How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Odin]

(12-20-2016, 12:40 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(12-20-2016, 07:56 AM)Odin Wrote: To me there was a big change in how many candidates were perceived starting in 2008. With Obama, Sanders, and Trump you have had people projecting messianic dreams of world-historical change on them. Look at Obama's campaign rallies in 2008, and Sanders' and Trump's rallies in this election cycle, they all had that same messianic enthusiasm. I don't remember that with previous elections in my lifetime. To me that's a good indicator that something shifted in the collective psyche and that we are 4T.

This strikes me as reaching.  In the absence of something more definitive we can talk about subjective things like perceptions and mood that cannot be ascertained.   Past 4T were period identified from a future perspective, sometimes very far in the future.  What people actually felt is unknowable to such observers. They had to make use of the events that actually happened.  That America faced crises in 1776, 1861 and 1932 was obvious to large numbers of observers long before S&H.

At 8 years in, we are like 1971, 1937, 1867, and 1780.  In all four of these years it was crystal clear that the country had been through and was still in a momentous period of history (i.e. a social moment). I lived through the 2T.  It was obvious shit was going down. FOr decades after people talked about The Sixties as a special period. There was no need to talk about perceptions and moods, it was plain as a pikestaff.  It has NOT been plain as a pikestaff that America has been in a social moment since 2001, or 2005 or 2008, or any of the dates people have floated. This is my point.  No interpretation should be necessary. Momentous change should be underway now.  We have had big scale events: largest foreign attack on American soil since the War of 1812; second largest stock market crash in history; the first financial panic in 75 years.  There have been triggers aplenty, but they haven't ignited anything. 

This is the problem.  According to the theory triggers DO ignite things when the generational constellation is right.  Well its been right for years, with sparks aplenty and we have had bupkis.  How do you explain this?

The extreme political polarization which began in 2008 is the current manifestation of the Crisis. One of the mistakes the authors make is that they thought that 4Ts were times of unity and common purpose, which speaks more to how they learned about the Great Depression and WW2 as kids than to historical reality. What historical 4Ts have in common is the lack of Artist restraint and compromise, any problem and any issue gets blown up to huge proportions and if there is disagreement there is increasing anger and uncompromising rage, which is exactly what we are seeing right now.