Trump, Bannon and the Coming Crisis

[pbrower2a]

(11-27-2016, 10:57 PM)anandrajan Wrote:

(11-27-2016, 04:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-27-2016, 12:26 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(11-18-2016, 08:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Sometimes nations in a 4T try all sorts of bad solutions before coming up with the right one ...

I don't see how we can avoid a period of experimentation, since we are totally in the dark about the course we must follow.  Isn't that a huge part of the 4T ethic?  If we knew what to do, there would be no reason for a crisis.

FWIW, I assume the next iteration will involve a full restructuring of the system we have currently locked in place by the Constitution.  Doing that will be hard ... very hard.  It could involve the Constitutional convention that has never happened to date, or some form of social disintegration that leads to who-knows-what.  In any case, it will be dramatic, if it happens.  Stasis is also a possibility, and crisis will simply pass unresolved for now. 

If the solution is the non-solution, then the next 2T will see the last 2T on steroids, and the 4T ... I hate to think.  We're running a post-modern America on an Agricultural Age political model.  At some point, that has to break down.

It is the neglectful government of a 3T, the bad business practices, and the perverse mass culture that form the Degeneracy that implodes as a Crisis. The 3T is the time of hidden rot (especially the intensification of economic inequality and the degradation of public service); the 4T usually strikes when a do-nothing leader is in charge and has no clue of how to meet the Crisis.

The problem isn't our Constitution; it is that cunning, ruthless people have found ways to get around its intent for their own gain and power. We will need a new political structure that counteracts those tendencies.

I wonder if it's possible to guess at the contours of where we are headed post crisis (assuming there's a big one in the next 10 years).

Some biggies:

1. Income inequality is starting to become a problem
2. US manufacturing jobs for the lower middle class have all but vanished
3. The culture at large is becoming incredibly fragmented (civil unrest, shootings, cops killing innocents and getting killed etc.)
4. Economic slowdowns in Europe and in China are likely to affect the US soon.
5. ISIS-style terrorism is becoming more common.
6. There's a significant element of the US population which will not accept climate change as a serious problem.
7. Unfunded entitlements, debt, interest rates at zero, QE, etc.

Let's assume that all these problems come to a head in the next 3-4 years. We can also assume that Trump/Bannon etc. will probably exacerbate these issues to the point where we (the citizens) may feel that the republic is falling apart.

All these problems point to the start of a new era driven by (i) the need to address climate change head on by changing our infrastructure and (ii) ensuring that there's decent GDP growth in the U.S. while providing job security for the middle and lower middle classes, (iii) taking steps toward forming a unified American culture and (iv) firewalling the terrorist world somehow.

What's written above seems insanely difficult to achieve. And yet we'll probably get there (or somewhere equivalent) because we'll reach a point where we have nothing to lose. This view also points to the U.S. moving in a more socially conservative (in the good sense) and economically liberal direction. The question is: is this the likely 1T?

We are in the post-industrial world. We can achieve all of our material needs much more easily than we did even forty years ago. We do not need as many people in manufacturing as we used to because manufacturing is now a smaller part of the economy. Services are where the money is. It's arguable that many of us are paying more in interest than we are paying on equity. If you have a two-year-old computer you have probably paid more on the Internet service than on the computer itself. Likewise on cable TV (one can't get good reception where I live without cable TV, as I am seventy or so miles away from most TV signals) than for the TV set that you watch it on, unless you have one of those super-expensive ones.

To save money we can largely do three things:

(1) be a late adapter, which means that one gets serviceable technologies when they are  obsolete by most standards,
(2) be very conservative in personal style, or
(3) cut back on services.

Basically one can make it do or do without. People will do that in an economic meltdown, only to make the meltdown worse.

Being able to meet one's needs with less work would seem to be a blessing -- right?  If it takes 28 hours to meet our basic needs instead of 40 (allowing a reasonable return on investment for ownership, of course) then maybe we need to cut back on the workweek so that we have more leisure.

But what would we do with that leisure? That's where high-quality liberal education comes in.  We need to sort the uplifting from the degrading and choose the uplifting. We need to expand formal education so that people can deal with the great variety of material available so easily. But in that material is material that ranges from wastes of time to sheer toxic waste for the mind -- dioxin for the soul.

People need recognize that some news sources are reliable and that some aren't. It is bad enough (from my ideological standpoint) that people rely upon FoX News, Breitbart, Newsmax, and other such right-wing stuff. I can ignore the journalistic trash that tells us of space aliens, toast that bears apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and the lore of the Loch Ness Monster because such is harmless (if stupefying). People were citing Facebook as a news source just because people were getting news items over it... news items often little more than rumors. (My ideal news source is the AP wires because they are blitz-written for speed, without room for a journalist's bias). As the news items that we see are fed to us often based upon what we believe instead of what is true, those who feed us the stuff have quit fact-checking. We need to do our own fact-checking or rely upon paid sources that do what used to be a norm in journalism.

So we need more education, and not less -- and a high school diploma that might have been adequate in the days in which many who got it could  expect to do 40 hours of work with numbing boredom on an assembly line is no longer adequate for people who no longer need to work so many hours. We need to get our youth exposed to more philosophy (including formal logic), world history, economics, and psychology.  

There's much art, music, and literature on the Web... and we might as well enjoy it. I'm not going to say that those who love classical music need scrap Anton Bruckner for Conway Twitty, or vice versa. There is not and never will be a unified American culture. I might be a better fit for Japanese-American culture (if you are wondering about my taste in music, classical music does well in Japan) than for many American subcultures. We need freedom to change cultural identity, something highly likely in mixed marriages. But you said culture... I think that you really meant 'civil society'. We will be able to get away with many cultures and cultural fusions, but we can have only one society. The optimum is an orderly (if intellectually free) society that respects learning, enterprise, and legitimate achievement.

I see middle-class minorities as the hope for an advancing America. These people are well educated as a rule, and they respect learning not only as vocational preparation but also as essential for finding meaning in life. The truly vile stuff in America seems directed at dumb white people who lack heroes even in the white part of the American middle class. Their lack of such heroes makes them amenable to someone as callow as Donald Trump. The minority poor at the least have the middle class of their own ethnic group to look up to and to seek as mentors if they so desire.

...The generational cycle offers some hope. We often have to go through some catastrophic blunders (Donald Trump will be that) to figure that we need something sensible. The Crisis pushes people to the limits of their competence just for survival of the society. Who would have expected flappers of the 1920s to become Rosie the Riveter? By the end of the Crisis we will get institutional change that sweeps out many bad habits that have put the People  in danger. Shared danger pushes people into shared effort, and inequality for its own sake (typically very high going into a Crisis Era) diminishes due to economic necessity.

I figure that life in the late 2020s and the 2030s will have parallels to the last American High in the late 1940s and early 1950s -- austere enough to be bland, conformist due to the habits that compulsory teamwork have imposed, and equitable. Labor-management relations will not be as one-sided as they are now. People will respect learning and achievement again and consider pompous display suspect. Political invective will be entirely against those seen as dangerous extremists. The vulgarity of a 3T in speech (as in the political speech of Donald Trump) and other expression goes to the scrap heap.  The High is if nothing else a family-friendly time.

...I think we got the political sequence wrong. Dubya was perfect for fitting the climate of a 3T going bad... permissive toward greed and speculation, and no reformer. Then would come someone who really mucks things up (Hoover or Buchanan in previous cycles, probably Trump this time) and then someone who either solves the problems forcefully (Lincoln, FDR's  third term) or at least calms things (nobody did that before the Civil War, but maybe FDR's first two terms of Obama) with needful reforms and a steady hand. This time we got a financial panic due to the implosion of a corrupt boom, we did a few things right, and we may be going into a time in which we collectively learn much the hard way.



I predict that Donald Trump will be a disaster as President; he is not uniting Americans; he is for the intensification of economic inequality; he is a reformer only if one's idea of reform is to turn back race relations fifty years and labor-management relations back eighty years. That's  before I even discuss a foreign policy likely to make enemies out of countries either already cool to America (like China) and even allied. Neither he, nor Mike Pence should Trump step down, will solve anything except for tiny segments of the American people -- segments that consider themselves the only Americans who matter.  Neither will be able to win a free and fair election in 2020. (If either wins a rigged election in 2020, then we are in deep trouble, the sort that either domestic revolutionaries or foreign occupiers solve on our behalf).