(07-14-2020, 02:36 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: We don't have a major war yet. I wouldn't count that out of the picture just yet in this crisis, which has 9 years to run (not two), even if it's by comparison a smaller war, or two smaller wars.
As in 2009 I see American political culture changing dramatically and irrevocably. The Hard Right was able to find its way back to a near-dictatorial lock on power and might try to do so again. A failure of that might end the Crisis mode. Unlike the case in 2009, the generational shift (Generation X practically all in mid-life) practically ensures a sharp liberal turn in political and even economic life. In 2009, Boomers were the corporate executives who could reward themselves richly for treating others badly. Generation X, unlike Boomers, can't get away with that. Generation X will have to earn such through creative or entrepreneurial achievements. Add to this, we are likely to undergo another economic downturn... and saving the companies that may appear (this time) Too Big and Irresponsible to Save might depend upon paring back the economic compensation... and scheduling higher income taxes down the line. But here I am getting into economics which I seek to discuss as a topic in itself. The Millennial Generation does not believe in trickle-down economics and is unwilling to see a permanent underclass as a necessary condition for prosperity. The dominant elites of the American economy largely believed that no human suffering could be in excess so long as they get whatever they want, which is essentially the sort of ideology characteristic of societies headed to proletarian revolutions such as the Russian Revolution. Those elites still generally believe such, but they are rapidly losing their support.
The Millennial Generation is much more likely to congeal around a more egalitarian society, if not for themselves, then at least for their children. It will sacrifice for a better world. It will not sacrifice on behalf of one that serves people that they know about only for egregious excess and loathe for such.
In the mean time we have legitimate fear of new and potentially more dangerous viruses going around. No general wants to send his troops into a plague zone. War zone? That is his appointed task. Is there a COVID-23 or SARS-4 in the wings waiting to be unleashed upon the world?
The eighty-year rule applies. We do not have an exact analogue to the last Crisis even if the financial meltdown of 2007-2009 looks much like the first year and a half of the 1929-1932 meltdown. Neither Putin nor Xi -- although both are unredeemed dictators -- is a Hitler-like figure this time. We ended up with a Tea Party instead of a New Deal. If Obama tried to be the "new FDR", he fell short and became more like a "new Eisenhower" better at calming history than at defining history. Trump is of course an unmitigated disaster as a leader in every aspect of the term.
Pervasive as war was in the last Crisis, a few countries managed to avoid the effects of the Second World War completely: Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. (Spain had its own horrible Crisis in its horrific civil war, so it didn't really get away scot-free). On the other hand if you have countries as disparate as Ethiopia and Thailand on opposite side of the same Crisis war (Thailand was an Axis Power at war with the UK and the UK had liberated Ethiopia) you have an unprecedented scope of war.
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.