Presidential Archetypes

[pbrower2a]

(12-21-2019, 01:13 AM)ResidentArtist Wrote: No problem, I like the color scheme. At the heart of the realignment theory is a president's role in the process. There are recognizable differences between Trump and Hoover/Carter (especially so with the latter) but so is the case for Obama and Nixon. Changes in personal details are, in my opinion, a small hiccup in an overall process.

Manias, crazes, and fads happen. People can be very, very wrong en masse. Elites can be effective in getting what they want, but they often prove destructive in their personal and political success. It may be that being in the right place and time puts one in the leading role (for the time) of history. 

I notice, as Howe and Strauss did not point out in 1989, that if the 4T has a Regeneracy as a focus in which society redefines itself on new values for the ages (and this regeneracy can be benign as in FDR's Hundred Days or monstrously evil as in Hitler's Gleichschaltung) something must have eroded severely beforehand. Maybe the culture has degraded as in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (source of the musical Cabaret) about as the economy collapses... or a culture of greed and inequality as in the 1920's has led to a speculative boom that cannot support itself. The last phase of a 3T is an ugly time of bad business, bad politics, depraved culture, inequity, and bad morals. The world is consummately fortunate that the Second (1915) KKK, which was fascist before Mussolini invented the word, imploded before the stock markets imploded in 1929. The Nazis got to keep growing.

I remind people that although nostalgia is now a big business, there was practically no nostalgia for the supposed halcyon days of the 1920's. Maybe people outgrew it, or people drew a lesson that that time was itself a (choose metaphor -- ticking time-bomb, volcano about to erupt, calm before the storm). Maybe it was the character of the Lost, who didn't want youth imitating their youthful indiscretions (including the Klan). 1920's politics was a Last Hurrah of the Gilded ethos, and nothing disproved that as did the economic meltdown of 1929-1932.

Note well: blunders of all kinds seem so obviously wrong after the fact, but when they happen they are highly seductive.    

Quote:Technology could easily be a part of the quicker pacing, maybe because of a more readily available access to information over the last century. What took almost 80 years to completely transform is now done twice in a lifetime; going from Lincoln-McKinley to Roosevelt-Reagan in the same span of time is a significant shift. Tech and economic innovations have gone through leaps and bounds since the time of the Gilded Era. It would explain why going from Jeffersonian agrarianism to Lincoln industrialism took as long as it did, as the parties changed with them. The service economy sped along quickly after the New Deal in contrast.

Information moves faster, and people are more mobile than they used to be. People can move to where the high-paying jobs are along with brutal rents such as New York City or Silicon Valley, and then retreat to the rural South... or as many do now, Mexico, where the cost of living is much lower and one can live like an aristocrat on the proceeds of selling off American real estate. We have more formal education, and more people understand statistics, accounting, finance, etc.    

Quote:In fact, the generational change in economic structures are part of a main theme in a thread over on Election Atlas, titled "Between Two Majorities," that introduced me to the causes of these realignments. It was also how I discovered TFT since Strauss-Howe comes up in the comments a few times. Not sure what the policy is on external links here but I can send you the link in PM if you'd like, I found it to be a fascinating read.

I will need to read that thread.  If I see Donald Trump as a disaster it is because he is the last hurrah of an ideology that, however, discreditable, still has powerful backers who have yet to be ruined or rendered politically impotent. In the event of a revolution that topples what we now have, such people will be the ones first before the firing squad.  

Here is a big part of the problem: we are at the end of an age in which the production of more goods itself creates prosperity. It may be economic canon that satiation of human needs is impossible, but glut is certain when either (1) a non-market economy fails to take account of diminishing returns, or (2) productivity overpowers basic needs.  The current solution of the American economic elite is monopolization that creates scarcity from which the elites can profiteer, and limitation of opportunity so that the elites can keep imposing their unimaginative command-and-control systems of management. The End of Scarcity may have seemed the hope of the ages but even it has consequences. No technological fix, and no miracle of productivity can offset the effect of oppression.