08-30-2019, 03:20 PM
(08-29-2019, 09:22 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(08-29-2019, 02:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(08-24-2019, 03:21 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(08-24-2019, 01:46 PM)sbarrera Wrote: The point is Trump is leading in a manner consistent with what turnings theory predicts for his generation in this turning.
Absolutely. In fact, Trump's victory in the 2016 election was a major victory for generational theory.
The major questions at this point are how the crisis war will start, and whether we'll be on the winning side or the losing side.
Hillary's victory would have been far better as such a victory for generation theory. She represented the better side of boomers, and is also very typical for better or worse.
Hillary's platform was similar to her husband's in the 1990s, with perhaps the exception of a little more warmongering. Third turning platforms like that winning in 2016 would have been inconsistent generational theory predicts for fourth turnings, providing strong evidence against the theory.
Like it or not, Trump got elected due to a populist campaign, exactly as predicted by generational theory.
Conservatives such as yourself see things from a harkening back to the old days point of view. You guys are just not likely to see things correctly. Hillary was going to continue Obama's policies and add to them. That was not a radical 4T style, that's true. But Obama was answering the needs of this 4T, as best as can be done in a backward, center-right country like the USA is today. So it was not her husband's party that she was offering, but her boss's.
Trump is and was as far from being a populist as any candidate could ever be. He takes away the means people have to empower themselves against the bosses of the world: their vote and their voice in politics and government. He is following Bannon's program of dismantling the administrative state. That state is the best organ the people have to rein in the robber barons who run this country into the ground and deprive the people of their rights and their prosperity just so a few fat cats can profit. That is the only thing Republicans are interested in: protecting their class. And Trump is head of the rabble in doing that. This is 3T, not 4T.
And stop misusing the word populist. I think it is, to use another oft-misused term by the Republican bosses, "elitist." Right wing "populism" merely appeals to peoples' fears and prejudices, and the term assumes that the common people are more susceptible to such fear-mongering. Perhaps in fact, it may be true sometimes, but it doesn't have to be. The common people have the ability to see the truth and reject fear-mongering, just as fully as the intellectual "elite" do. Sometimes more so.
Populism was first promoted by James B. Weaver in his Populist Party campaign in 1892. Then William J. Bryan took Weaver's populist program and took over the Democratic Party with it, and Weaver supported him. Wilson and FDR continued his tradition and made the party what it is today. Democrats are the populists. Republicans are and always will be anti-populists, and can never be populists again; period. They are not the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt anymore. They take power away from the people and give it to the bosses; the very bosses who claim "free enterprise" is freedom, when that is the most blatant bullshit that has ever been perpetrated on the people.