02-11-2017, 04:29 PM
Quote:It seems odd to select events that occurred at random point within each moment. The end here, the beginning there, somewhere in between for the next.
Nevermind. The example is obviously not serving its purpose.
Quote:I also think you should consider that it would be very difficult to explain Trump without the financial crisis and Obama. You could have a 20 year turning start in 2008, with a tighter social moment starting at the end of 2016, and a climax in the 2020s. Just raising the possibility.
Unless Trump does something that advances the 4T closer to a resolution, Trump’s election will become a non-event in hindsight, like the election of Harding. There are several parallels between now and the period around 1920, more I think than between now and the late 1930’s.
Quote:As for your oscillator, consider that the recent Republican period could end up as long as the previous one. I am not sure why you are attaching Democratic rule to a definition of a crisis period. There was only the one period, so far, after all.
I am not. Percent democratic is simply a measure of the occupation of the white house by a political faction. I could plot the inverse function, i.e. the fraction of time the White House was held by the Republican-Whig-Nat’l Republican-Federalist faction. But that is cumbersome, so I use %Democrat.
The purpose of the oscillator is to identify critical elections because there is no agreement for the recent ones. Everyone pretty much agrees on 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896 and 1932. But after that you have a variety of candidates—1960, 1968, 1980 for the next one after 1932. The oscillator gives an answer-1968. I made it for this purpose, to decide amongst these three choices.
Now if Trump is the beginning of 12 years of Republican presidents, then by 2028, the situation will again be like 2008, when two-thirds of the previous 30 years will have seen Republican presidents. The Overton window will be shifted back to the right*. It will be no more possible for Democrats to enact universal Healthcare than it was in 1992 or 2008. Democrats will be forced to govern like Clinton/Obama and fail their base yet again. Mostly likely they will simply moderate the harshness of the Republican policies they inherit and do nothing new on their own—like Clinton. In that case, it will make sense to lump this DINO with the Republicans to give a 4T roughly spanning 2016-2036. Trump will be the GC and the 4T will be built around his “New Deal” (in Elazar’s sense). A 2036 4T end would be 90 years after 1946—close to the “standard” length of 88 years (four 22-year phases of life).
*There is a theoretical justification for the 30-year oscillator. People tend to interpret politics through a presidential lens. Assume media figures reach their peaks in influence after about 30 years of observing the national scene. In the early 1990’s influential media had spent their careers over a time when Republicans had been setting the agenda most of the time, and so their take on things was considered as more normal, the Overton window shifted right. And example of this is how Clinton-Care went down in flames (I opposed it, for example). This situation was still the case in 2008 and Obama’s offering was horribly flawed because the environment was too conservative to pass anything remotely progressive. By 2016, 52% of the last 30 years had seen a Democratic president and the media narrative had moved left so that there was now a rough balance, when the media are defined broadly (i.e. including outfits like Red State and Breitbart).