Creative destruction in the most recent campaign

It was considered a given throughout the entire course of the recent presidential campaign that the Democrats had an enormous edge in technology over the Republicans in the areas of data science, analytics, and the set of technologies required to sway voters through social media. For example, Bloomberg reported in 2013:

During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an under-appreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. ... Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. ... Wagner’s team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook, e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength.

The Democrats' edge in these disciplines turns out to have been much less important in 2016. Much more significant was the Trump campaign's ability to produce and disseminate information and narratives across the internet, an expertise in no small degree due to the presence in the Trump campaign of Steve Bannon.

Bannon, a Hollywood media mogul, had become an expert over the years in the art of creating and promoting memes and narratives through the packaging and releasing of films and books across a wide variety of media channels, including through Breitbart news and even the New York Times. This was yet another change in the landscape that the Democrats turned out to be completely blind to. They smugly assumed they had the technology advantage. The election last week was a rude awakening. They must now acknowledge that they have suddenly been completely outflanked/leapfrogged by a revolutionary new approach.

This sudden outflanking/leapfrogging of an old technology by a new technology is precisely what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was trying to capture when he coined the term "creative destruction" (schöpferische Zerstörung). As Wikipedia informs us::

According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".

In other words, the Democrats' big data operation is just another example of a high-tech company grown lazy and complacent. Its incumbent technology is suddenly obsoleted by the arrival on the scene of a brash new startup. The old darling was Google's Eric Schmidt; this year's new darlings are Bannon and right-wing Peter Thiel, who, as with so many of his VC bets, made a high-risk (though calculated) wager on a revolutionary new approach and, to the dismay of all the ultra-liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to keep pace, won big yet again.

Expect the technology war between the two parties to continue and escalate.