas now: Atoms America and Bits America.

People used to worry about a digital divide. Well, that’s now looking more like the border between North Korea and South Korea—tense and bristling with pointed missiles, one nervous misunderstanding away from mayhem. This new dynamic is evident in everything from the transgender bathroom laws in the South to proposals from Silicon Valley to institute basic income for all the people technology is going to throw out of work.

And while we’re at it, let’s include the 2016 presidential election, which is really all about Atoms vs. Bits.

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then head of the MIT Media Lab, wrote about the changing relationship between atoms and bits in his book Being Digital. Atoms make up physical stuff. Bits are digital. As Negroponte presciently pointed out, atoms represent the old economy of manufacturing and trucks and retail stores and, as it turns out, a lot of middle-class work. Bits drive the new economy—which today includes mobile apps, social networks, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 3-D printing and other technologies that are eating the old economy.

Atoms America is getting poorer and angrier. Bits America pretty much rules the global economy and churns out billionaires.

Atoms America wants to “make America great again” because reclaiming the past seems a hell of a lot better than whatever the future holds. Bits America patronizingly believes that the Atoms people would be fine, at least in the short run, if they would only take some Khan Academy courses and learn to code.•

Most consider the technological changes of the 19th century more foundational than ours but also slower to proliferate, but the latter wasn’t always so. Consider that the Pony Express was established in 1860 and had been made completely obsolete by telegraphy by 1861, a rush from cradle to grave without the benefit of a dotage. That same year the Civil War began and President Lincoln, an early adopter, was soon sleeping in the telegraph office in the War Department next to the White House. Every era had been an Information Age in one way or another, but some fundamental things had changed and they were speed and connectivity.

In an excellent Newsweek article, journalist Kevin Maney looks back at the mid-19th century technological boom and sees a reflection of our own tumultuous political times. He believes wealth inequality has been stoked by the jolting transition from industrialization to digitalization in much the same as it was in the 1850s when we moved from an agrarian economy to one of factories. The North reached for the future with innovative inventions while the South doubled down on a farm-based economy powered by slavery. Soon enough, the center could not hold.

There’s truth to Maney’s theory, though I think there’s more at play and don’t believe the shocking displays of bigotry and xenophobia we’ve recently witnessed can be wholly explained by our puzzling new economic reality. Such sad things predated AI and apps. As he argues, though, great leadership and policy will be necessary to help us traverse unsure terrain before we can arrive at what may be a post-scarcity society.

The opening:

A technological revolution killed the Whig Party in 1850. A new one is blasting the GOP into splinters in 2016.

Amazingly, none of the presidential candidates talk much about technology, yet our software-eats-the-world whirlwind drives everything that’s cleaving the country and throwing its politics into chaos. The parallels to the dynamics of the 1850s are a little scary. After all, the Whigs’ self-destruction was a prelude to the Civil War.

Like today, the technological revolution in the mid-1800s ushered in a disruptive new era of connectivity, and transportation technology was key. Before the 1800s, getting anywhere—or exchanging any information over distance—involved horses, mud roads or boats. Movement was so hard that almost all business in America stayed local and small, and much of it was centered on agriculture.

Then, starting around 1810, the country paved roads and built canals. Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, and within a couple of decades mountains of goods were flowing upstream. The monster agent of change was the railroads. The country built rail lines with the same alacrity that would go into building the Web during the dot-com boom. By 1860, the U.S. boasted more miles of rail than the rest of the world combined.

Oh, and in the 1830s Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. By 1860, telegraph lines spanned the continent. You couldn’t quite sit in Boston and Skype your dad at the California Gold Rush, but prices and business data could cross states in a flash. It was an information transformation.

All of this changed life and economics in ways we can relate to today.•