(06-14-2016, 01:42 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-14-2016, 12:10 AM)taramarie Wrote: How could they not know how he functions? Even the kiwi knows and i am not even from America or in that country. Guess when you are viewing it from the outside bias does not blind you.
Wishful thinking on the part of many. Consider Eric the (insults redacted), an extreme case admittedly, but dreadfully common among the Boomers. Fourth turnings are the cause of systems and ideas that are well past their expiration date.
Consider this article by Paul Graham, an Xer a bit older than I am, and then think of how Trump with his "Make America Great" is in many ways promising to bring that mid-century world back. Yet Trump is also a rebellion against the status quo of the last forty years. Definitely a contradiction but that is but one of many contradictions that will die in fourth turnings.
The generational cycle will force America through a Crisis Era, ready or not, and when the Crisis ends, America will go into a 1T obviously analogous to the 1950s, 1870s, or the latter part of the 1790s. Americans will generally be as satisfied with institutions that work well and (mostly) fairly. Did Washington, Grant, or Eisenhower speak of America being "great"? No more than does Barack Obama, who lis very much a member of Generation X.
The usual sorts of leaders in a Crisis Era are typically principled Idealists with a vision of a better world (Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Benito Juarez, Winston Churchill, FDR, Karl Mannerheim, Mohandas Gandhi) or cynical, callow Reactives who seek to use a Crisis to settle old scores (Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Laval, Quisling, Szalasi, and Pavelic are extreme examples of the type, quite possibly making the WWII Crisis so horrific) with some who seem to be hybrids with the worst of both Idealist and Reactive types (Stalin, maybe Kerensky, Antonescu, and the Nazi general Keitel). A mature Reactive who is much more pragmatic than principled but defers to principle, like Barack Obama, usually achieves top leadership at the end of or after the Crisis.
Is Barack Obama the ideal leader for meeting a Crisis? Do you see anyone comparing him to S. Adams, Franklin, Lincoln, Garibaldi, Juarez, Churchill, F. Roosevelt, Mannerheim, or Gandhi? But there could be worse -- the weak sorts of 3T leaders like Fillmore, J. Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge, Bruning, Schuschnigg -- who sow the seeds of a 4T through their permissiveness toward the worst trends in human behavior. The world has plenty of would-be Fuhrers, but except in the Infernal State I see none of them in power.
History has yet to judge Barack Obama, and the worst that one can say of him is that he did not solve all problems. The best is that he did few things to make things worse unless one so says from an ideological standpoint. "Make America Great Again" sounds like an appeal to return to a manifest Destiny that Americans have generally long since considered outdated. With what major power do you want America to tangle? Donald Trump is just a horrible leader.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.