09-22-2018, 12:23 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-22-2018, 12:25 AM by Eric the Green.)
(09-21-2018, 06:23 AM)Tuss Wrote:(06-03-2018, 04:02 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-02-2018, 08:23 AM)TheNomad Wrote: Was 911 and the following affect on American culture along with the several wars after 911 and the change in national mood part of the Crisis portion of this saeculum we are now in?
If not, why?
No, because America turned back quickly to an Unraveling mood. The President told people to "travel" and "go shopping", much in contrast to the response to the Pearl Harbor attack. After "the Date that will live in Infamy", America quickly put an end to luxury production and started rationing. The government pushed war bonds and military production. Young men in large numbers signed up for military service at the expense of lucrative civilian careers.
There is at least one big flaw with this argument. Pearl Harbor didn't initiate the Crisis Turning, the 1929 and the stock market crash did. In other words, the US had been in a Crisis "mood" for over a decade at that point. Of course, in December 1941 there was a lot of Day of Infamy talk that happened to land in fertile soil. FDR must have felt greatly relieved the day the Japanese eventually struck and Hitler declared war, as up to that point there was a certain shortage of legit reasons to go to war with Germany.
In this Fourth Turning, the sequence of events was reversed, foreign first and domestic second, but as 9/11 hardly had the scope of Pearl Harbor, we shouldn't be surprised it wasn't as clearcut a watershed event. So instead of abruptly falling into it, after the initial shock the western world rather slid into a 4T mood over the following months and years, but arguably long before the 2008 financial crisis.
Also, as is well known, an argument could at least be made that in a similar way, after the 1929 stock market crash, America slid into the 4th Turning during the Hoover years.
I don't see why such a reasoning would be so hard to accept. Most great historical turning points are more like symbols while the actual casuality of events are smeared out across a wider span of time. But we still need the symbols to pin the narrative on something.
Our current 4th turning was also domestic first. The crash and Great Recession of 2008 is the exact repeat of the crash and Great Depression of 1929.
9-11 did not start a turning, and did not create anything more than taking us back to business as usual before the Berlin Wall fell. Americans were encouraged to go shopping in order to show the terrorists we were not cowards. 9-11 was compared to the Wall Street bombing of 1919 by S&H, and appropriately so. Terrorists were already the bane of the 3rd turning, and this continued.
There was no 4T mood until we were on the verge of falling off a veritable financial cliff. Only lessons learned from the last crash saved us from an identical fate. The economic recession worldwide in 2008 and thereafter, along with climate change, drove the series of middle east and worldwide revolutionary outbreaks from 2011 to 2015, and this in turn created the immigration crisis that has spawned reactionary ethnic nationalism, Trump and Brexit. In this 4T, tyranny has made a comeback, and Russia again is a threat.
Meanwhile, reactionary movements in the USA, born in the 2T, have continued, and resistance to them is growing now. A confrontation looms, and the pendulum is swinging. The domestic conflict may erupt violently before this 4T is over in 2028-29. And we may face more war abroad when the war cycle comes around again too. I expect the year 2025 to see the outbreak of the crisis climax, and continuous build up to it until then.
In the double rhythm, our 4T is more domestic the foreign. We are recycling through the 1850s now, and 1861 looms ahead in 2025. Perhaps lessons learned will help make our cold civil war stay reasonably cold, just as our great depression only became a great recession because of lessons learned, and thus state intervention happened sooner to keep us from going entirely off the financial cliff.