Understanding the Republican and Democratic Party Divide Today as a Divide Between an Industrial and Information Economy

The last time I was on Google's campus, I was training 7 project managers. At one point it came out that 6 of the 7 had gone to Saturday school for years to study language and get religious / cultural education. Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Nubian-Muslim (the Nubian tribe is divided by the Egyptian / Sudanese border) and Korean are five of the six that I remember. Another time, I was in a room with about a dozen engineers at Intel and every single one had a story about green cards.

That sort of diversity is pretty normal for the tech and pharmaceutical companies I work with. If you are hiring and want the best and brightest, you hire from around the world. Even if China and India's universities turn out great engineers at half the rate of US universities, they will still turn out two times as many given their populations are four times ours.

One thing that I've concluded from decades of working with engineers and scientists is that creating a team able to win in a global market without first or second-generation immigrants on your team is about as tough as trying to win MLB, NBA or NFL championships without players of color. Given how talent shows so little regard for race or nationality, you’d be a fool to exclude any group if you’re serious about conquering a global market or world championship. You’re not going to find the talent you need within your local zip code.

Anti-immigrant and free-trade nationalists inevitably argue for the importance of an industrial economy. Why? Industrial capital is in a place. By contrast, intellectual capital is in people’s heads and hands. You can put up walls around industrial capital. Look at a place like North Korea to see that walls are an obstacle to the creation of intellectual capital – something created through the exchange of ideas rather than their suppression.

The two economies - industrial and information - have been created by two kinds of politics. And that brings us to the divide we have today.

The Republican Party under Trump is championing a set of policies that are fitting for an industrial economy. People who consider themselves part of this economy feel threatened by immigrants, free trade and universities.

The Democratic Party - as it has been since about the time of Kennedy or Clinton - has a set of policies that are fitting for the information economy. People who consider themselves part of this economy see immigrants, free trade, and universities as essential.

To not understand the sharp divide in American politics is to not understand how much of the cultural war actually comes out of a perception of which economy livelihoods depend on. Whether something is essential or a threat is a question of which economy people consider themselves members of. And these two groups bring about as much passion to the topic as one might expect of people who see their livelihoods caught up in a particular set of policies.

Progress does have a direction, though.

William F. Buckley was one of the Republican Party's most respected intellectuals. He wrote, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" To attempt to undermine the universities, immigration and trade that causes our information economy to thrive in order to protect the industrial economy is to do exactly that: yell stop to progress.

Republicans are fighting to protect the past, not create it. Since 1950, factory workers as a percentage of the workforce has dropped each decade and college grads a percentage of the workforce has gone up. Whatever economy we create in the future, it will be beyond the information economy, not back in time into the industrial economy.