09-23-2018, 04:49 AM
Also: FDR was a cusp Missionary-Lost, and Obama was a cusp X-Boom. FDR was spectacularly successful as a President because he got inaugurated as the Depression was at a point nearly as bad as it could get. Americans had no delusion that the world was spectacularly different late in 1932 from what it was in the middle of 1929, and about every demographic was ready for real change. The financial assets of shareholders were cut to 1/8 of their original value, and businesses were more concerned about getting their profit margins and share prices in recovery than in buying the political system.
Obama got inaugurated in the equivalent of early 1931, when share prices had been cut by a little more than half. Obama, like FDR, backed the banks... but Corporate America still had enough money with which to buy the political process. Almost a decade later the United States is, aside from some oil-rich monarchies in which the royal family controls the revenue from oil extraction, the purest plutocracy on Earth. Economic inequality has intensified to the point that most people would have been materially better off nearly fifty years ago.
Maybe there is a generational difference: Boomer elites are much more narcissistic than Missionary elites. Boomer elites mostly inherited power from GI and Silent elites, but Missionaries were more likely to have been self-made. Boomer elites have done well in ensuring that people not always in the elite get no chance in bureaucratic organizations, setting up rigid barriers to advancement in career to those who have ever been poor. Those who have been poor might do something horrible, like show empathy for people who have known hardship and allow talented people to get ahead. Boomer elites have supported the most reactionary causes (except perhaps racism) with lavish funding. They are also the worst business executives ever in treatment of subordinates.
The current Boomer elites must fail so spectacularly that they face political and administrative purges, get shoved out of power, or die off before America can make real progress in its institutions -- political, educational, and economic. They will lose educational influence as educational administrators retire to enjoy the good life of retirement among the well-off. Economic? People with a worldview much like that of Henry Clay Frick do not really retire. Political? Watch elections of 2018 and 2020. The Millennial generation will be running for plenty of public offices and could win some. The best and brightest usually make themselves known when in their mid-30s.
Obama got inaugurated in the equivalent of early 1931, when share prices had been cut by a little more than half. Obama, like FDR, backed the banks... but Corporate America still had enough money with which to buy the political process. Almost a decade later the United States is, aside from some oil-rich monarchies in which the royal family controls the revenue from oil extraction, the purest plutocracy on Earth. Economic inequality has intensified to the point that most people would have been materially better off nearly fifty years ago.
Maybe there is a generational difference: Boomer elites are much more narcissistic than Missionary elites. Boomer elites mostly inherited power from GI and Silent elites, but Missionaries were more likely to have been self-made. Boomer elites have done well in ensuring that people not always in the elite get no chance in bureaucratic organizations, setting up rigid barriers to advancement in career to those who have ever been poor. Those who have been poor might do something horrible, like show empathy for people who have known hardship and allow talented people to get ahead. Boomer elites have supported the most reactionary causes (except perhaps racism) with lavish funding. They are also the worst business executives ever in treatment of subordinates.
The current Boomer elites must fail so spectacularly that they face political and administrative purges, get shoved out of power, or die off before America can make real progress in its institutions -- political, educational, and economic. They will lose educational influence as educational administrators retire to enjoy the good life of retirement among the well-off. Economic? People with a worldview much like that of Henry Clay Frick do not really retire. Political? Watch elections of 2018 and 2020. The Millennial generation will be running for plenty of public offices and could win some. The best and brightest usually make themselves known when in their mid-30s.
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.