The Aging of X

[pbrower2a]

(07-11-2018, 01:15 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: The US won't get a better government until the Boomers are out of it - and they won't improve until they're dead.

Boomers need one Disraeli, Juarez, Lincoln, Garibaldi, Gandhi, Churchill, FDR, Mannerheim, Adenauer, or (George Catlett) Marshall to undo the damage that not-so-great Boomers have done and thus redeem America. Donald Trump is everything wrong with an Idealist leader -- the exploiter who demands to be known as a benefactor. American Revolution? There were plenty of Idealists, then getting old if they weren't already old, as foci of Idealist tendencies and highly capable of setting a convincing moral agenda for the rest of us.

If you are thinking of X as leaders, Reactive types at their best typically take over at or soon after the end of the Crisis Era and accept the moral vision of the rapidly-disappearing Idealist generation as a moral agenda on autopilot. Thus Washington, John Adams, Truman, or Eisenhower. Without having their own grandiose vision, they set forward a calming mood. If you wonder where that puts the Gilded Presidents following the Civil War -- the Gilded took on many of the traits of a Civic/Hero generation if successful. Obama? He has the typical ethos of a 'mature Reactive' in his 60s -- and a temperament closer to that of Eisenhower than to that of an FDR.

I will predict this: Obama will not be the last of his type as President. The next effective conservative President, the sort who slows radical reforms in the name of sanity both fiscal and moral, will behave much more like Obama than like Trump. Obama is a Reactive, and not an Idealist. An Idealist would not have authorized an underworld-style hit upon Osama bin Laden even if such was fully justified. Obama is not the sort to establish a grand new moral vision for America. He was simply before his time, someone too pragmatic for such.