Decoding the 4T - The Winners

[pbrower2a]

(04-21-2018, 03:44 AM)Another Xer Wrote: The whole question of Idealist leadership to me is quite overblown by the generational theory.  Can you think of anyone younger than a Boomer, who thinks in generational terms, who thinks of the Boomers as providing leadership.  No, any Xer or Millenial pretty much has the same view that leadership is completely lacking from the Boomers.  Their ethos is one of grotesque selfishness that needs to be repulsed, not followed.

So far, Boomer leadership has been largely awful. But so was Transcendental and so was Missionary leadership in politics before the Civil War and the Great Depression. I could also make the case that Awakening leadership before the American Revolution is largely forgotten for good reason. Maybe the Crisis Era has the power to force people to seek the best while the preceding Degeneracy rewards letting people gravitate to their most debased and improvident tendencies.

Of course, things can go badly enough that the most cynical and depraved figures get top leadership at the start of a Fourth Turning. Thus the fascists and Nazis who shut out more principled leadership that might have led their countries in different directions. Imagine Germany with Konrad Adenauer instead of Adolf Hitler. Also imagine Europe with a much larger Jewish population, and with the collapse of Bolshevism. The difference between a nation winning a Great Struggle and losing it may be the moral leadership of its top leaders. The British and Americans won in the end because with their humane view of how to settle things that those who endured defeat at their hands had nothing for which to fight. German soldiers had to watch their backs on the way to and from the Russian front as soon as they set foot in the pre-war Poland. I can think of someone far less principled than  FDR in America and a cause nearly as vile as the German Nazi Party. We are simply fortunate that the 1915 Klan imploded.

Quote:

Quote:That's not to say the Millenial's won't find a vessel who is the leader.  But the power and guidance will flow from the youth up.  Take Bernie Sanders - he's been there forever.  I passed through Vermont in the 1990s and voted for him once.  He was irrelevant.  Inconsequential.  And certainly nobody that anybody called charismatic.  He was nothing until the Millenials picked him up and made him something.  It's the same with FDR.  The Greatest Generation made him, and not the other way around.  They voted for him en masse in 1932.  They shocked the nation by sealing the deal for the New Deal with strong voter turnout in the midterm election of 1934.  The power flowed from the youth.  Lincoln doesn't count because it was a broken cycle, but it holds true for the Republican Generation.  The youth shaped the way and found a leader that fit their view.  The leader did not mold the youth.

You can talk to me about Stalin and Hitler all you want but it doesn't matter because they aren't the products of free societies.  In America a motivated, self-directed youth (a Civic) can cast off the failures of the old generations.  It's why America rebounds while totalitarians shatter.

Stalin exploited a power struggle within a political system that had already destroyed all civil liberties and democratic practice. He was simply the most ruthless of his enemies and of erstwhile allies that he decided to dispose of when those allies asked for their rewards. Hitler overthrew a weakened democratic order in which the political life had split between extremist factions by getting power from a leadership that had lost faith in democracy. Hitler took emergency powers and used them as an excuse for consolidating exclusive power.

I am not so sure that American politics are as democratic as they used to be. Lobbyists have the real power in the legislative branch of the federal government and in most state legislatures. Enough Americans fell for a crass demagogue in 2016 that we have the most dictatorial President in our history. Government now effectively represents economic power and bureaucratic power instead of the People. Should Donald Trump fail after having betrayed the masses whose resentments he exploited in the name of solving their economic distress, then the people with hurt feelings might be amenable to a left-wing demagogue who exploits economic distress.

Leadership that believes in nothing but itself (Eric Hoffer's True Believer may be a fanatic, but the fanaticism is but window dressing for a depraved, soulless person) brings about great horrors. Maybe the Idealist with a grand vision isn't so necessary as is leadership that out of its own pragmatism concocts principles no more profound than kindness, caution, and conscience.  That's the best that a Reactive like Barack Obama can do. After Donald Trump, we may have to settle for that -- but we will do fine.

But government by lobbyist must go. The Trump ideology that holds that government best represents economic ownership and bureaucratic power within giant corporations must also go. Political corruption has no defense. I can easily see the Trump ideology transforming America into a Corporate State reminiscent of the scheme of Benito Mussolini in which the bank teller supposedly had more in common with a bank executive than with a construction worker. Well, a bank teller is more likely to be married to a construction worker than to a bank executive, and a bank executive is more likely to have dealings with real estate developers hiring masses of construction workers than with the bank's janitors...

The class struggle is real, and in recent years the owners and executives have been winning... and humiliating workers. We need better than that lest we are to consolidate a nightmare.