12-06-2017, 07:10 AM
(12-02-2017, 03:52 PM)GeekyCynic Wrote: Do you think Strauss & Howe and their theory on generational cycles are now tainted by their association with an ultra-right racist like Steve Bannon? Should Howe be doing more to distance his ideas from Bannon and the toxic worldview he represents?
Practically everyone has some agenda, myself included. I can still see many ways in which this Crisis can culminate and possible results, many of which are abominable (such as thermonuclear war). I'd like to see America become a social-market society with broadened opportunity for everyone. I would like to see poverty disappear as a threat except to the grossly wicked and improvident. I would like to see liberal democracy much more solid than it is now. But I do not have the ultimate choice.
I have tried to apply the Howe and Strauss theory to other countries, and one analogue that I do not want is the Spanish civil war. This one has an eerie fit to America in view of the political and regional polarization of contemporary life in America. This Crisis ends in America, I believe, when people either find a wholesome or vital cause to unify them in purpose, or that one side completely obliterates the power of the other side and is able to force people to either comply or die. I prefer a humane and patriotic consensus.
Nothing in Howe and Strauss suggests any acquiescence with racism or religious bigotry. In the last Crisis, the great struggle between Good and Evil ended up favoring Good (FDR and Churchill) over evil (Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini) because Good had more to offer than Evil -- even to the common people whose wartime leadership lost the war.
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.