Signs of a Dying Empire

[David Horn]

(06-27-2019, 12:56 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote: India could be another democratic superpower, the Indian economy could be the largest in the world by 2050. If so, I'm looking to US-UK-India alliance, all three nations share the English language as well.

Down with China and their social credit sySStem!

I agree that the Anglosphere and India will ally, at least in the medium term.  Once India and China are both fully 1st World that may decay, but that should take a few decades at a minimum.

[pbrower2a]

(06-25-2019, 12:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: This topic needs a definition of the USA "empire." Strictly speaking, the USA has divested itself of much of its empire already, after its conquests in the 1890s. It still holds some conquered territories though. It absorbed Hawaii into itself, and holds on to Puerto Rico and Guam. It let the Philippines go in 1946, after successfully seeking to hold on to it in 1899-1902. It let Cuba go sometime ago, and it has stopped joining the other powers to enforce their will on China after the Boxer Rebellion.

By scale alone the United States has been an empire since 1783, when it extended 'only' to the Mississippi River. The British conceded territory nominally theirs but that they could never control between the Appalachians and the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes, and nearly doubled in size again by buying some land that Napoleon didn't really want or could not control. The tricky part of that deal was New Orleans, with everything from Baton Rouge to what are now Great Falls, Denver, and the Twin Cities as throw-ins.

In this sense, "empire" is not a reference to the form of government. If the question is the form of government, then the comparison after 1815 in Europe was to Switzerland. which modeled its political system upon ours. One spoke of the French and Portuguese colonial empires even though France was a republic after 1871 (if you ignore the Vichy regime, an obvious dictatorship) and Portugal was a nominal republic most of the time after 1911. Reference to the blatantly-undemocratic Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" suggests the nature of the system as "evil", with "empire as a reference to scale and military power.

The United States of America is one of the most impressive political entities to have ever existed. Even if there have been empires of greater scale, including the British Empire at its peak, the Chinese Empire and the People's Republic of China, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and the Spanish Empire when it controlled almost everything from what is now the 42nd parallel of latitude in the current American Northwest  or such places as New Orleans and Jacksonville farther east to Tierra del Fuego except for Brazil or is less populous than India, it has few comparisons for power. Two of the most obvious are the Roman Empire when it stretched from roughly Liverpool to Kuwait (neither of which existed at the time) and the Caliphate. It is already one of the most durable. Giving 1776 as its inception, the United States of America has existed continuously for 243 years. If Lincoln could speak of America as "a new nation conceived in liberty... four score and seven years ago"... much time has passed since then. The United States of America has outlasted all but a few dynasties of China, and is 'only' sixty-four years away from surpassing the Romanov dynasty in Russia. The Roman Empire? It lasted a little over twice as long as the United States of America has already lasted -- but with plenty of overthrows of formal leadership until Odoacer found it not worth saving even as a puppet state in AD 476. (The Roman Empire was a rotten entity from its inception). Donald Trump may be rot, but I can't imagine him starting a dynasty as did Julius Caesar. America at its best has been an Empire of Liberty, as in its simultaneous jihad against Nazi Germany and Thug Japan.



I once told a former Marine a joke. 

"Do you know what the best course of action is if you face the Marines?

Raise both arms and drop you weapons."

Quote:Since WWII, American imperialism revolved around the Cold War and then the War on Terror, so-called. It has not conquered territory directly, but going back to TR has demanded what kind of government some other countries must have. This process was stepped up after FDR. The USA kept South Korea from being conquered by the Communist North, but failed to keep the manufactured country of South Vietnam from being conquered by their Communist North. The USA conducted coups in such countries as Guatemala, Iran and Chile to keep them from going communist, and helped repress a movement in Honduras for much the same reason. It supported right-wing contra rebels in Nicaragua who failed to recaptured the country from a native left-wing Sandanista movement, but Nicaragua went moderate on its own anyway. It imposed sanctions on Venezuela against the allegedly socialist government here, and has recently stepped them up under Trump to drive the country and its people to total ruin. It conquered Panama to topple the Noriega dictatorship and then let it go, and had already relinquished the Canal Zone that TR had conquered. It helped prop up Israel in a region whose regimes were largely allied with the Soviet Union.

It continues to support Israel from the terrorist movements against it, starting in the 1970s. It waged campaigns against Palestinian terrorists in the 1980s, and recaptured Kuwait by organizing and leading a coalition against Saddam Hussein of Iraq in 1991. Then in 2001 the USA supported an alliance against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9-11, and eventually invaded the country to keep the Taliban out of power. Then in 2003 it invaded Iraq, deposed Saddam, and imposed an ineffective parliamentary government there. It re-invaded Iraq and Syria with Kurdish and Iraqi support and participation to roll back the Islamic State conquests in 2014-2017. It has continued to impose its military influence in various and limited ways in parts of such regions as the Sahel in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and South-east Asia.


But all this has not resulted in any further direct territorial conquests by the United States of America. So what is the empire today? Is it our campaigns to influence other countries? Is it the dominance of our currency, especially in regard to oil (the petrodollar)? Is it the worldwide economic control by multi-national corporations, many of whom originally grew and became wealthy and powerful in the USA, and benefited from free trade agreements?

From Persia, Egypt, China, and Babylon in antiquity to the United States and China today, empires have used client states to do their bidding, whether economic or cultural, when outright annexation would be distasteful or unduly costly.

It's about what politicians often called "American interests abroad", meaning American corporate investments overseas. Consider that the US toppled Salvador Allende when Kennecott Copper saw trouble with a democratically-elected government started talking about nationalizing its copper mines in Chile. See also what happened to Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala.

Quote:If so, what are the consequences of the "fall" of this "empire" of world-wide military and economic influence? Does it mean that the USA will break-up or lose territory? Does it mean it will decline in power and influence?

For now America seems to be splintering along cultural lines, but those lines are not so obvious as lines on the map as they were in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. Detroit has more in common with Atlanta than Detroit has with rural Michigan or Atlanta has much to do with rural Georgia.

Quote:Or will divesting itself of much of this role as world cop and decider, and by gaining regulatory control of and re-distributing the wealth and power of the multi-national corporations, and their trade/currency behavior and offshore tax evasion, as the progressives and green new dealers propose, actually benefit the United States and its wealth and power by allowing it to become a more middle-class and more peaceful country again?

The best that we can hope for is "capitalism with a human face" very different from what our current pathological leaders of business and the Right side of the political spectrum offer. Such is within our political heritage or something that might transfer well here, like what we imposed upon Germany and Japan after liberating those countries from nightmarish regimes that sought to impose their nightmares where such was unwelcome -- like the United States. The alternatives to "capitalism with a human face" look like either a pure plutocracy in which the whims of entrenched elites are the objective the rest of us -- or else... or a Socialist revolution that establishes a madhouse. Consider what Russia was in 1900 and what it was in 1935, and you see both nightmares.

[pbrower2a]

(09-21-2017, 09:28 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-20-2017, 08:27 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(09-20-2017, 05:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Speaking of conservatives -- the Party once associated with political and economic conservatism   used to be for small-scale government and against debt. They thought competition adequate for economic justice. They believed in rational thought and expected it to overpower superstition and ignorance because of the advantages of objective learning. There would be room for big as well as small players in the economy. Now the last two 'conservative' Presidents stand for monopoly, debt as a generator of income and a promoter of consumerism, and heavy involvement of the government in private-public partnerships -- guaranteed profits to gougers with high costs for us all to bear.

The way you speak I'm pretty sure you're stuck in some sort of time warp where the Trump hostile take over of the GOP never happened.  Of course this could just be a canned response you've been dishing out since the 90s.

Trump won an unexpected victory, is under investigation for collusion with an adversarial foreign power and has no governing philosophy I can discern.  In what way is that a dominant position in the long term?  That said, ,the Dems are splashing around and clueless, so we have no solid party at the moment.

Let's see how this plays out.  I doubt 2018 will be a tide-turning event, so it's all about 2020.

Update: in what proved largely a status-quo election the electorate 'fired' Donald Trump in his bid for a second term. He tried to blame liberals for the personal restrictions that COVID-19 made necessary if hundreds of thousands more people were not to die of a respiratory infection that supposedly does not bedevil First World countries. He resorted to violence against political protesters, something new in American history for a President, even to the point of encouraging people with the same sort of vehicle with both a US flag and a Trump banner harassing protesters. The latter looks like what one might expect with a secret police. I mocked the scenario as having introduced the "Trump-Trump Macoutes", an allusion to a nasty secret police in Duvalier-era Haiti.

Some conservatives turned against him on his misdeeds.

[pbrower2a]

Well, well, well. America got a political breather with the defeat of Donald Trump, if in a close election that could have gone the other way easily. Democrats kept the House and got a working, if the definitive bare majority, in the Senate with what were some surprising D wins of both Senate seats in Georgia. I'm going to say this about Jon Ossoff now: as the first Millennial in the US Senate he is one of the most obvious prospects to be President of the United States from his generation. Oh, he's Jewish? If we can vote for someone with a black African father as President we can vote for a Jew to be President.

Of course, on the very day in which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Senate seats from incumbent Republicans, Donald Trump's most fanatical supporters who accepted the indefensible claim that Donald Trump "really" won stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral votes with the aim of selecting a result of their choosing.

What President Donald Trump sought to do that day was what many dictators have done, nullifying an election that he has lost. We got a breather, but at the same time over 600,000 Americans have died of a respiratory virus that most of us thought just never showed up in an advanced industrial society. Over 600,000 people have ceased breathing because COVID-19 overpowers some of our most effective and desperate means of saving lives from shortness of breath. Most importantly, the vast majority of those deaths was preventable with appropriate behavior, like wearing masks, washing hands frequently, social distancing, and (finally) getting inoculated.

We had people with a hideous substitute for that, like reliance upon the Will of God to save people from the plague. We are seeing the consequences of such. Trump rallies have proved themselves super-spreader events, as have fundamentalist get-togethers. "Don't close our churches!", said some of the pastors... meanwhile, the Pope was telling people to not attend church services in person. One can get the Mass on EWTN easily. Most Protestant churches are able to have some televised services available to shut-ins such as the hospitalized...

Donald Trump still has followers. many still convinced that the 2020 election was a fraud. It wasn't. It was arguably the best-run election in American history, and Trump may have done better than expected.

We have problems -- novel problems -- best solved by doing again what we used to do better. We need to shore up our educational system to foster rational thought including a respect for objective science and an acceptance of verifiable history. We need again to become less vulnerable to demagogues. Donald Trump will not be the last, and the next one might be much slicker and be in a position in which to exploit political chaos and economic distress when both are far more severe than in 2016.

[Eric the Green]

(06-27-2019, 05:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-25-2019, 12:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: This topic needs a definition of the USA "empire." Strictly speaking, the USA has divested itself of much of its empire already, after its conquests in the 1890s. It still holds some conquered territories though. It absorbed Hawaii into itself, and holds on to Puerto Rico and Guam. It let the Philippines go in 1946, after successfully seeking to hold on to it in 1899-1902. It let Cuba go sometime ago, and it has stopped joining the other powers to enforce their will on China after the Boxer Rebellion.

By scale alone the United States has been an empire since 1783, when it extended 'only' to the Mississippi River. The British conceded territory nominally theirs but that they could never control between the Appalachians and the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes, and nearly doubled in size again by buying some land that Napoleon didn't really want or could not control. The tricky part of that deal was New Orleans, with everything from Baton Rouge to what are now Great Falls, Denver, and the Twin Cities as throw-ins.

In this sense, "empire" is not a reference to the form of government. If the question is the form of government, then the comparison after 1815 in Europe was to Switzerland. which modeled its political system upon ours. One spoke of the French and Portuguese colonial empires even though France was a republic after 1871 (if you ignore the Vichy regime, an obvious dictatorship) and Portugal was a nominal republic most of the time after 1911. Reference to the blatantly-undemocratic Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" suggests the nature of the system as "evil", with "empire as a reference to scale and military power.

The United States of America is one of the most impressive political entities to have ever existed. Even if there have been empires of greater scale, including the British Empire at its peak, the Chinese Empire and the People's Republic of China, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and the Spanish Empire when it controlled almost everything from what is now the 42nd parallel of latitude in the current American Northwest  or such places as New Orleans and Jacksonville farther east to Tierra del Fuego except for Brazil or is less populous than India, it has few comparisons for power. Two of the most obvious are the Roman Empire when it stretched from roughly Liverpool to Kuwait (neither of which existed at the time) and the Caliphate. It is already one of the most durable. Giving 1776 as its inception, the United States of America has existed continuously for 243 years. If Lincoln could speak of America as "a new nation conceived in liberty... four score and seven years ago"... much time has passed since then. The United States of America has outlasted all but a few dynasties of China, and is 'only' sixty-four years away from surpassing the Romanov dynasty in Russia. The Roman Empire? It lasted a little over twice as long as the United States of America has already lasted -- but with plenty of overthrows of formal leadership until Odoacer found it not worth saving even as a puppet state in AD 476. (The Roman Empire was a rotten entity from its inception). Donald Trump may be rot, but I can't imagine him starting a dynasty as did Julius Caesar. America at its best has been an Empire of Liberty, as in its simultaneous jihad against Nazi Germany and Thug Japan.

Calling the territory of a nation an "empire" does not really fit the definition, as I see it. The various states asked to join the union, and when they have done that, they are no longer imperial possessions. Puerto Rico is still an imperial possession. The only problem is that it is now commonly assumed that states cannot secede without approval. But, they can. And some might in this 4T.

"Empire" refers to the territory a nation controls or possesses beyond its borders; or in earlier times, conquered territories populated by different national/ethnic groups than those of the conquering state. Talking about "the fall of the American Empire" thus does not amount to much, literally; except for its influence abroad which we discussed; its foreign policy of interference or alliance, and sometimes a degree of domination or presence of troops. Its conquest of Iraq was imperialistic, and deliberately so; but upon returning its sovereignty to Iraq its empire there ended, though not its influence. So also pretty-much with other such conquests, such as its invasion of Vietnam, where the USA propped up puppet governments in the south. And Afghanistan too, of course, and parts of Mexico which then became states later. Western Europe and Japan, from which the USA was itself attacked, were conquered by the USA and its allies in world war II, and then became allies of the USA upon release.

On the other hand, we could talk about the American empire that conquered the indigenous nations that populated the land. They were hustled off to reservations, which are supposed to have their own rights. Giving up this "empire" does not seem as relevant to the phrase though, since their population is now so small compared to that of the conquering nation. So if the USA ceded enclaves of territory to the natives, it would now still keep most of its territory.

Quote:For now America seems to be splintering along cultural lines, but those lines are not so obvious as lines on the map as they were in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. Detroit has more in common with Atlanta than Detroit has with rural Michigan or Atlanta has much to do with rural Georgia.

It might be problematic to split the country, since the division in the country is rural/urban. But, some states are more one than the other. Some states are 50/50, like the two you mention. I assume though that if secession happens, people may move in increased numbers to the half that they prefer. Voluntary "political cleansing."

[galaxy]

(08-03-2021, 02:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Well, well, well. America got a political breather with the defeat of Donald Trump, if in a close election that could have gone the other way easily. Democrats kept the House and got a working, if the definitive bare majority, in the Senate with what were some surprising D wins of both Senate seats in Georgia. I'm going to say this about Jon Ossoff now: as the first Millennial in the US Senate he is one of the most obvious prospects to be President of the United States from his generation. Oh, he's Jewish? If we can vote for someone with a black African father as President we can vote for a Jew to be President.

Of course, on the very day in which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Senate seats  from incumbent Republicans, Donald Trump's most fanatical supporters who accepted the indefensible claim that Donald Trump "really" won stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral votes with the aim of selecting a result of their choosing.

What President Donald Trump sought to do that day was what many dictators have done, nullifying an election that he has lost. We got a breather, but at the same time over 600,000 Americans have died of a respiratory virus that most of us thought just never showed up in an advanced industrial society. Over 600,000 people have ceased breathing because COVID-19 overpowers some of our most effective and desperate means of saving lives from shortness of breath. Most importantly, the vast majority of those deaths was preventable with appropriate behavior, like wearing masks, washing hands frequently, social distancing, and (finally) getting inoculated.

Related to this - after giving it some thought, I'm increasingly believing that if the climax of this turning has already happened (hopefully it has), it was November 3, not January 6. A Crisis climax involves the entire society and affects every part of life. January 6 was a normal day (or, as normal as a day near the peak of a pandemic can be) for those not in and around the Capitol - if I had not checked any news sources that day, I would not have known what was happening. At the moment of the storming, in fact, I was receiving a furniture delivery. There are probably millions - yes, millions - of people in this country still even now who do not know about it, or only have a vague idea of what occurred.

November 3 was completely different. It was impossible to not know what was happening. It was all people talked about for weeks. It was an obsession. Businesses were boarded up in Washington DC. All braced for impact. Instead of the chaos that most expected, for four days an eerie calm descended upon the nation - everyone locked in position, waiting, until the general public became confident in a Biden victory on November 7. It felt as if someone had pressed "pause" on the 3rd and then pressed "play" on the 7th, and anyone who went to a public place between those two times could feel the tension in the air. I know I did.

I'm starting to wonder if the 2020 election is best understood as a sort of peaceful or indirect civil war (the climactic final battle of the culture war?) and everything since then has been an aftershock. 1/6 is perhaps best compared to the Lincoln assassination, as an act of reactionary aggression (and/or failed attempt at a Hail Mary victory) by a fiercely devoted member/members of the losing side shortly after the loss occurred.

If this is the case, then it likely points to:
- the coming 1T beginning relatively sooner rather than later (potential starting point: 2024 election?)
- toward it being more similar to the post-Civil War 1T than the post-WWII 1T. It will be a rebuilding time, not a rebuilt time.
- The "cold civil war" may continue, but it will feel gradually weaker in prominence, and ultimately unimportant. It may be reduced to oversized arguments over small things, to the point that people will almost laugh about it. It will not threaten to split the nation apart. The two sides of the culture war will very slowly begin to correspond less perfectly to the political parties, which will become more and more similar, even as they claim to be as different as ever (and may superficially seem to be diverging even further).
- This 1T will be a relatively energetic one, unlike the post-WWII one. Society will not become "robotic."
- Even though the 2020 and 1896 elections bear a remarkable resemblance, and 2024 and 1900 may well continue this, the Seventh Party System will ultimately look more like the Third than the Fourth, with "general intensity" decreasing for a while after 2024 and a tendency toward narrow wins in all parts of politics. We may see a very clear mirroring of the Third, with Democrats repeatedly winning the Presidency by narrow margins while Congress is always narrowly divided and flips frequently and erratically.
- The conformity of this 1T will not be "society tells individuals what to do" (like 1946-1963), it will be "society tells individuals what *not* to do" (like 1865-1886). We are already seeing this develop - in fact, the beginnings of this can be seen as far back as ~2013.

Just throwing some thoughts around, I guess.


Edit - okay I really need to figure out how to express all my overtheorizing better, writing longposts really is not great, sorry about that

[pbrower2a]

(08-03-2021, 02:34 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-03-2021, 02:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Well, well, well. America got a political breather with the defeat of Donald Trump, if in a close election that could have gone the other way easily. Democrats kept the House and got a working, if the definitive bare majority, in the Senate with what were some surprising D wins of both Senate seats in Georgia. I'm going to say this about Jon Ossoff now: as the first Millennial in the US Senate he is one of the most obvious prospects to be President of the United States from his generation. Oh, he's Jewish? If we can vote for someone with a black African father as President we can vote for a Jew to be President.

Of course, on the very day in which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Senate seats  from incumbent Republicans, Donald Trump's most fanatical supporters who accepted the indefensible claim that Donald Trump "really" won stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral votes with the aim of selecting a result of their choosing.

What President Donald Trump sought to do that day was what many dictators have done, nullifying an election that he has lost. We got a breather, but at the same time over 600,000 Americans have died of a respiratory virus that most of us thought just never showed up in an advanced industrial society. Over 600,000 people have ceased breathing because COVID-19 overpowers some of our most effective and desperate means of saving lives from shortness of breath. Most importantly, the vast majority of those deaths was preventable with appropriate behavior, like wearing masks, washing hands frequently, social distancing, and (finally) getting inoculated.

Related to this - after giving it some thought, I'm increasingly believing that if the climax of this turning has already happened (hopefully it has), it was November 3, not January 6. A Crisis climax involves the entire society and affects every part of life. January 6 was a normal day (or, as normal as a day near the peak of a pandemic can be) for those not in and around the Capitol - if I had not checked any news sources that day, I would not have known what was happening. At the moment of the storming, in fact, I was receiving a furniture delivery. There are probably millions - yes, millions - of people in this country still even now who do not know about it, or only have a vague idea of what occurred.

Obviously had Trump won the presidential election we would be in deep trouble in America. Would terror or incompetence prevail? Would America start having revolutionary-Left movements that attribute all the pathology of a corrupt plutocracy under a sociopathic leader who has the overt support of economic elites? Would we be enduring strikes and riots that lead to some Trump-organized secret police that resembles the Milice of Vichy France? Mercifully that prospect has entered the realm of "alternative history". 

Had Trump won, then January 6 would simply be a formality that nobody could stop. Trump's most fanatical supporters thought the election reversible because they believed that any election that did not have a Trump victory as its core could only be a fraud. Maybe the election of 2000 was shaky, but the results were clear in 2020. Trump and his people are highly ignorant of many things, including statistics and demographics. They could not understand how such states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin could slip away from him when he had firm leads. Here's the obvious explanation: it takes much more time to count the votes from Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh than those in places in which dairy cattle far outnumber people. Nobody can reasonably expect any Republican nominee to win much of the popular vote in the giant cities. Such has not happened in decades, so why should Donald Trump or his supporters believe otherwise now?

I saw the opposite in Ohio and Texas; in both states, Joe Biden had early leads that vanished quickly because the rural vote that was strongly R and came in last was enough to offset early D leads from Akron, Austin, Canton,  Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Dayton, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Toledo. I know enough about demographics to understand how Ohio seems to be drifting  R: as its cities other than Columbus hemorrhage a comparatively-liberal population (and Columbus largely gets its population growth from such places) the rural areas don't. The rural areas, never particularly liberal, have become even more traditionalist and reactionary while they become a bigger share of the Ohio electorate. Texas, in contrast, is able to attract urbanites from elsewhere in America (and that includes Ohio, of course)... and while its black population except for people migrating from outside Texas is stable as a voting bloc, the Mexican-American contingent of the electorate is increasingly gaining in numbers. The urbanites from outside Texas, much like those moving to Virginia about twenty years ago, are bringing their liberal beliefs with them. Add to this, Texas is increasingly becoming a microcosm of America, becoming closer to America in education and prosperity, which bodes ill for Republicans who depend heavily upon "low-information voters" that Donald Trump so lavishly praised.

Trump is offense to anyone with intelligence and conscience. But in case anyone still thinks it a great horror that Trump lost, we have the dubious opening for someone similarly ruthless, cruel, reactionary, bigoted, and demagogic who can make promises to reverse LGBT rights, destroy or eviscerate labor unions, put an end to environmental regulations, bring back school prayer, ban abortion once and for all, and "separate the races" again. The difference will be that the fellow who builds on the legacy of Donald Trump will be more politically astute, knowing enough to destroy the formal opposition before purging his own Party. That's when the single-Party or dominant-Party system takes over, when the key to success for a youth is to join some GOP equivalent of the (Soviet) Pioneers so that they get opportunities to attend diploma mills that feed young people into positions of influence and professions staffed only with politically-trustworthy people. That's also when political dissidents are given quickly-assembled passports and forged welcome papers to Austria, Australia, or Argentina (alphabetically the first of the likely), and are led to military transports on which they are drugged so that they can be dumped into the open ocean.     

Quote:November 3 was completely different. It was impossible to not know what was happening. It was all people talked about for weeks. It was an obsession. Businesses were boarded up in Washington DC. All braced for impact. Instead of the chaos that most expected, for four days an eerie calm descended upon the nation - everyone locked in position, waiting, until the general public became confident in a Biden victory on November 7. It felt as if someone had pressed "pause" on the 3rd and then pressed "play" on the 7th, and anyone who went to a public place between those two times could feel the tension in the air. I know I did.

I felt the tension myself. The news media called the last states at an agonizingly-slow pace, figuring that the election of 2000 could be much like that of 2020, except with a public much more polarized into opposing factions that despise each other, and with all the self-righteousness on both sides ratcheted up, fearing the absolute worst. America is about as polarized between Left and Right as Spain was on the brink of its Civil War in the 1930's, between people fully modern and people with ideas characteristic of a pre-industrial, wholly-agrarian era. On both sides, if one lives in areas in which one side or the other predominates -- which means just about everywhere -- many people did not know people on the other side of the political divide within their communities except as loud-mouthed lunatics at the fairgrounds. The other side is immoral, amoral, perverted, stupid, cruel, unpatriotic, grossly ignorant, or -- whatever. Surely I missed some derogatory adjective here. American politics used to be votes on subtle differences between opposing Parties. That came to an end in the 3T and the polarization has become increasingly intense. 

if there is any edge it is now with the Democrats, who have even adopted some values that one ordinarily associated with conservatives (adherence to precedent and protocol, acceptance of the hierarchy of intellectual and technological achievement, sobriety, and acceptance of tradition (if several different traditions at once because those are not going to meld easily and none of them has any chance to prevail over the others). It is hard to see any liberal virtues that Trump or the contemporary GOP has. Republicans have a mangled response to COVID-19, a natural disaster that they could have met only had they recognized that economic principles do not come before survival, their last president acting much like a despot who scared the bejeesus out of so many Americans, the Capitol Putsch, and the vast majority of relevant Republican pols seeing nothing wrong with the Capitol Putsch. In that Putsch I see a model that should scare the bejeesus out of anyone calling himself a conservative: the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin storming the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917 and inaugurating one of the most absurd, dehumanizing, murderous, and persistent dictatorships ever known. Yes, we have rule for defining who wins a Presidential election, and those defined Joe Biden as the winner.            

Quote:I'm starting to wonder if the 2020 election is best understood as a sort of peaceful or indirect civil war (the climactic final battle of the culture war?) and everything since then has been an aftershock. 1/6 is perhaps best compared to the Lincoln assassination, as an act of reactionary aggression (and/or failed attempt at a Hail Mary victory) by a fiercely devoted member/members of the losing side shortly after the loss occurred.

It could be the beginning of the end of a Crisis Era. COVID-19 kills like a bungled Crisis-Era war, at least by American standards. Perhaps this war will have no Medals of Honor for some soldier who threw his body onto a live grenade to ensure that even if he died by being blown into an unidentifiable mess, his buddies would survive. The super-villain this time is a virus, and not a Hitler or Tojo whose conduct is easy to compare to some anthropomorphic Devil, or even misguided people on the Other Side during the Civil War, or a distant king whose sanity is suspect. 

Success builds a constituency because more people seek to emulate it than to thwart it. Disgrace never redeems itself.       

Quote:If this is the case, then it likely points to:
- the coming 1T beginning relatively sooner rather than later (potential starting point: 2024 election?)
- toward it being more similar to the post-Civil War 1T than the post-WWII 1T. It will be a rebuilding time, not a rebuilt time.

I am one of the more optimistic posters in suggesting that we are closer to the end of the Crisis of 2020 than to its beginning. Few people in the summer of 1942 could have foreseen that Hitler would off himself while cowering in a fetid bunker or that the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere  would not keep growing until it encompassed at the least Australia. The fascists expected that Churchill, FDR, and Stalin would be the ones to dangle at the ends of ropes if they survived the war in which the fascists saw themselves as inevitable victors. But three years after the Wehrmacht advanced on Stalingrad, Hitler would be dead and Tojo would face the harshest judgment possible. 

Crises move fast in the end. Maybe the winners either fully exterminate the enemy or, more simply (and safely) win the peace. I've seen video of the US Army entering German cities, and you would think that the Germans saw the US Army as liberators. Winning the peace is as decisive as one gets.    

Quote:- The "cold civil war" may continue, but it will feel gradually weaker in prominence, and ultimately unimportant. It may be reduced to oversized arguments over small things, to the point that people will almost laugh about it. It will not threaten to split the nation apart. The two sides of the culture war will very slowly begin to correspond less perfectly to the political parties, which will become more and more similar, even as they claim to be as different as ever (and may superficially seem to be diverging even further).

Obviously it will lose its relevance, and as it starts back-guard defenses it minutiae of policy and culture, it will fail. Defense of rogues is bad politics, but right-wing authoritarian types are far slower to get the message. The culture war will be won by people who can get their way in their own communities if not elsewhere. We might even see political events unthinkable in recent years. 

One way of looking at it is the Skowronek Cycle, in which American history breaks down almost neatly in eras that begin with a highly-successful President setting a new agenda that leads to political successes. With those successes come diminishing returns, so the last orthodox follower of the president who initiates that cycle has no clue about his failure until the failure is all too obvious. Like Buchanan, then  Hoover, Carter and Trump. Like Lincoln, then  Theodore Roosevelt (although McKinley was muted as a failure), FDR, and Reagan. Maybe Biden? Skowronek cycles, two of which generally coincide with one Saeculum, may keep America from going off into the ultimately-dangerous zone of rigidity in which rot develops that keeps getting worse... and worse... and worse.  

Quote:This 1T will be a relatively energetic one, unlike the post-WWII one. Society will not become "robotic."
- Even though the 2020 and 1896 elections bear a remarkable resemblance, and 2024 and 1900 may well continue this, the Seventh Party System will ultimately look more like the Third than the Fourth, with "general intensity" decreasing for a while after 2024 and a tendency toward narrow wins in all parts of politics. We may see a very clear mirroring of the Third, with Democrats repeatedly winning the Presidency by narrow margins while Congress is always narrowly divided and flips frequently and erratically.

- The conformity of this 1T will not be "society tells individuals what to do" (like 1946-1963), it will be "society tells individuals what *not* to do" (like 1865-1886). We are already seeing this develop - in fact, the beginnings of this can be seen as far back as ~2013.

Unlike the last High, when the Idealist generation of the time faded rapidly from public life, the Boom Generation will still be present. The most ruthless, selfish, and arrogant Boomers generally prevailed in political and economic life... until now. Donald Trump exemplifies nearly everything potentially wrong with Idealists. For a parallel, just think of the Transcendental slave-owners who saw the treatment of slavery as a necessary evil as inadequate, but instead saw it as a good thing -- even for the slaves -- and thus worthy of praise from others as necessary for human progress. Such was arrogant in the extreme. 

Plenty of Boomers -- and they are already almost entirely old by the standards of any other time for an Idealist generation -- will come out of the shadows to reshape the American culture and its institutions. Boomers show no sign of abandoning the practice of remaining active and connected into elderhood. Boomers may be the lightest smokers of all generations to their time, and their drinking has largely abated. (OK, smarty-pants, you may say: we can't hold our liquor as well as we used to. I will drink to that -- one drink, because that is my limit at age 65. My metabolism is just too slow now to do heavy drinking anymore. Soon enough that drink might have to be mineral water or fruit punch without the alcohol).
  

Quote:Just throwing some thoughts around, I guess.


Edit - okay I really need to figure out how to express all my overtheorizing better, writing longposts really is not great, sorry about that

We are all at the theory stage.

[pbrower2a]

We are seeing participants in the Capitol Putsch prosecuted in large numbers. The legal system offers no easy defenses. "Presidential orders"? Don't make me laugh. Self-defense when attacking a police officer? Ask most black people whether it is wise to defer to the cop and avoid an escalation of the encounter. Who says that one need be black to recognize that?

[pbrower2a]

I'd guess that one of the clearest signs of a dying empire is that the leaders get away with horrible things. OK, the United State was far from its final hase of decadence as the system imposed the Trail of Tears upon First Peoples, some of them exquisitely civilized. Yes, Andrew Jackson and associates got away with that, and with the removal of First Peoples from the American Southeast he made possible the expansion of slavery in the southeastern quadrant of the USA. America would pay a dear price for the expansion of slavery.

More recently, President Trump suggested that protesters near the White house be beaten -- and one story now has it that he suggested shooting people in the legs. (Well, once people fall from gunshots to their5 legs, gunshots intended for people's legs might hit people already on the ground in parts of their anatomy that bring about a quick kill.

Consider that the official line of the USA on some regimes on the verge of collapse is that shooting peaceful protesters will end all support for the regime.

It is far better, of course, that government seeks solutions to matters that lead to peaceful protests. Maybe we are wiser to seek ways in which to get cops to see African-Americans and Latinos as less menacing than they think. Maybe community policing, including a return to the old 'beat' system in which cops get to know a troubled neighborhood and who the good guys and bad guys are within that neighborhood are. So the cop knows which Cadillac (a/k/a "Pimpmobile" in some settings) belongs to a physician and which one belongs to a pimp. Both the physician and the pimp are black, so some other distinction must be made. When stopped, a pimp is unlikely to have a card of the American Medical Association behind his driver's license.

Oh, it's the ghetto of Hartford Connecticut and you see cars with white people in them but Vermont license plates on the bumpers. Such people aren't in Hartford to sell maple syrup, you know. If simply lost... well, give them directions to I-91 back to Vermont. If they are there to score some heroin, then bust 'em, impound the car, and tell their parents that their Vermont cars are in Hartford... and, no, they are not applying for work with an insurance company.

Trump's stunt in which he went to a church after protesters were attacked and held up a Bible as an ostentatious display of piety had terrible optics. People seem on the brink of arrests for that.

OK, when the leaders don't get away with really-bad behavior, maybe things aren't so bad after all. I look forward to seeing Obama as the model of how to behave as President even for those who disagree with his ideas. That can buy our Republic much time. It could be that the COVID-19 plague and the Capitol Putsch were the foci of this Crisis Era. I have every reason to believe that the next Big Dangers will result from global warming. We are in the frog-in-the-warm-bath stage for now.

[JasonBlack]

Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

[pbrower2a]

(05-04-2022, 06:10 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

It is the part of America proud to be white that is on the decline. Anyone proud to be white is proud of something worthless. Proud of a specific heritage? Sure... that's fine. A Czech-American proud of the Czech musical heritage is on solid ground. Someone who thinks that Dvorak is great because he is white is a fool. 
 

Quote:In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

Women can be as chilly rationalists as men, and they can fight back. Just think of what the word "bitch" means when applied rightly to a female dog. Do something screwy around her puppies, and you stand to be hurt badly. Pussycat? Sure. Years ago my dog and I once saw a dachshund stalk a mother cat with kittens. The cat turned around and sent the dachshund back yelping in pain. I'm not sure that I can read canine expressions, but my dog (who knew enough to treat that cat with some respect) looked back at me with an expression that suggested the canine equivalent of "What a schmnuck!"

Remember well that the people who shaped the Boom Awakening are largely gone now, and few of those tried to resurrect it after it faded out. 

The completed 3T was a time of elite and middle-class consumption  with a continuing burden upon not-so-well-off people who were treated and paid badly at work. The shopping-mall culture is dead. 

The fault this time is that special interests have sought to maintain the worst aspects of the 3T long into the Crisis Era, which is a disaster in itself. We should be trending toward 1T practices already this late in the Crisis Era -- but we aren't.

[Eric the Green]

(05-04-2022, 06:10 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

Your preferences and attitudes are not shared widely. Does America want to give up? Or does it really matter to many of us anymore whether someone is part of "America"? Maybe Americans have not given up, but maybe they don't think we are qualified to push other nations around, and many people might be wising up to the fact that our identity and our goals are our own, not defined as members of a nation (or religion or race or whatever false group we may depend on for our identity because we don't know ourselves and our real connection to real life and divinity).

And yet almost half of America still identifies strongly with America, and wants "America First!" And they seem to support a (now former) president that wants the USA to militarize to the teeth, even if he is less interventionist than the previous president they followed (W). What this means is that the USA today is culturally deprived, and this is a serious situation. Our scale of values has become seriously warped. Brower has touched on this too.

So, it's complicated.

Millennials are acting out their hero role fairly well, for what it really is. Organization and courage are not "masculine." Organization is their forte, but not through becoming corporate drones so much, as the GIs did, but through social media and other groups. They have some concern for political and social matters, such as climate change and inequality. The previous civic hero generation supported civil rights and feminism to a large degree. A civic generation understands that we are all in this national project together. This is not identifying with a nation we have given up on. It is practical attention to how things get done in our country.

The trouble is the huge influence of Reaganism and neoliberalism, which has sapped belief in our civic institutions and cut back on civics education. This means millennials have to learn their proper role, which means to support and participate in civic institutions, and not sit back and wait for somebody else to do something because they might not get everything that they want. Obama is a good teacher, but I don't know if that's enough this year.

[pbrower2a]

(05-05-2022, 02:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-04-2022, 06:10 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: Imo, the biggest sign of an empire dying is that so many people seem to want it to die. Don't get me wrong, I've been relatively non-interventionist since I can remember, but Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric caught on for a reason: America has become a culture that has given up, a culture that just wants it all to be over. No longer does anyone have a desire for us to be great, for us to be prosperous, for us to be strong.

In this fight, the millennials are really failing in their hero role and acting a lot more like their adaptive next juniors. The hero generation is supposed to begin tilting the scale back from the over-femininity of the hyper-emotional 2T and consumptive/solipsistic 3T and toward a more masculine sense of vigor, drive, organization and courage. On some level, we have realized this, and I'm hoping for a kind of better-late-than never swing toward trying to do something about this, but I am not optimistic.

Your preferences and attitudes are not shared widely. Does America want to give up? Or does it really matter to many of us anymore whether someone is part of "America"? Maybe Americans have not given up, but maybe they don't think we are qualified to push other nations around, and many people might be wising up to the fact that our identity and our goals are our own, not defined as members of a nation (or religion or race or whatever false group we may depend on for our identity because we don't know ourselves and our real connection to real life and divinity).

(really to Jason: Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" is more a rejection of culture other than an extremely low-brow culture that utterly disrespects formal education beyond that needed for basic literacy in which people can barely read and right or do simple arithmetic.. .at that, long division would be iffy. What one dare not do in an authoritarian, anti-intellectual society is to think -- and the effective discouragement of independent thought trips up technical achievement. IBM put the word "THINK). " everywhere -- not "OBEY". 

Quote:And yet almost half of America still identifies strongly with America, and wants "America First!" And they seem to support a (now former) president that wants the USA to militarize to the teeth, even if he is less interventionist than the previous president they followed (W). What this means is that the USA today is culturally deprived, and this is a serious situation. Our scale of values has become seriously warped. Brower has touched on this too.

So, it's complicated.

That's not my idea of America. Brute force is the necessary method of doing some things, but it often shows its shortcomings. A dumb warehouseman can do what "Archie Bunker" did one day, sending a shipment to London, England instead of to London, Ontario. If it's in my purview and I can't determine whether the destination is San Jose CA or San Jose CR due to sloppy handwriting I am going to ask some questions. I'm also going to give a lecture on how important it is to either not abbreviate or to making shipping instructions unambiguous. 

As I see it, I see the United States trapped in the generational cycle. That is a good thing. This country needs to redefine itself in subtle ways every twenty years or so, weeding out some old bad habits while creating a vacuum that draws attention to people who can start nearly-anew. So figure that in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Civic component that the Gilded (the Gilded took on many Civic characteristics after the Civil War) faded from institutional power to scarcity and went practically into hiatus before the GI generation could make a mark. In recent times the GI Generation had great institutional power before it faded completely... and left a hiatus for the Millennial generation to fill in work skills, attitudes, and political values.   Societies that don't have a generational cycle develop a culture that either goes into dangerous directions, like the militarism of Sparta that caused it to wage one too many wars -- the one that brought its ruin. Not having a strong generational cycle but a strong proclivity to maintain the status quo is one way to ensure that rot thrive because nobody solves problems. 

For a system begging to die, just look at the Roman Empire in the 5th century. To be sure, the bloated bureaucracy wanted to save its class privilege, and the aristocracy sought to keep the serfs in thralldom. Such few independent tradesmen and shopkeepers as there were wanted lower taxes, and the serfs wanted to be free of their oppressors. The barbarians found that to meet the demands of the plebs and proles they needed to dismantle a costly and unproductive system. So kill the male aristocrats and ask the poor people where the elite women and the luxuries were, and the barbarians would leave the peasants as freehold farmers. It's easy to see the downfall of the Roman Empire as the start of the Dark Ages... but those began when classical civilization died in much of the Roman world in the climatic disaster of AD 536-537, fully seventy years later. Classical civilization had never been strongly rooted in Britain, Gaul, Hispania, Pannonia (mostly Austria and western Hungary) and those parts of Germany west of the Rhine or south of the Danube. 

The American system still does much for us for comparatively low cost. That's how democracy works -- even if there is Big Government as in Scandinavian countries it at least gives a good deal for the money. In dictatorship, formal taxes might be low, but state enterprises turn extreme profits, and the government can take anything that it wants at any time. The soldiers helping with the harvest are really helping themselves to the harvest on behalf of the State. They rarely help with the planting. Public services in such places are wholly inadequate; soon after casting off Commie rule, Czechoslovakia rapidly privatized state industries so that it could have a welfare state.  

We aren't on the brink of ruin yet, but we can get there -- if we should enshrine neoliberal policies that ultimately turn most Americans into a high-tech equivalent of medieval serfs on behalf of crony capitalists responsible only to themselves.     

Quote:Millennials are acting out their hero role fairly well, for what it really is. Organization and courage are not "masculine." Organization is their forte, but not through becoming corporate drones so much, as the GIs did, but through social media and other groups. They have some concern for political and social matters, such as climate change and inequality. The previous civic hero generation supported civil rights and feminism to a large degree. A civic generation understands that we are all in this national project together. This is not identifying with a nation we have given up on. It is practical attention to how things get done in our country.

History has shown plentiful examples of female heroism, including partisan movements in all occupied countries. Many women involved themselves heroically in either Warsaw uprising (the Jewish one or the gentile one). Women showed great courage in struggles against both slavery and Jim Crow. Even in the animal world -- mess with a momma cat's kittens, and you can be mauled; mess with the puppies of a literal bitch (that is, she barks and bears puppies), and you might even be killed if the dog is large enough. 

We shall see what new evils emanate from the Trump court. I predict that it will go far beyond abortion. Abortion is much less of an economic issue than workers' rights, privatization of anything that can be privatized, and the welfare state, which really are economic issues. I can imagine a super-reactionary regime in America criminalizing any behavior that challenges the class privilege of people responsible to none but themselves.

I hope that we have plenty of peaceful protests about the abrogation of abortion rights or (should such happen) LGBT rights or the right to contraception. If we don't, then we open ourselves to a new form of American exceptionalism -- one in which America becomes exceptionally evil by world standards. That sort of exceptionalism must die, and it will most likely die in some war for profit that goes badly because our soldiers have nothing worth risking their lives for other than fear of military "justice".

My imagination can run wild when crazy, bad stuff happens. We have had a near-dictator, and we could get a full dictator in the wake of some economic downturn. We are due for one because we did not solve the underlying problems in 2009 and 2010, and economic meltdowns are the usual consequences of perverse economics,     

Quote:The trouble is the huge influence of Reaganism and neoliberalism, which has sapped belief in our civic institutions and cut back on civics education. This means millennials have to 

Quote:learn their proper role, which means to support and participate in civic institutions, and not sit back and wait for somebody else to do something because they might not get everything that they want. Obama is a good teacher, but I don't know if that's enough this year.

America will need to remake those institutions from what remains or will have to start over from scratch. Too many rich-and-powerful people believe that no human suffering can ever be excessive in the service of their power, indulgence, and gain. In the 1930's  the remaining rich lacked the means for buying the political system. In the 2010's they had plenty of funds and well-polished operatives for doing this. 

Obama is a good teacher of political ways. The problem is that he had a class full of resolute delinquents.

[JasonBlack]

I agree that white nationalism is silly, but that isn't the point. "But white nationalism!" simply isn't a satisfactory response to give whenever someone says "people should be more proud of their country". We're still talking around the basic point that America needs more strength, more vitality, more morale. It's sad that such basic ideas have become so politicized, seen as some passing interest of right wing males, rather than traits that people and societies alike need in every age. 

The hero's journey is about facing fear and gaining confidence by overcoming a trial. We aren't going to solve this with more "compassion", more "awareness", or anything like that. 

It's a concept so simple and fundamental that, at times, it's difficult to articulate. Frankly, all the compassion, all the resources, all the technology....none of that is going to help us unless we stop being so bloody defeatist and cynical. We already readily recognize "black people need black pride because they have to overcome hardship in life", "gay people need gay pride because of the challenges they face"....why is this any different for countries? Why does any kind of national pride always have to conjure up images of fascism, Nazis, death camps or racial oppression? 


We need more of this:

[JasonBlack]

Also, fwiw, "we need more focus on masculinity" does not equal "we don't need women playing important roles" ("let's exclude 50% of the population from contributing to the solution" is simply not a practical approach to anything). Similarly, even as a right winger, I get the cynicism about the political power wielded by corporations, but I think we still have far too much focus on "punish the rich" and less on "how can we empower the disenfranchised to build more for themselves? 

pbrower2a made a post a few weeks ago about "more capitalism" in the form of creating better opportunities for people to start small businesses. this is what we need more of in the 1T. This is how we "make America great again" (to our credit, Millennials are actually a fairly entrepreneurial generation). 

as per Eric the Green's comments, millennials are reasonably good at organizing things (boomers are not. imo, Idealist generations in general are notoriously bad at organization, and this is a lot of what exasperates the problems of 3Ts and leads to the saecular Winter of the 4T), but I don't think we're very courageous. What courage we do have almost reminds me of small children: feeling very good about themselves for courageously overcoming tasks that an adult shouldn't really find scary in the first place, like "The Ugly Duckling" or "The Little Engine That Could". 

With that said, I don't believe America is deprived of culture. Our culture is about entrepreneurship, blazing new frontiers, defending liberties. We are the only country in the world which unironically believes "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!". Facing challenges head on is supposed to be what we're best at. Adversarial grit is in our blood**, and the sooner we get back in touch with these roots, the sooner we can pull ourselves out of this mess.


**literally. we're descended from over a dozen generations of the most individualistic, trailblazing, entrepreneurial specimens of the gene pool. If we took the time to study it, I think we'd see that Americans are more prone to individualism, risk taking and adventure down to our very genes.

[David Horn]

(05-06-2022, 02:00 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: We need more of this:

Charlton Heston was the epidiemy of Hollywood bravado.  On the other hand, Jimmie Stewart was actually a hero.  Ronald Reagan spent WW-II making propaganda inspirational movies. On the other hand, soft and meek George McGovern won a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Bravado is neither bravery nor strength. Most of the bravest and strongest were humble, and not all were men.

[Tim Randal Walker]

"....the people who shaped the Boom Awakening are largely gone now...." S&H indicated that the 2T ended in 1984, about 38 years ago. The Silent generation that mentored the Awakening is dying. Those who experienced the Awakening in young adulthood are quite aged by now; the late '50s cohorts are in the tail end of Middle Age, and the oldest Boomers have been edging into the Middle-Old years.

[pbrower2a]

[Tim Randal Walker]

Galaxy mentioned some interesting contrasts between 1Ts. If we should get through this 4T okay, no doubt we will see discussion comparing the new 1T to the last one. (The last one still being within living memory). Also, S&H mentioned the possibility of very old Boomers being around to witness the new Awakening.

[Eric the Green]

(05-06-2022, 02:00 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: I agree that white nationalism is silly, but that isn't the point. "But white nationalism!" simply isn't a satisfactory response to give whenever someone says "people should be more proud of their country". We're still talking around the basic point that America needs more strength, more vitality, more morale. It's sad that such basic ideas have become so politicized, seen as some passing interest of right wing males, rather than traits that people and societies alike need in every age. 

The hero's journey is about facing fear and gaining confidence by overcoming a trial. We aren't going to solve this with more "compassion", more "awareness", or anything like that. 

It's a concept so simple and fundamental that, at times, it's difficult to articulate. Frankly, all the compassion, all the resources, all the technology....none of that is going to help us unless we stop being so bloody defeatist and cynical. We already readily recognize "black people need black pride because they have to overcome hardship in life", "gay people need gay pride because of the challenges they face"....why is this any different for countries? Why does any kind of national pride always have to conjure up images of fascism, Nazis, death camps or racial oppression? 


We need more of this:

We needed to take away his gun from his cold, dead hands! And from all his followers!

The hero's journey involves learning virtues. There are many versions of the hero's journey. It certainly involves learning compassion, and certainly involves learning courage.

Nationalism seems to be related to Nazism. That's why they are called nationalist. It's in their name. White nationalists are folks interested in white power and repressing other people. The notion of "nation" can be positive or negative, depending on the context. The only valid meaning for today is a nation that's part of a world federation. NATO and the UN are steps on the way to this future federation. "Nation" now means only oppression and prejudice unless it is conceived as part of the developing world federation and its international laws. Such is the primary meaning of our times in history. We are a world civilization in fact. Institutions will take some time to catch up to this reality and adjust to it, and organize it properly. Every human today is a citizen of the world. We don't want a monolithic world government, though. There will always be divisions and localities within this government. Nation is one of those levels of sovereignty.

When Uranus conjoins Neptune again, as it did in circa 1648, circa 1815, and circa 1990, this world federation will be more thoroughly organized. That will come in the early and middle 2160s. History, and my own predictive track record including my published and verifiable predictions for circa 1990 that came true, provide confirmation of this prediction, which will not come true in our lifetimes, but perhaps for our reincarnated selves, if we can navigate through the difficult times ahead of us now. We have not yet made this possible. One senator and a few dictators and nationalists are in the way.

The USA believes in liberty. Yet it has always been a struggle to realize this liberty in fact. It is no better than other nations; it is not the exceptional nation. But it is a leader of The West, which in its extended meaning is organized according to ideals and laws of greater liberty than those not within the orbit of The West. More liberty, as it exists in The West, is something that all peoples want, and people power movements all over the world since the sixties demonstrate this desire among all peoples. This liberty is not fully realized until it also is extended to equality and fraternity, and that means the mixed economy that includes socialism, and the Green New Deal and fraternity among all peoples-- all one people on one restored Earth. The French Revolution was as much or more the driver of this world Revolution than the American Revolution or the English Revolution, since it contained all three revolutions in its creed and seed.