Tim Egan lives in Washington State and has been writing for the NY Times for decades.  Normally, he writes East Coast opinion with a West Coast spin.  Today, he took on his Boomers and Millennials to task, asking why Boomers are so backward and the Millennials so lame.  It was so in step with what we've been writing, it could have been posted on this forum.

I have figured out what the main battle of this Fourth Turning, it is Liberal Democracy vs the Alt-Right/Neo-Nationalist (which I see as a spectrum) movement. For a while I was on the fringes of the alt-right scene, I got into because of the my involvement in the counter-jihad movement and in recent years it has been entering this territory. I have recently figured out how incredibly insidious this ideology is and they are duping a lot of people, usually gradually.  


I don't believe law enforcement authorities (in general) know how bad it has gotten, because they only notice when the people have reached the alt-right stage, not the neo-nationalist/alt-lite stage. For example; Milo Yiannopoulos or Jordan Peterson* and Richard Spencer are in the same movement, just on different points of the spectrum. Essentially people start on the road to the alt-right when they get 'red-pilled' or starting believing in conspiracy theories say like that of cultural Marxism. I think writing book on this whole movement (if good guys win) will become my life work, so that future generations of people can avoid same fate.



The neo-nationalist parties which are major political players now aren’t too extreme. Although it is alarming that it has entered the American Right (which is 30% odd percentage of the American public that are Trump supporters). In Australia on the other-hand they are still pretty fringe, although starting to enter into a few minor parties.

However, the second global financial crisis will come and a lack of global effort to combat it will plunge the world into an massive economic downturn like the Great Depression. Then those countries with neo-nationalist parties in power will get more extreme or more extreme alt-right parties will come to power. 

The countries of Western Europe have been pretty good at identifying and containing alt-right. However the European Union is weak and neo-nationalist parties are governments in some Eastern European countries. Such parties as the Austria Freedom Party and Italy's Lega Nord are in government in those countries. Millennial students on university campuses have been good at trying to prevent speakers they deem as having 'alt-lite' or 'alt-right' ideas.
 
Therefore, the first Turning Purge which the one in the last first turning was McCarthyism can go two ways depending on which side wins. 

If Liberal Democracy wins, anybody who part of the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right or even suspected of Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right leanings. Nationalism and Populism are going to become words akin to Fascism and Nazism. I applaud Twitter and Facebook for starting to purge people with this subversion elements. Donald Trump is complaining that it unfairly targets Conservatives.
 
If the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right wins, little doubt authoritarian regimes would emerge that would be at best 'illiberal democracies' at worst downright totalitarian. 

They will purge what they consider their enemies which will be at the very least.
Anybody in the media and in public life they deem as "Leftists" or "Communists".
Feminist and LBGTQ activists.
Academics and teachers which they see as peddling "Cultural Marxism".
Transgender and even Homosexual people will be regarded as suffering from a mental illness and be sent to psychiatric hospitals to be retreated.
 
Depending on the regime in power:
Muslims (in some areas, where they are especially big enemies of whatever alt-right regime is in power)
Jews
Other ethnic groups deemed undesirable.
 
These regimes death toll won’t be on the scale of Nazism or Communism, still a lot of people killed.
Ultimately the alt-right want to take society back to the 1950's (well a fantasy version). Expect the education system to be purged of anything remotely resembling “cultural Marxism” and "post-modernism". 

I have figured out what the main battle of this Fourth Turning, it is Liberal Democracy vs the Alt-Right/Neo-Nationalist (which I see as a spectrum) movement. For a while I was on the fringes of the alt-right scene, I got into because of the my involvement in the counter-jihad movement and in recent years it has been entering this territory. I have recently figured out how incredibly insidious this ideology is and they are duping a lot of people, usually gradually.  


I don't believe law enforcement authorities (in general) know how bad it has gotten, because they only notice when the people have reached the alt-right stage, not the neo-nationalist/alt-lite stage. For example; Milo Yiannopoulos or Jordan Peterson* and Richard Spencer are in the same movement, just on different points of the spectrum. Essentially people start on the road to the alt-right when they get 'red-pilled' or starting believing in conspiracy theories say like that of cultural Marxism. I think writing book on this whole movement (if good guys win) will become my life work, so that future generations of people can avoid same fate.



The neo-nationalist parties which are major political players now aren’t too extreme. Although it is alarming that it has entered the American Right (which is 30% odd percentage of the American public that are Trump supporters). In Australia on the other-hand they are still pretty fringe, although starting to enter into a few minor parties.

However, the second global financial crisis will come and a lack of global effort to combat it will plunge the world into an massive economic downturn like the Great Depression. Then those countries with neo-nationalist parties in power will get more extreme or more extreme alt-right parties will come to power. 

The countries of Western Europe have been pretty good at identifying and containing alt-right. However the European Union is weak and neo-nationalist parties are governments in some Eastern European countries. Such parties as the Austria Freedom Party and Italy's Lega Nord are in government in those countries. Millennial students on university campuses have been good at trying to prevent speakers they deem as having 'alt-lite' or 'alt-right' ideas.
 
Therefore, the first Turning Purge which the one in the last first turning was McCarthyism can go two ways depending on which side wins. 

If Liberal Democracy wins, anybody who part of the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right or even suspected of Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right leanings. Nationalism and Populism are going to become words akin to Fascism and Nazism. I applaud Twitter and Facebook for starting to purge people with this subversion elements. Donald Trump is complaining that it unfairly targets Conservatives.
 
If the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right wins, little doubt authoritarian regimes would emerge that would be at best 'illiberal democracies' at worst downright totalitarian. 

They will purge what they consider their enemies which will be at the very least.
Anybody in the media and in public life they deem as "Leftists" or "Communists".
Feminist and LBGTQ activists.
Academics and teachers which they see as peddling "Cultural Marxism".
Transgender and even Homosexual people will be regarded as suffering from a mental illness and be sent to psychiatric hospitals to be retreated.
 
Depending on the regime in power:
Muslims (in some areas, where they are especially big enemies of whatever alt-right regime is in power)
Jews
Other ethnic groups deemed undesirable.
 
These regimes death toll won’t be on the scale of Nazism or Communism, still a lot of people killed.
Ultimately the alt-right want to take society back to the 1950's (well a fantasy version). Expect the education system to be purged of anything remotely resembling “cultural Marxism” and "post-modernism". 

My most recent blog post. Finishes up the list of "what to expect in the Crisis Era" from the Millennial generation.

THE SPOTLIGHT ON MILLENNIALS
 October 3, 2018  Steve Comments 0 Comment
I’m going to return to looking at the list of patterns to expect for the living generations in the current social era, the Crisis Era in Strauss & Howe terms, picking up where I left off a few months back.

Let’s look at the remaining items on the list of predictions about the Millennial generation – that Millennials will heroically rise to political challenge, that they will develop a sense of generational community, and that they will benefit from a new focus on the young-adult world. For evidence, I will simply consider the kinds of news stories that have been prevalent on social media and the web in the past decade. So let’s start with the last item on the list.

In the Millennial generation’s childhood era, which began way back in the 1980s, children benefited from a new focus on child-rearing. A wave of social change in the direction of increased child protection came in the form of mandatory safety rules, zero tolerance policies, and laws named after child victims (for example, Megan’s Law). I wrote about this on my old blog nearly twenty years ago.

Now that we are in the Millennial young adulthood era, the impetus for social change has shifted to the adult sphere of life. Political change may be stymied by partisanship, but a wave of social movements has risen in response to long-standing problems. These problems were tolerated when they affected previous generations – but no more.

A prominent example which can be thought of as zero tolerance policies reaching the workplace is the Me Too movement and its effects. This took off last year as a viral social media hashtag when a prominent Hollywood producer was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment. Since then, a flood of accusations has led to the downfall of many men in high places. Sexual harassment in the workplace has long been covered up by HR departments and endured by female employees, but in the Millennial era this may not be possible, or desirable, any more.

A less politically charged example is the new concern over reducing concussions to football players in the National Football League. The research into the problem began in the Gen-X era, but it was only ten years ago that the U.S. Congress compelled the NFL to act.  An enormous settlement was agreed upon, which has benefited retired Gen-X players, but only after they sustained the injuries in the first place. For Millennials, a protocol is coming into place to reduce the prevalence of injuries in the first place.

Not that there isn’t a politically charged example connected to the NFL, by which I mean the Black Lives Matter movement. Football players kneeling during the national anthem are in solidarity with this movement, protesting police shootings of unarmed young black men. Though rates of violence have been declining for a generation, police killings still disproportionately affect minorities. In the past this may have been a topic for moralistic commentary in academia and the arts, but today it is the focus of a stubbornly persistent and controversial activist movement.

Another famous movement that seems to have come and gone is Occupy Wall Street, which protested income inequality and the corruption in government and finance that was brought into stark relief by the financial crisis and bailouts in 2008. The protests on the street may have ended, but they continue in the online world. On today’s Internet feeds there are endless posts about the difficulties faced today by Millennials trying to get by in the current economy – the burden of student debt, the impossibility of surviving on minimum wage, the need to delay life events like home buying or marriage until financial stability is achieved.

All of these difficulties were faced by previous generations, but now that Millennials face them there is a greater sense of urgency. Will these problems be addressed by drastic measure while Millennials are still young adults? Will student debt be discharged, and higher education be payed for by taxpayers, like primary and secondary education? Will the minimum wage be raised significantly?

This ties into the first item on the list of what to expect from Millennials – that they will heroically rise to political challenge. There is less evidence of this. Youth voting rates have increased slightly since their nadir in the Gen-X era, but have not come anywhere close to that of the great era of civic participation of the mid-twentieth century. Older generations still have a lock on government, which partisanship has rendered contentious and barely functioning. But time favors the young generation, and they will eventually make their voices heard.

All that is discussed above connects to the remaining item on the list – that Millennials will develop a sense of generational community. Just that fact the their generation’s name – originally coined by Strauss & Howe as part of an academic theory – has become a household word, and that news about them has become so prominent, shows how they are in the forefront of social awareness. 
Everyone is familiar, for example, with stories about how they are reshaping the economy. With the spotlight shining on them, it is hard to imagine this generation doesn’t have a strong self-awareness. If they can combine that awareness with an enforceable political consensus, they could reshape our society, and truly bring about a Millennial era.

Neo-nationalism is a political ideology which has spread across the world in this Fourth Turning. I am quoting a Wikipedia article on Neo-nationalism. This ideology started in Putin's Russia and China and has spread in the last decade to about everywhere in the world essentially. It is a lot like Fascism in the 1930's expect usually considerably milder, in formerly Liberal Democratic countries there has been a slide back to authoritarianism. I am not sure if they will be like the Nazis of the Last Fourth Turning, it could be given early last decade I thought the Fourth Turning would centering on how to civilize globalization and the need for more globalization to deal with the challenge of man-made climate change.
 

Quote:Neo-nationalism or new nationalism is a type of nationalism that rose in the mid-2010s in Europe and North America and to some degree in other regions. It is associated with several positions, such as right-wing populism, anti-globalization, nativism,  protectionism, opposition to immigration, opposition to Islam and Muslims and Euroscepticism where applicable. According to one scholar, "nationalist resistance to global liberalism turned out to be the most influential force in Western politics" in 2016.Particularly notable expressions of new nationalism include the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States.

Quote:Writing for Politico, Michael Hirsh described new nationalism as "a bitter populist rejection of the status quo that global elites have imposed on the international system since the Cold War ended, and which lower-income voters have decided—understandably—is unfair." Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in The Week that new nationalism is a "broad nativist revolt" against post-Cold War politics long "characterized by an orthodoxy of free trade, nurturing the service economy, neoliberal trading arrangements, and liberalized immigration policies."
 
The Economist wrote in November 2016 that "new nationalists are riding high on promises to close borders and restore societies to a past homogeneity." Clarence Page wrote in the Las Vegas Sun that "a new neo-tribal nationalism has boiled up in European politics and to a lesser degree in the United States since the global economic meltdown of 2008," and Ryan Cooper in The Week and researchers with the Centre for Economic Policy Research have linked 21st-century right-wing populism to the Great Recession. According to Harvard political theorist Yascha Mounk, "economic stagnation among lower- and middle-class whites [has been] a main driver for nationalism's rise around the globe." According to religion scholar Mark L. Movesian, new nationalism "sets the nation-state against supranational, liberal regimes like the EU or NAFTA, and local customs and traditions, including religious traditions, against alien, outside trends."
 
David Brog and Yoram Hazony wrote in National Review that some conservatives view the new nationalism associated with Brexit and Donald Trump as a betrayal of conservative ideology while they see it as a "return". According to conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, the nationalism associated with Trump is "really little more than a brand name for generic white identity politics."
 
Writing for The Week, Damon Linker called the idea of neo-nationalism being racist "nonsense" and went on to say that "the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but 'racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia'—is the desire to delegitimize any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic."
 
Regarding new nationalism, The Economist said that "Mr Trump needs to realise that his policies will unfold in the context of other countries’ jealous nationalism," and called nationalism itself a "slippery concept" that is "easy to manipulate". They also repeatedly contrasted ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism and implied new nationalism could become "angry" and difficult to control, citing Chinese nationalism as an example.

Michael Lewis paints a bleak picture of our prospects under continued domination of the "government is the problem" meme. See video here:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/michae...nder-trump

Bestselling author Michael Lewis says the idea that civil servants are “lazy or stupid or dead weight on the society is...the most sinister idea alive in this country right now." In his new book, “The Fifth Risk,” Lewis examines how the Trump administration has been staffing the federal government, and its “ignorance of the mission.” Lewis sits down with William Brangham for a conversation.

• Judy Woodruff:
  As we have been reporting, addressing enormous global challenges like climate change require more than just individual action. They require the leadership of active, engaged governments.
  In his new book, "The Fifth Risk," bestselling author Michael Lewis reports on the Trump administration and its approach to staffing the federal government.
  William is back with the latest installment of our "NewsHour" Bookshelf.
  He began by asking Michael Lewis to explain the book's title.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  It's the risk you're not imagining. It's the thing you're not thinking about when you're worried about whatever you're worried about.
  And the beginning of the story is really seeing the federal government as a portfolio of risks that are being managed. Most of — most of them, we aren't even thinking about, things like the risk that some nuclear bomb is going to go off when it shouldn't go off, managed out of the Department Energy, or that we won't have an accurate picture of the society, managed out of the Department of Commerce.
  It collects all the statistics about the society. I mean, you move across the government, it's breathtaking how many mission-critical things there are, and how it's being done in spite of this vague hostility the society has to its own government.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Your reporting really covers the period after Trump is clearly going to be the president and the transition that goes on when one administration switches to the next.
  How would you characterize, broadly speaking, how that transition happened and what occurred?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  So, there's what's supposed to happen, and there's what happened.
  What is supposed to happen is that the outgoing administration spends nine months and a thousand people's time building briefing books across the administration. So, the Obama administration did this. And the idea was, the day after the election, whoever won would send hundreds of people into the government to get the briefings.
  And the Trump administration didn't show up. They never bothered to learn what these agencies are doing.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  The book has so many fascinating vignettes of people who work within these different federal agencies.
  And I wonder if there's one story that stands out to you that's emblematic of this larger issue that you're talking about.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Well, the larger issue of the ignorance — the problem of ignorance of the mission, and, as a result, putting the wrong person in.
  I mean, there are hundreds of examples, but I mean, I think one that is easily described is, inside the Department of Agriculture, there is a chief scientist. And this person is responsible for distributing $3 billion in research grants every year.
  Now, this is going to agricultural research, most of it, one way or another, now associated with climate change. it's how we're going to — how we're going to continue to grow food and graze sheep and milk cows in different — in a different climate. And it's a serious issue. It's the planning for the — the food supply of 50 years from now.
  The person who was doing that was a very distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki. She's a world-class authority on the subject of agricultural science.
  Trump replaced her with a right-wing talk show radio host from Iowa who happened to have supported him in the election who had no science background at all.
  That kind of thing, taking people who really know something, and replacing them with people who are just like loyalists, who have absolutely no idea what the mission is, is a theme that runs right through the administration.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Does the mission suffer? I mean, I think obviously, you could look at that kind of a transition and say, that seems a drastic shift in priority.
  But these bureaucracies largely have a career staff that are there largely permanently. I mean, doesn't — doesn't that staff keep the mission going for the most part?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  So of the top 6,000 career civil servants in the federal work force, 20 percent of them quit or were fired the first year of the Trump administration.
  So, already, there's a — you can see a gutting of the civil service. And the idea that these people are lazy or stupid or dead weight on the society is — I think it's the most sinister idea alive in this country right now. I really do.
  And I think — and it's because they are — they're very mission-driven people. They're very knowledgeable people. What they aren't is money people. And…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Meaning they're not in money for themselves.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Yes, that's right. You don't take these jobs to be famous — rich and famous. You take these jobs because you really care about the thing.
  And they're the government. And without those people, this place collapses.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  This place being this society.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  The society.
  It's not like the government is a tool that we might use to address the biggest problems we have. It's the only tool for most of the biggest problem. You're going to deal with climate change, that's going to be from the government.
  If you deal — anything having to do with science and technology, all the basic research, the very basic research is done with government — through the government, because if it's not going to pay out in the next 10 to 15 years, industry doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
  The future is driven by what the government does. And it has been in this country forever. I mean, you don't get the Internet without the government. You don't get the iPhone without the government. You don't get GPS without the government.
  We are drastically cheating the future when we beat the government, the way we treat it. It's not just Trump. I mean, we have been doing this here for several decades, this — playing with the idea that the government's the problem, not the solution. He is just the ultimate expression of the problem.
  And I think if it's like there is this exquisitely important machine that we have allowed, through our own neglect, to accumulate rust over the decades. And now he's come in with a sledgehammer. And, yes, we're going to play a real price if we don't pay attention.
  
• William Brangham:
  In the last third of the book, you really talk about the centrality of government data and how important that is.
  And there's a few passages where you list a lot of ways in which the Trump administration has been scrubbing its Web sites of data. The USDA was removing reports of farm animals being abused, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau removing reports of financial abuse, FEMA removing data about electricity and water in Puerto Rico after the hurricane.
  What is behind that?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  All the climate change data across the…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Right, at the Department of Energy.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  There is a threat, anyway, to the weather data being accessible.
  It is not ideological. It's been driven by narrow financial interests. Someone…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Financial interests?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Someone has a business that is going to be more profitable if this information is not available.
  And so it's ranchers who want to be able to abuse animals, or it's a — it's a weather company that doesn't want the weather data publicly accessible, because they want to be able to sell it to people.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  After talking with all of these different officials working within these crucial agencies, what is the thing that scares you the most? What keeps you up?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  It's a broad thing. And the broad thing is the fantastic myopia of this moment.
  We're going to look back and say there were many — unless we drastically shift course — look back and say there were many moments where we cheated the future by the way we behaved in the present.
  And I think that's — that's been true for a while, but I think it's really true right now.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  The book is "The Fifth Risk."
  Michael Lewis, thank you so much.
  

A recent post from my blog.

THE MILLENNIAL COUNTER ARGUMENT

 September 25, 2018  Steve Comments 0 Comment

Since the streaming video era began, a new kind of content from the Millennial generation has become prevalent. It consists of episodes of commentary that dissects cultural phenomena, common sense knowledge or received history to get at hidden or unrepresented truth.

A famous example is Adam Ruins Everything, which began as a series on the CollegeHumor web site and then became a television show on truTV. An example you may have seen on Facebook is Racist History. Other examples abound on YouTube, in the form of named channels such as Counter Arguments, CaptainDisillusion, Knowing Better, Loose Canon by Lindsay Ellis (though I think she might have dropped that name), and Hilarious Helmet History from the web site Cracked (which itself fits this description).

With Spock-like logic and more than a little snark, the Millennial creatives who produce this content challenge assumptions and rewrite the narrative of conventional wisdom. Unsentimental and hyperrational, they seek to shine a cold, hard light on reality and reveal stark facts, repudiating the hysterics and oversaturation with meaning that characterize the Boomer outlook.
It’s like they seek to jettison all of the histrionic cultural baggage of the Boomer era, and rebuild a world based on reason and accuracy, in keeping with that Millennial mantra, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Here is a great example of what I mean:

[url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4VcOQz...U4VcOQzQm0[/url]

CNN has one of the better articles on how the Millennials might look at things differently politically.

Yuval Noah Harari is an historian and futurist with a wide following, and he has a new book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century"  A great model for me!

We need to develop mental and emotional resilience. We need to re-engineer the world inside us. Global cooperation is needed to solve the most significant problems. Control of data is control of society. We have too much information today; censorship today means flooding people with information. Artificial Intelligence might replace human abilities before we know what they are. There's a shift in power underway from humans to algorithms. Every technology opens different doors, and can be used to create hell or paradise; it's up to us. Computers will care about us better than humans; we may downgrade humans in order to make them more efficient. Free media gives us excitement, not information, in the battle for attention. People think in stories, not facts, and we need new stories. We are better off today than ever in history; but things can get worse quickly-- if we think things are completely broken, so we break them in order to start over. There's lots to worry about, but humans have the ability to rise to the occasion. We can't leave the future to the free market or an arms race. These are some of his points.

When Jade Doskow first started photographing her Lost Utopias series in 2007, it seemed eerily prescient. Published as the international banking system teetered on the brink of collapse, the remains of World’s Fair sites she highlighted seemingly captured the ruins of a time before our collective optimism towards the future had vanished. But World’s Fairs still happen. In fact, they’ve never been bigger. Recent and forthcoming expositions in Astana (2017), Beijing (2019) and Dubai (2020), make it clear that World’s Fairs still offer predictions of what is to come, illuminating human aspiration.

Expos are celebrations of art, science, engineering, and vernacular architecture, but they’re also opportunities for cities to announce themselves open for business. Following the carving of the Simplon Tunnel through the Alps, Milan invited the world to L'Esposizione Internazionale del Sempione in 1906. That same year, most of San Francisco was leveled by a colossal earthquake and resulting fires but aimed to re-emerge like a phoenix with the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition. With Expo ’92, Seville sought to prove that it, and all of Spain, had truly emerged from the shadow of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Yet all the noble aspirations, centenary celebrations, and talk of the brotherhood of nations boils down to selling a city to an international audience.


Long before the internet, Expos were encapsulations of the global village. Millions flocked to experience foreign cultures and new innovations. With their national pavilions, countries competed for attention in the hope of attracting tourism, investment, or political recognition. But the greatest benefactors were almost always the host cities. Mies van der Rohe’s architectural contribution to the 1929 Exposició Internacional is remembered not as the German Pavilion—after the country that commissioned it—but the Barcelona Pavilion. Demolished the following year, it became a dazzling modernist specter in photographs and renderings until rebuilt in the Catalan city in 1986.
The lasting benefits for cities can be found in their fabric. The profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851 provided London with Albertopolis, with its still-flourishing museums like the V&A. Paris was left with a host of buildings from successive expositions including the Eiffel Tower, once intended as temporary. Whether the traces left behind are sublime or ridiculous is subjective—Brussels has the Atomium; Seattle, the Space Needle; Melbourne, its Royal Exhibition Building; Montreal, Habitat 67 and the bones of the Biosphere; Nashville, a life-size replica of the Parthenon. In a deeper sense, World’s Fairs changed the way citizens moved around and engaged with their cities from the initiation of the Paris Métro to the Vancouver Skytrain. Land was reclaimed in Chicago and Liege. Ghent, Vienna, and Suita were redeveloped. Melbourne and Barcelona were illuminated with electric lights. New roads, railways and flight paths emanated like nervous systems across countries, to bring spectators from the countryside and abroad.

Then, the Western-centric story goes, World’s Fairs fell from grace. Part of this was down to audiences simply aging. Who could blame nostalgia towards witnessing the Crystal Palace, the head of the Statue of Liberty in a Parisian park, the extra-terrestrial Trylon and Perisphere, or the Tower of the Sun? This was bolstered by the fact that many of the greatest buildings, like Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building of 1893 with its famed Golden Door, had been demolished and so attained a lost perfection in memory. World’s Fairs seemed to suit children, who would be swept up in the spectacle of monorails, geodesic domes, and Ferris wheels. They’d also fail to notice the temporary, occasionally-shoddy nature of the structures, or the fact that many Expos ran at a financial loss. When the Louisiana World Exposition capsized into bankruptcy in 1984, it seemed to confirm that the promise offered by World’s Fairs had already passed into the realm of Kodachrome photographs and Super 8 film.

More here.