04-06-2020, 12:08 PM
(04-06-2020, 07:25 AM)Snowflake1996 Wrote: What about something like this?
1929-1947 4T
1948-1965 1T
1966-1984 2T
1985-2001 3T
2002-2021? 4T
Boomers 1943-1960
Xers 1961-1979
Millennials 1980-1996
Zoomers 1997-2016?
New Prophets-2017-onwards (too young to remember the Great Quarantine that both Zoomers and Millennials will talk about for decades)
Catalyst: 9/11 followed by the war on terror, Katrina, housing market pop, and financial crisis
Regeneracy: Obama’s administration. The passage of the affordable care act, the stimulus, Dodd-Frank, don’t ask don’t tell repeal, Osama’s death, etc.
-Note: Obama is the gray champion (He was born closer to the end of the last 4T than FDR or Lincoln were. He is old enough to fulfill this role).
Crisis: Trump/Covid19 (a direct threat to the regeneracy that millennials supported with their electoral support behind Obama). Perhaps this is a leading indicator that Biden will cement Obama’s reforms if he wins in November?
It seems like we’re way overdue for the regeneracy phase.
Power figures have repressed any lasting Regeneracy; COVID-19 may make such impossible. Note well that much that goes on in a depraved 3T is profitable -- a celebrity culture that allows people to get rich for exploiting their fame, speculative bubbles that devour capital but create paper profits, privatization and monopolization, sweetheart deals between government and Big Business, 'consolidation' of small business, and the imposition of huge personal debt upon the common man... the super-rich often wanted Obama to fail politically so that they could establish the pure plutocracy of their dreams. Survival strategies for meeting COVID-19 will put an end to much of the depraved behavior of a 3T culture that long outlasted its value.
Obama is much like FDR in being on the Idealist-Reactive cusp. There were some nasty people (Ion Antonescu, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Getulio Vargas) born in 1882... Howe and Strauss saw FDR more like Lincoln than like any other President in American history, which is a reasonable assessment. FDR was often considered devious, and he had some very Lost traits.
Obama is not a Boomer; if anything he has acted more like a mature Reactive, the sort of person more intent on calming things than shaking things up. He's the sort of leader that America gets plenty of after a Crisis -- and if in a Crisis, only at the end. He cleaves to precedent and protocol; he has no great agenda. I see Obama more like Eisenhower than like FDR. Ike was a fine President, and it is telling that Obama won only one state in 2012 that Eisenhower did not win twice -- and that exception was Hawaii, which wasn't voting in the 1950's. Obama in 2008 even did something Republican nominees for President usually did -- having a positive connection between voting for him and income. (That was really formal education, but Ike also wiped Stevenson out among people with college educations).
One thing is certain: Donald Trump is not the Grey Champion. He has done more to divide America than to reconcile it. His vision is little more than his ideology, one that offends half the American electorate at the least. He seems like the end of the line of a political fad that has either gone stale or has been taken to its preposterous conclusion. Besides, he is simply a horrible person. He has the vices usually associated with the worst Idealists (selfishness, fanaticism, and narcissism) with none of the culture, principle, or historical perspective that one associates with Idealists at their best.
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.