09-15-2018, 07:20 AM
As I wrote in another thread, a 4T is the time in which social forces, economic reality, and the outright distinction between truth and falsehood, winnows out what works and what doesn't. The success in such may at times reflect the level of bloodletting, as in World War II or the American Civil War.
I see Donald Trump as a likely scapegoat (polling suggests such) representing much that is wrong in contemporary America. He exemplifies the Seven Deadly Sins (anger, envy, greed, lust, excess, sloth, and hubristic pride) and three sins of equal lethality (cruelty, deceit, and cowardice) as few others have. People associated with him have faced severe legal consequences.
Democracy is worth preserving (there are no good alternatives), and I expect that we will want what Abraham Lincoln called "a new Birth of Freedom". Capitalism (probably more capitalism, which means a revival of small business as a share of the economy) is preferable to government ownership unless there are severe questions of equity. OK, so we end up with a social-market economy that affords more opportunity, and maybe we have graduated income taxes that create niches for small-scale entrepreneurs. We need to recognize that education is necessary both as training for work and as a means of making life off work meaningful.
I see Barack Obama as a portent of the sort of leaders that we will have after the 1T is over -- a mature, sixty-year-old Reactive (Obama acted like a sixty-year-old, mellowed Reactive when he was in his mid-40s). Obama was more like an Eisenhower than like an FDR or a Lincoln. Well, in view of Trump, we were certainly not ready for an FDR or Lincoln.
I see Donald Trump as a likely scapegoat (polling suggests such) representing much that is wrong in contemporary America. He exemplifies the Seven Deadly Sins (anger, envy, greed, lust, excess, sloth, and hubristic pride) and three sins of equal lethality (cruelty, deceit, and cowardice) as few others have. People associated with him have faced severe legal consequences.
Democracy is worth preserving (there are no good alternatives), and I expect that we will want what Abraham Lincoln called "a new Birth of Freedom". Capitalism (probably more capitalism, which means a revival of small business as a share of the economy) is preferable to government ownership unless there are severe questions of equity. OK, so we end up with a social-market economy that affords more opportunity, and maybe we have graduated income taxes that create niches for small-scale entrepreneurs. We need to recognize that education is necessary both as training for work and as a means of making life off work meaningful.
I see Barack Obama as a portent of the sort of leaders that we will have after the 1T is over -- a mature, sixty-year-old Reactive (Obama acted like a sixty-year-old, mellowed Reactive when he was in his mid-40s). Obama was more like an Eisenhower than like an FDR or a Lincoln. Well, in view of Trump, we were certainly not ready for an FDR or Lincoln.
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.
