Regeneracy=TARP, Climax=Trump, Resolution=Midterms?

[Ritterlich]

Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

[Bill the Piper]

The resolution will have to wait until the election in 2020. There are 3 possibilities:
-Trump gets re-elected. In this case, the 4T will last for another 4 years.
-A virulent SJW Democrat (someone like Elizabeth Warren or Camala Harris) is elected. In this case, the US could be stuck in 4T until 2028, since such a president would only attract everybody dissatisfied to the nationalist camp.
-A moderate president is elected. In this case, the 4T may end in 2020.

For Britain, the climax is Brexit and there are also 3 possible resolutions:
-leaving the EU without a deal
-staying in the EU
-striking a divorce deal that satisfies both parties

[pbrower2a]

(11-04-2018, 11:26 PM)Ritterlich Wrote: Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

Stock market prices from late 2007 to about now, explained with a graph. Roughly a year and a half after the corresponding peaks for the stock markets of almost 80 years apart (September 1929 and October 2007), stock market valuations had fallen over 50%. Stock market valuations might reflect things other than economic performance, but when one considers similarities between the 1920s and the Double-Zero decades (right-wing, pro-business President, speculative boom based on bad business, and a depraved 3T culture), the coincidences have a similar result. Speculative bubbles devour capital, diverting capital from job-creating investments in plant and equipment. Investment, heavily in real estate, leads to a glut. A financial panic occurs when people can no longer afford to buy into the bubble.

In the meltdown beginning in 1929 the stock market kept plunging for three years. The meltdown beginning in 2007 lasted roughly a year and a half. After roughly three years, America started to recover from the Crash of 1929 and huge mismanagement of the economy. After a year and a half following the economic meltdown of 2007, the American economy started growing out of an economic meltdown. Obama and FDR both backed the banks, but Obama got the chance after a year and a half of the meltdown began, and FDR could not really start doing so until after more than three years of economic collapse.

The timing made a huge difference. The 1929-1932 meltdown forced big Business into a survival mode in which buying the political process was an unaffordable luxury. Obama rescued interests who wanted a pure plutocracy and by 2010 started to buy the political system. Now that the United States has the purest plutocracy in the advanced West, we are where we are. Everybody wanted swift action to put an end to the economic meltdown. In the 1930s FDR could push a reforming agenda. By 2011 Obama could achieve nothing of the type.

Quote:However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

A nitpick: the 'conservatives' of 2018 are very different from the conservatives of 1968. The conservatives of 1968 sought to preserve the New Deal against radical change. The Movement Conservatives that we now have want a return to a time that they think wonderful -- a time in which capitalists had all the power in the economy and the political sphere and others were obliged to defer. Just look at the slogan "Make America Great Again", suggesting that America has lost something. People can look fondly at certain aspects of the distant past, recognizing that there were opportunities now absent and that real estate was cheap. A canon of housing lenders of the 1950s was that people should never get housing loans that will cost more than 35% of the (male) breadwinner's income even if the mortgage loan was a good deal. Today, many middle-income people get stuck paying 60% of their after-tax income on rent.

Note well that the missed opportunities of the alleged time of American greatness reflect that people missed those opportunities because economic realities forced people to pass them up. Around 1900, industrial workers typically worked 70 hours a week and had a 40-hour lifespan, the brutal working conditions usually breaking them down in the workers' thirties. Children were often pressed into manufacturing and mining to support parents old before their time, so such curtailed their formal education. Since about 1935 the industrial worker has a 40-hour workweek and a 70-year lifespan. It is easy to see why people of the time passed up on many of the opportunities that seem so obvious today. Such an institution as the supermarket came into its own in the 1930s.

The Hard Right longs for a return to a time in which people worked hard, competently, and cheaply under brutal management that workers feared but recognized as the best of all possible worlds. The elites of ownership and management want the perfect order of ultra-cheap labor (Third World pay) with high, First World productivity. Who needs a consumer economy when the elites are the only ones with the means with which to consume? (The unspoken answer is, of course, the working class more humanely induced to work with promises of prosperity than with fear of beatings or being condemned to starvation).

Much as many of us disparage Karl Marx, he got one thing undeniably right: in an industrial society, the worker has nothing to offer but his toil. He failed to recognize the nexus between productivity and wages that would be necessary for saving capitalism (saving capitalism was the one thing that he did not want to happen), a nexus that would form as employers found that a sullen and resentful proletariat was harder to control than a proletariat that could enjoy a consumer society. So long as the industrial order was making life better for people by producing new and better things that working people were starting to consume, the capitalist system worked well. Most Americans are at the point in which they can't improve their lives by simply buying more stuff. Measures of consumption can impress people if one recognizes that people are paying much more for things that used to be cheap (rent and taxes).

Quote:It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

Demographics explain much. The white proletariat can look back to a time when things were allegedly better -- when working people were starting to make headway because their union wages allowed them to buy cars, furniture, appliances, and single-family housing that their parents never had. Hispanics and Asians were not around in the same numbers, so they can interpret "Make America Great Again" refer to a time when they were not in America. Such people have little nostalgia for a time in which they were not there. Blacks? Those 'good old days' implied either second-class citizenship Up North, getting consigned to the worse jobs (last hired, first fired) and being obliged to accept substandard housing that white people no longer wanted as white people moved to the shining new suburbs with their bungalows, lawns, picket fences, and two-car garages -- or the infamous supervision of Jim Crow practice in "Kukluxistan".

The white proletariat and the non-white proletariat have similar economic results, but they could hardly see the world more differently.

Donald Trump does badly among educated people by what used to be the standards of Republicans. In the 1950s, the Democratic nominee for President (Adlai Stevenson both times) got crushed in the parts of America that were then best-educated in Eisenhower landslides. Republicans got about 80% of the vote of people with college degrees. As late as 1964, even in a landslide election that he lost, Barry Goldwater won a majority of people with college degrees. To be sure, far fewer people in those days had college degrees, and college graduation (or even attendance) still usually reflected that as late as the 1930s that one was part of the WASP elite, something that changed with the GI Bill that allowed people not WASP to attend college and get college degrees. Obama did extremely well for a Democrat (better even than LBJ in his 1964 landslide!) among college graduates*.


Practically by definition the middle class, whatever its origin, is doing well in America except for getting stuck spending 60% of its after-tax income on rent in places where the economy is post-industrial (Florida, perhaps? Certainly coastal California, Greater Washington, New York City, Greater Boston, and maybe the cities of the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle.  The Rust Belt? There are few middle-class opportunities in such urban wrecks as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Louisville. Maybe if one is a CPA, dentist, or a physician one can find adequate living in a place like Pittsburgh which has lost its old industrial base and can avoid paying 60% of one's income to rent. The middle class has no nostalgia for the sentiment behind "Make America Great Again"; it has college degrees and can see through the pitch.

*An overlay of the Eisenhower and Obama elections is remarkable. Any Presidential nominee who wins 330 or more electoral votes is going to win few states that FDR did not win in 1936 (Maine and Vermont), Nixon did not win in 1972 (Massachusetts), or Reagan did not win in 1984 (Minnesota). Obama won all four such states twice, which LBJ also won in 1964. In 2008, Obama won only one state in a 365-EV near-landslide that Eisenhower did not win twice (North Carolina) and won a state (Indiana) that had gone for a Democratic nominee only once since 1936. In 2012, Obama won 332 electoral votes (an unusual number because Presidential elections avoid the mean result, tending either to closeness or to landslides), which  is a huge number of electoral votes -- not one of them in a state that Eisenhower did not win twice.

If you look at the 1928 election of Hoover, Ike won the two Northern states that Hoover did not win (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) and the one state that Reagan never won (Minnesota) -- three states usually among the toughest for a Republican to win. Rhode Island was the third-worst state for Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984 (both won the state in 49-state blowouts), and Massachusetts and Minnesota were the second-worst and worst states for Nixon in 1972 and 1984, respectively. Ike won all three states twice, being the only Republican nominee to win all three states together since the 1920s -- and he did it twice.

Obama is unique in the President just for having a non-American father and, of course, not being white. This said, he has to be more like some other President than like others, and I see Eisenhower despite the very different curriculum vitae (Ike was a military man and Obama is a polished attorney, but I could imagine Ike as an attorney and Obama as a military man very easily), being about fifteen years different in age, and being in opposite Parties. This said, both exemplified caution, both put a high value on legal precedent and diplomatic protocol, both eschewed populism, and both ran squeaky-clean administrations. In the generational theory, both exemplify the mature Reactive type at its best as a leader -- someone who sees the hornet's nest and leaves it alone. The worst Reactive/Nomad types kick the hornet's nest. Think of Hitler.

Eisenhower and Obama may have had personalities that soothed the American middle class, which may explain much.

[pbrower2a]

More -- I see Obama not getting the full effects of a Regeneracy that would have required significant reforms of the political system and the economic order. The elites of ownership and management wanted none of that; they want a paradise for themselves that implies a Hell for everyone else. It is hardly surprising that Vladimir Putin can wine and dine a reactionary like Trump and show him the glorious world (for an elite) of Imperial Russia and impress him. An ex-KGB man, he could show to a leftist what a leftist might admire in the Soviet Union while glossing over the horrors of a police state, Stalin's purges, and the Gulag system, too.

The economic elites of America sought a Regeneracy of their choosing, and that is one in which the common man learns to accept his place on One Big Happy Plantation. Intellectuals who dislike that? Heck, they can emigrate. People who refuse the terms of working to exhaustion for near-starvation pay? They can starve or rot in prison. For people not in the elites, one must suffer with a smile, as I see of people who work in convenience stores. As the old Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

It may take a full-blown second Great Depression to compel Americans to feel a similar shared danger that they must meet with give-and-take instead of with demands to get everything that they want. It may take an apocalyptic war that implies the potential for dissolution of the Union or subjection of America to enemy regimes hostile to the essence of the American political order.

[David Horn]

(11-04-2018, 11:26 PM)Ritterlich Wrote: Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

I seriously doubt the Trump-as-GC theory, because Trump has no strategy beyond dominating the next news cycle.  It's true.  Politicians tend to be myopic, but he's simply ridiculous.  And the possibility that he wins in 2020 won't change my thinking in the least.  There cannot be a resolution when the optimum state is chaos, and that's pretty much Trump's entire toolkit.

I find it much more likely that he will keep things in turmoil until he leaves office, possibly in 2024, we will just stop the in-fighting out of ennui.  It's a poor choice, but exhaustion may be the final winner. I'm less concerned about the UK, because the failure there was a badly played gambit by Cameron that almost everyone knows was stupid. Brexit may happen, but it will slowly be overcome by common sense and common needs.

[pbrower2a]

Trump is too incompetent... and evil. He can force an apocalypse, but he cannot ensure a salubrious result. If he should provoke a war, then that war is likely to be mindless carnage.

OK, he is not Hitler -- but was Hitler a Gray Champion? Hitler had his strengths as a leader; he was good at dividing power among potential rivals; he was attentive to detail; he thought outside the (moral) box that most people would reject leaving; he was adept at keeping a nation scared of real or imagined evils. In the end he traded the imaginary evil of the Jews for the real menace of the Allied Armies finally having more power than the Wehrmacht. Contrast Churchill, who made sure that the British people feared defeat far more than they feared him, who did not find scapegoats other than the wartime enemies, and who found a potential rival at times a necessary ally to be cultivated even at the risk of giving that person more potential power. Churchill also made sure that to conquered people that defeat at his hands was better than any alternatives available.

A Nazi victory was the worst thing to happen to just about any people (the only imaginable exception was gentile Balts who had endured worse under the Soviet Union) and created a resistance in its wake. A British or American victory was the end of the nastiness, and a time for starting over. A German soldier had to watch his back all the way from the old German border to his place of posting; a British or American soldier did not.

Trump is a potential Gray Champion only if an evil person can succeed at the role. I am not going to say that victory justifies all crimes, as those crimes eventually tear at the system. In general, the world outside America despises him; he is not going to gain friends by invading Cuba or Venezuela, let alone Iran.

[Eric the Green]

(11-04-2018, 11:26 PM)Ritterlich Wrote: Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

Good try. But a common misinterpretation around T4T commentary is to think this 4T will end sooner than it will. Mr. Howe has spelled out the end year as 2029, and it agrees with what I predicted according to other cycles.

The regeneracy has begun, however, and it is what Obama described in his Oct.7 chicago school speech as the political awakening going on all across the country. In our time though, being a return of cold (and maybe later, hot) civil war, is that the sleepening forces were aroused too, so stalemate continues. TARP was the equivalent of the New Deal, along with Obama's stimulus package and Wall Street reforms (Dodd-Frank). It was not a regeneracy, but the early response to the onset of crisis. But your observations are correct about the quicker economic repair. But, since the stimulus was stopped in 2011 by the right-wing tea party reaction, recovery continued and continues to be anemic.

Just because losers from the de-industrialization of America have been deceived, in many cases, to support those who have caused it (the Trumpist/Bush/Reagan Republicans) does not at all mean that their deception and misalignment is a new deal coalition; Trump is the opposite of that. He is the Democrats on the eve of the civil war, resisting change in every way. Deplorables cannot lead us into progress; only regression, as they are doing.

NO, the next New Deal was never due until the 2020s. That's what was in the stars and the cycles, and the 4T has at least a decade more to run. The climax won't even happen until 2025-27 (2027 to be exact, but 2025 is a key year). I hope America has it within itself to move forward and throw off the shackles of the Deplorable regression. Time will tell, but that's the timing. The early 2020s could see considerable reform. 

The reactive Trumpist deplorables won't go away, however, which is why the 4T will last until they are humbled and shackled enough so that a 1T can begin. If the Deplorables win, however, and their "new deal" is established, look for a steady quick decline to banana republic status for the USA, and world leadership devolving to others. And there will be no awakening ever again for the USA, in that case. We are done.

How anyone can see any hope for change and progress in Trump and his Deplorables, is beyond me. Polls and midterm election returns show that, at least in the 3 midwest de-industrialized states that gave Trump the White House, Trump's lies and fear-mongering are less appealing, and those hurt by de-industrialization are returning to the only party that can help them; the party that represents them; the Democrats. Sherrod Brown is their leading spokesman. Folks in Missouri and Indiana can still be fooled, but they were already red states and not the heart of the Rust Belt.

[Eric the Green]

(11-05-2018, 06:20 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: The resolution will have to wait until the election in 2020. There are 3 possibilities:
-Trump gets re-elected. In this case, the 4T will last for another 4 years.
-A virulent SJW Democrat (someone like Elizabeth Warren or Camala Harris) is elected. In this case, the US could be stuck in 4T until 2028, since such a president would only attract everybody dissatisfied to the nationalist camp.
-A moderate president is elected. In this case, the 4T may end in 2020.

For Britain, the climax is Brexit and there are also 3 possible resolutions:
-leaving the EU without a deal
-staying in the EU
-striking a divorce deal that satisfies both parties

The election of 2020 will be crucial, but not a resolution.

What happens will largely be determined by who wins the nomination for president on the Democratic ticket.

The issue will be NOT who is and SJW or progressive and who is a moderate. The issue, as is now being pointed out, is who can be nominated who can be an inspiring leader and thus beat the charismatic appeal of the Liar in Chief.

That issue is resolved according to the astrological indicators.





Inspiring leaders like Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke are emerging for the future, but 2020 seems too soon for them to rise. And Beto apparently can't be the guy, according to his score. Meanwhile, the more-moderate Terry McAuliffe has the energy and smarts to win, and Mitch Landrieu is even more appealing as a liberal leader who can bring the Democratic factions together. Sherrod Brown is also a possibility, and although he is less skilled than McAuliffe or Landrieu, he is good and represents those who feel lost by de-industrialization in his native Rust Belt well.

It is not necessary to satisfy the stupid, creepy, evil, deplorable "nationalists." It is a matter of defeating them and shackling them. It's a cold and maybe a hot civil war. Only a victory for the Democrats can bring about a resolution and emergence into a successful 1T after a climax to come in the middle 2020s.

If one of the 3 Democrats I mention is nominated, then defeat of Trump is the most-likely scenario in 2020 and reform can proceed. But that doesn't end the 4T because the Deplorable nationalists are still around and resisting, and the election of 2024 will be the key to cementing the victory and defeating the resistance, which could get violent. By then though, it's possible that a liberal or moderate third party or independent candidate could win the election.

If one of the less skilled candidates is nominated, which certainly includes Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, and people who cannot appeal to a broader spectrum are less likely to be elected (which the horoscope scores indicate as well), then Trump will be re-elected, unless he is somehow removed from office before then. If he is re-elected though, Trump will quickly go off the rails. He will be unlikely to have a supportive congress after 2020, and any supreme court nominees he makes are less likely to be confirmed. The 6th-year midterms are always disasters for the party in power at the white house; it would be a tsunami, reducing Trump to a figurehead in 2023, and very likely ousted from power then if not before (2021 is quite possible for this to happen). The supreme court would be re-stacked with liberals. Then the Democrats would take over the WH in 2024. Reforms and resistance would then follow just as in the 1st scenario.

If Trump is somehow removed from office before 2020, then Pence would probably be nominated, and more than 3 possible candidates could defeat him than can defeat Trump, because Pence is a mediocre candidate.

It's possible, due to America's regressive trend today, that Trump and his deplorable nationalists could win in 2020 and establish themselves in power during the rest of the 4T, with Trump as an evil gray champion. In that scenario, the USA has lost, progressives lose the 4T for the first time ever, a left-wing revolt in circa 2025 is repressed, and the USA enters quick decline as a tyrannical oligarchy from which it will not recover.

Whatever happens in these 4 cases will not change the turning schedule. The 4T will climax in 2025-27 and end in 2028-29 no matter what.

[Eric the Green]

As for Britain and Europe, if anything the 4T will last a bit longer than the USA's, since that's the historical trend for the cycle. Brexit was certainly no climax, but only an element in the Crisis. It won't matter what the Brits and Europeans do with it. It will probably be an ongoing, unresolved uncertainty long after 2019. The crisis continues, and I don't know if they will pull out of it. Right-wing nationalist reaction needs to be defeated, just as it does in the USA, and Europe/Britain's more progressive endowment can then bring it into progress again and into the 1T by 2030. Later, at the end of that decade, it will be France that undergoes another quasi-revolution, if their Uranus return is significant again (as it has been since 1789-1794 at least).

[Eric the Green]

Imagine a ticket of Oprah Winfrey and Stacey Abrams. Now that would be a dynamic duo that could win. If Oprah is willing. There are two schools of thought on that among liberal commentators and T4T fans. Michael Moore says we need a beloved figure to win, and not a politician, and so he would be all in on Oprah-Stacey. Bill Maher says no, we need to get back to "normal" and elect real leaders who only become celebrities because of their good performance in office. In that case, we'd better choose one of the 3 I have mentioned, or we the liberal side will lose in 2020! Because, celebrity or not, only a skilled candidate can win, whether or not (s)he is a skilled president.

Of course, if a skilled candidate and winner of the election is not a good president, then that could discredit the party in power and the political system even more, so that does matter too.

[Hintergrund]

Unemployment numbers look good, but I suspect they were fudged, and that didn't even have to start under Trump. Better look at the employment rate.