(07-12-2019, 09:29 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: It's in this forum's description, "News about Neil Howe and his upcoming book The First Turning", but what is the deal with it? It's not listed on amazon... is this still a thing?
Predictions of the future bifurcate in most times -- except at the end of the Crisis era that determines practically everything for the next three decades or so. When the Axis Powers were in the ascendant, people could predict either a world without them or one in which their genocidal, slave-driving regimes established themselves forever.
Do the next two years in America repudiate or enshrine Donald Trump? The question was much more ambiguous with Barack Obama because he did not challenge legal tradition and did not foster a personality cult. Besides, Obama was clearly pre-seasonal in style, showing more how a John Adams, a Grover Cleveland, a Harry Truman, or a Dwight Eisenhower would do things.
It is easy for Howe to say and for Strauss to have said that pre-seasonal ways are honorable while recognizing their irrelevance, or that post-seasonal behavior is suspect. Wearing Bermuda shorts on a chilly November night (clearly post-seasonal) or doing an April snowstorm (clearly pre-seasonal) is similarly foolish even if it might have felt liberating on one of the last warm days of October or will feel natural on the first summer-like day in April. Both pre-seasonal and post-seasonal behavior is out of phase. Much about Obama is admirable, but one can consider his style either sixty years before his time or twenty years ahead.
Donald Trump is post-seasonal, dredging up ideas that many of us thought were obsolete or furthering ideas of others (Mike Pence is just as obnoxious, and if anything happens to Donald Trump we get to here Mike Pence's fundamentalist anti-intellectualism instead of the crude adulation of the greed, indulgence, and power of a rentier elite).
I see the Trump-Pence agenda as a "Christian and Corporate State" in which the sole focus of the government in the economy is to foster the enrichment of the Right People while the social order promotes superstition and subordination in the Name of Jesus. Economic elites can follow the "do what thou wilt" dictum of Aleister Crowley while the proles are expected to churn out babies to become cannon fodder in wars for profit, cheap labor in industry, and people compelled to pay exorbitant rents to people like Donald Trump. The Trump agenda and the Pence agenda may seem like a hypocritical marriage of political convenience, but remember well: the norm in history has been a soft set of rules for the Master Classes and harsh rules for the proles of the time. Maximization of inequality in economic result and personal happiness is the objective of all exploitative elites from antiquity to today.
Donald Trump does not live like the ideal of the devout, humble Christian fundamentalist stereotype. Trump is practically a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat. His economic ideals come from Ayn Rand and his sexual practice comes from the Playboy Philosophy. Note well that both Trump and Pence are both grossly anti-feminist. They do not disagree; they harmonize well even if they seem hypocritically diametric in style.
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.