OPINION/EDITORIAL
A Republican friend of mine once asked me why Democrats put so much trust in the government. I told him that was a myth. It is not that Democrats trust the government.
No American has really trusted the government since at least 1776, and probably for a while longer than that. That’s the whole point of our “trust but verify” system.
I explained it is rather that they distrust big business, and the centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few, more than they distrust government. That is because government is the only power that people can influence to try and limit the overreach of large corporate interests.
When they perceive that business interests and the government have united against them, you will quickly see just how little Democrats trust government. But they also know that the power to pressure and influence government is the only leverage they have against the large money interests that seem to run everything around us.
The crusade against data centers is a perfect example.
Every elected leader in Texas was for data centers, until all of a sudden they weren’t. That only happened because of the people applying pressure.
Voting is an important part of democracy, but it does not by itself create or sustain democracy. They vote in Russia and Iran after all.
Only involvement in government, and resistance when government and business overstep their bounds maintains democracy.
While few people were noticing, the high tech industry and federal and state government decided it was urgent to build a lot of data centers all over the country.
They never really discussed the need with the public, or even in Congress or the legislature. Few news outlets paid attention to it at the beginning.
There may have been perfectly good and important reasons. These data centers may be urgently needed for our national and economic security. But government and business leaders never went to the people to try and convince them of the need.
The result was the inevitable push back, protests and resistance. Government tends to do this every so often. They forget that the people are the ones in charge in this country, and fail to bring the people along, and show the need for such a vast undertaking before charging ahead.
Iran War Has Makings of Quagmire
Our government made the same mistake about pushing data center construction as they did starting a war with Iran. They do not have and never tried to get Congress and the people behind them.
In his debate with Claire Reynolds last week, Rep. August Pfluger repeated the false claim that we had to go to war right now to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, or to prevent an iminent attack. All intelligence assessments I have seen indicate Iran was nowhere near having a nuclear weapon at the time Trump started a war no one in Congress, or our allies, even knew was coming.
I recall another President starting a war in the middle east because of weapons of mass destruction. Only later did we discover that was not true.
But at least President Bush and his administration made a case to the American people and the international community that war was justified, even though their reasons turned out to be false.
Trump did not, and has not made a case to Congress or the American people for an aggressive war with Iran that violates international law. He refuses to do so even now.
On no authority but his own he has thrown us all into a military and financial quagmire from which we will not easily extricate ourselves. That task will likely fall to Congress or the next President. Meanwhile the war is escalating beyond our ability to control it.
Trump forgot, or never cared, that the only power the President has is what the people will support. Without public support America’s foreign wars always fail. Presidents and Congress ignore that truth at their peril. The decision to got to war with Iran will likely be one of the biggest foreign policy failures in U.S. history.
Massive Data Infrastructure Investment Requires Public Support
Like the Iran War; the president, the governor and private companies decided we need to build a massive number of data centers, and they moved ahead and did so. But they never made the case to the American (or Texas) people as to why so many data centers are necessary first.
If there is national security or economic reason why we must have all these data centers, then the first job of government and business is to make the case to the American people.
If they are truly necessary, I expect the American people in general would support them. But it is a lot harder to build that support after you have already broken ground.
In our American political culture that failure is fatal to the success of any large scale enterprise, like starting a war, or organizing private industry to build massive infrastructure projects with the help of the public’s tax dollars.
If the President and Governor Abbott and others truly believe these data centers are necessary for defense of the country and our economic future, make that case.
If they can’t, people should be forgiven for assuming they are only interested in it because they are corrupt, and are willing to sacrifice the people to fill their pocket books.
Jon Mark Hogg is founder and senior editor at the Concho Observer.
