02-09-2019, 01:49 PM
(02-08-2019, 12:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(02-08-2019, 08:45 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: The oldest Millennials are >35 already. Soon, they'll be too old to be a footsoldier in any war, period. No, I stand by my opinion that rich old people (*cough* Silents *cough*) use their influence to do lobbyism, and that's why we don't have a proper Crisis. Trump would love to lead like FDR - but they don't let him. They know well enough how much they'd lose if a government took action, so they preserve the status quo, no matter if it suffocates the country and the people.
I don't understand BTW how Strauss & Howe could live in DC and never mention a topic like lobbyism. After all, the puppetmasters are more important than the puppets.
That's a good point. I imagine the youngest millennials, by S&H dating and not Pew demographic dating, will be in their early 20s when the war comes, if it comes, so they can be footsoldiers like the youngest GIs and even Silent/GI cuspers were in world war two. But the Silents like the Koch Brothers and others are still pulling the lobby and money strings and keeping congress and presidents shackled. Not that I have any faith in Trump, but the forces of obstruction do pull on him.
This Crisis will decide whether we have government of the People, by the People, and for the People -- or government by lobbyist, a novel form of tyranny that has yet to have a name. The Boomers are now old enough, even the youngest approaching retirement age, that they will be on the sidelines (likely pensioned off, if necessary) after the Crisis is over. If the lobbyists win they will simply reward the ones who did not turn against them with modest retirements to keep them out of the workforce -- especially the intellectual workforce. The new elite might not want older people who know about the old America 'corrupting' the youth with tales of old freedom and responsible government in an order in which the economic elites have rights due from the non-elites who have only responsibilities to those elites. Government by lobbyist (and we have had bitter tastes of it) implies that those who hold the purse-strings (owners and executives) have the real power and that others simply defer, go into exile, or die.
Quote:This may not be anything new for a 4T; the Compromise Generation, at least as S&H defined it (extending through 1780s cohorts, maybe too far), were at the helm in the 1850s, which was actually the early 4T like our times, restraining any real move to restrict or eliminate slavery and keeping southern planters' interests uppermost with the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott Decision. Only in the later 4T (the 1860s) was this Adaptive Generation rule broken, at the cost of civil war that time.
You mentioned the Koch brothers as examples of the Silent elites maintaining influence -- but one of them, I understand, has terminal cancer. A generation has power until it has no successors in its midst.
Quote:In the 2020s, the dam will break again, though not without conflict and resistance of some kind. One more election and the dam could get real shaky, and the elections of 2022 and 2024 will break it down. The right-wing will still have the supreme court and possibly the senate, however (which over-represents rural red states), which may keep much resistance in place. The progressive and reform/revolution tides will be very strong though.
Note well that Generation X is already beginning to supplant Boomers in elected office. Some of its Senate leaders are even more resolutely and fervently reactionary (Pat Toomey, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee in the Senate alone... OK, Scott Walker is probably through) than Silent and Boom right-wingers. Will these be brittle targets for liberals? I certainly hope so!
It's going to take a 2020s equivalent of a New Deal to bring the Mountain and Deep South into political as well as technological modernity. Those now in charge resist such kicking in screaming. (Young-earth creation! "Godly" America! Rah! Rah! Rah!) But will the kids?
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.