Quote:Exactly. But if he does this, he will be serving in the role of a post-trigger president like Hoover, and not a post regeneracy president like FDR, Trump still presents a change from the past, and the simplest interpretation would be a 2016 trigger with a regeneracy in the future.
This is a reasonable interpretation, and I would agree with it if that came to pass. I was speaking more broadly, in terms of why I chose to vote for Trump, rather than solely in terms of S & H theory. Given the age of the Boomers, and the likely candidates on the Democratic side, I would be more inclined to your view that the T4T theory would then be in serious trouble, at least in generational terms.
Quote:On the other hand, if 2016 is a regeneracy, then 2008 as trigger still makes sense. For this to happen Trump has to be successful. But to be successful he needs the right tools, and the right personnel. He has neither, he ran all by himself. There was no movement that he led. He has no ideology, no loyal followers. Only self-interested individuals like himself, who are backing his play for now, because he's on top.
He has to select amongst the same Republican ideas and people that Bush had to choose from. Trump's plan, of which I approve, is to make nice to Russia. The GOP is filled with people who mistrust Russia and who see Munich everywhere. He is going to have a lot of unhappy campers.
He is not tapping libertarian anti-war types, but rather hawkish Republicans. They may be less antagonistic about Russia, but they make it up in spades with Iran. So if Trump manages to replace a Cold War with Russia with a hot war with Iran, how is this any better than what Bush did?
Speculative, and too informed by what your personal opinions of the "right" tools, policies, and personnel are. Ross and Lighthizer are adequate support for his stated positions on trade, as are Kelly and especially Sessions on immigration. The inclusion of people like Kobach and Dan DiMicco in lesser positions (which can not be ruled out as of yet) would only reinforce those policies in terms of personnel. Flynn and Tillerson provide adequate support for rapprochement with Russia. Likely Navy Secretary Ray Forbes has long been pushing for naval rearmament on a grander scale. Mnuchin has already discussed implementing an infrastructure bank, and Chao would help in providing political support for more infrastructure spending through her husband McConnell. Likewise, Trump did not specifically campaign on things like education policy, and so people like DeVos are an easy sop to the more traditional Republicans. He may not pursue all of those policies as president with equal vigor, but he has hired the right personnel to implement them if he so chooses.
Hawkishness towards Iran is unfortunate, although invading Iran would be on quite a different scale from either Iraq or Afghanistan. Occupying it even more so. The call with Tsai in Taiwan, and mention of expanding arms sales with the same, pose additional geopolitical risks as well. Renewed violence abroad would likely be on quite a different scale from what occurred in the 2000s. Sufficiently so as to imply a qualitative difference.
Quote:We are going to get another recession. This will not endear him to his base, who are expecting jobs not pink slips. A $2 trillion deficit is going to be noticed, even if Tea Partiers suddenly decide they don't care about deficits anymore. Obama inherited a recession that was half over before he took office, and enjoyed an expansion for almost all of both of his terms and yet he and his works were dragged through the mud. Trump is inheriting a boom, which is going to go bust on his watch. Do you really think it is possible for him to make the big electoral gains that FDR did? Or is slow bleeding like what happened to Obama more likely?
We are going to get another recession, AT SOME POINT. Neither you nor I have had a particularly good track record predicting when that would be, and the economy has stubbornly continued to limp along all the while. Remember that economy doesn't fall into recession because of the position of the calendar. It is entirely possible that stimulus spending could keep the economy in good shape till the election. Likewise, a strong stance on trade and infrastructure could shore up his position in the Electoral College even if the economy suffered. Or again, a downturn caused by a sharp trade stance with China could be subsumed into a broader conflict that caused people to rally around the flag, at least for a time. Or you could be right, neither of us know what the future holds, and a lot of these sorts of wargaming of specifics are, at this point, idle.
Quote:Note we could still have a 4T contemporaneous with a conflict with China during a global war period over 2025-2050. (M&T posited a delegitimization period over 1973-2000, which would suggest a deconcentration era over 2000-2025). An eventful period running from 2020-2040 could easily serve as a secular crisis social moment. A 4T ending in 2040 would give a 94-year saeculum, which is perfectly in line with the century-long spans of past ones. In other words, the S&H cycle would not be invalidated. But the theory that this 4T is caused by the collective history made by Boomers, Xer's and Millies moving into elder, mature adult and rising adult phases of life would be.
I just re-read the book last night (Thank you, Amazon!). A couple of points:
1.) 2000 is a nice round number, but with the benefit of hindsight I would be inclined to start the high-growth period of the 19th k-wave and surrounding deconcentration/coalition-building phase in the 90s. That's when IT really took off, the military might of the US' military allies and their erstwhile Russian adversaries bled away, the US military started abandoning training for specialties (electronic warfare, antisubmarine warfare, air defense, etc.) needed for great power war, etc. Likewise, China's agenda-setting had largely concluded with Tienanmen Square and the death of Deng Xiaoping, and their military commenced its big modernization drive in the wake of the Gulf War (which provided the demand, as they saw what the US military did to another large Third World military with more advanced weapons than they had at the time), the Taiwan Straits Crisis, and the breakdown on the Soviet Union (which reduced the threat of land war, and provided a supply of weapons and weapons related technologies for them to purchase). Really, nothing happened on their end in the 2000s that wasn't already in place during the 90s.
2) This would push the beginning of the macro-decision, end of the high growth phase to around 2020, which jibes with my understanding of when things like Moore's law are anticipated to completely breakdown, and for many of the associated technologies presently in the late stages of high growth to reach saturation. We can quibble on the dates, but I would be inclined to say that 2030 is a little late. Other theorists on these sort of decision cycles like S & H (loosely, I know) and Chase-Dunn also incline me to believe that the 2020s are the decade to watch for fireworks.
3) Like I said, this leaves us a roughly 2020-204x timeframe for a likely macrodecision phase. It might then be tempting to frame this phase as being the 4th turning for those countries whose previous one was the 30s-40s. I think this would be an error for two reasons. One, as you said, this would invalidate the theory of generations causing these issues, leaving T4T theory as a whole kinda shaky. Two, looking back at previous decision periods, none of them have neatly lined up with a single 4T, and have instead almost invariable straddled either the 4T-1T, or 3T-4T periods. Case in point, see the World Wars, the Napoleonic Wars-French Revolutionary Wars, the host of conflicts spanning from the Glorious Revolution to the War of the Spanish Succession, etc. This need not be a single continuous war, but might be part of a series of conflicts, truces, shifting alliances, and the like that suffice to either confirm US hegemony or transfer it elsewhere, be it China or somewhere else. An Awakening would then follow the conclusion of this process in short order, as it did with Europe in the early to mid-19th century, or the Soviet Union immediately after WWII with the Khrushchev Thaw and de-Stalinization.