ACA Repeal/Replace: Progressives Face Moral Dilemma

[Kinser79]

(03-19-2017, 06:58 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(03-18-2017, 02:02 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: So voting for the moat status quo/business as usual presidential candidate in the last 50 years is now "anti-authority".

The TDS is strong with Eric.  So strong I may need a booster shot.  But it does prove one thing conclusively, he has no idea who is and who is not the the Establishment. 

In the days and years following the September 11th attacks, conservatives on the old forum were pushing Bush 43 as the Grey Champion and suggesting that the regeneracy was well underway.

And they were wrong because the 4T hadn't even started yet. The living generations were not in their proper places for there to even be a 4T start let alone a regeneracy.

Quote:  He was pushing different values and foreign policy...  Invading the Middle East was considered a good idea.  I called it preemptive, unilateral, serial nation building.  We built huge military and embassy complexes in our new puppet state of Iraq.  There was a question of whether Syria or Iran was our next target.  We used every boot on the ground we had, turning around National Guard forces as fast as we could refurbish and retrain.

The only thing new about that is the target.

Quote:I have called this a false regeneracy.

Possible--but only if one can agree that 43's era was even 4T, an argument that can only be made of the last 2 years. If you want a false regeneracy it was the hope and change of 09 under Obama.

Quote:  Since the Bush 43 era, we have come to see meddling in the Middle East as expensive and not constructive.  We had a Pearl Harbor sort of trigger event that put the country in a militant mood.  The government shifted policies to go with the shifted values.  What they tried didn't work.  We had for a time a united people willing to try new ideas, but the new ideas didn't work.  From my perspective, we had a sorta half hearted crisis period, but the new values and policies flopped.  We ended up stepping back into a 3T mood of stagnation and stalemate.

I would argue that what we had was the micro-crisis of the late 3T. Naturally the policies flopped they were based on the idea that we can make the population of a country love us by bombing the shit out of them. Anyone with any sense already knew it was going to fail, as I said at the time to my own parents--this isn't going to work. It didn't work in vietnam either.

Quote:So.  Is Trump triggering a regeneracy?  Have we a united people trying out new values, ideas, concepts that will transform the country?

I think the idea that a regeneracy is united is misplaced. For that I blame S&H themselves on poor language choice. If we go back and look at news accounts of the Depression people were clearly not united and during the Civil War we had a civil war going on....the most not united it is possible for a single people to be.

Quote:

1. It is not clear he has united the country.  He has made a big splash for sure, but we seem to be as divided as ever.
   
2. The ideas are not new.  He is for the most part pushing the unravelling memes of cut taxes, cut services, and assume the government is the problem not the solution.  If 'establishment' means doing the same thing as has we have been all along, it is possible to say Trump is establishment.  (This isn't to say Hillary wasn't also establishment.  I don't think she would have made a Grey Campion pushing a strong values shifting regeneracy either.  Bernie, maybe.)
   
3. It's not clear that his 'new' values and ideas will work.  If borrow and spend trickle down does what it usually does, we will at best have another false regeneracy.  It's hard to transform the country when what you're trying to transform it into doesn't work.
   

1. He's united the two factions by serving as a lightning rod.
2. No they are not new. The tax cutting stuff comes from the late 3T to be sure. I don't think that it would be possible to get the GOP nomination without them though. Most of the rest of his ideas come from much older traditions in the US. These older traditions have been ignored for a saeculum so it isn't exactly the same thing over and over.
3. I actually said that Bernie was the Whig GC. Honestly I think he had a chance to defeat Trump but $hillary never had a chance. If one wants to assign blame to a group because Trump is the 45th president then that blame falls squarely on the DNC who cheated Bernie Sanders out of his bid at the Presidency.
[BTW: No matter who was president now, they'd be hated by at least half the country. Doesn't matter if it was Jeb!, $hillary, Bernie, Trump, or Joe Shmoe from down the street.]
4. It never is. If you want to use "new" ideas that are "known to work" then you'll have a hard time finding any.

Quote:It's still early days, but your father seems to be walking the country into a tangled mess.  There is no lack of energy.  Things are going to get shaken up.  I'm not expecting business as usual.  Still, he looks more to me like a Buchanan or Hoover than a Lincoln or FDR.  He seems more likely to prove that the unravelling values must go that set up a new transforming set of values.

I'm not discounting that possibility--it just seems to me that the time for that is past. If the 4T began in 08 like Howe claims then we're already half way to a third done with the turning. If it started in 06 like I say, we're already half way through. If he proves to be a Buchanan figure or a Hoover figure I expect the left to be dancing in the street. If instead he is FDR or Lincoln the right should be.

Over all though I think we've already had our Hoover in the person of Obama.

Quote:A central abstract problem is that the unravelling values are unravelling values.  Come a crisis, one is supposed to solve the most drastic problems facing the country.  If one of the central memes of the unraveling values is that governments shouldn't solve problems, that one should cut taxes and cripple domestic problem solving efforts, you can't make the unraveling values stronger and end up with crisis values.  Trump is pushing hard, but in a direction that simply can't result in a successful crisis resolution.

The problem you seem to be having here is that the previous 4T sets up the next 4T. (I'll also throw in my Mega-Saeculum too.) In the last 4T the problem was economic depression and foreign war. The time before that was civil war. Wars are almost always run by governments.

Now let us suppose we can have a 4T without a major war. It is possible that if the solutions implemented during the last 4T would be reversed so a new 1T can start. If those solutions are essentially free market then that means governmental intervention (see New Deal), but if those solutions are government regulation then the solution is free market.