07-16-2020, 04:06 PM
(07-15-2020, 05:58 PM)Marc Lamb Wrote:(06-30-2020, 02:59 PM)Mikebert Wrote: If Dems drop the ball then 2020 will just be another potential trigger that didn't trigger anything. The shit will keep hitting the fan...
Just a few observations here:
1. Gosh, that 18-year cycle keeps getting longer and longer!
2. What? We be 4T only when a "grey champion" from the Democrat Party suddenly appears? Guess that cycle really is "political."
3. Cheer up. 2020 may turn like 1928, and the Democrat Party can then finally wipe those evil Republicans off the face of the map. lol
A Crisis ultimately forces big changes in politics, ways of personal life, and geopolitical reality. It is invariably at some stage a repudiation of the political and economic behaviors that precipitated the Crisis. The free-wheeling plutocracy going into 1929 was lost beyond recovery by the end of the Crisis of 1940... and the free-wheeling plutocracy going into 2008 is similarly doomed this time.
It is not a question of "Republican" and "Democratic" this time. Take an overlay of the Eisenhower and Obama elections and you can easily see that some constituencies clearly shifted from R to D over about about fifty years. If the Republican Party is now ultra-conservative in economic and cultural ideology, the Democratic Party is ultra-conservative in style. State political cultures do not change much except for demographic change, and the only big change in American demographics is the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in some states. Other than that, the American Southwest would be firmly R except perhaps for California. The common thread between the Eisenhower electorate and the Obama electorate is that the old constituency of well-educated, high-earning "Rockefeller Republicans" have become Democrats as the Republicans attracted the superstitious, bigoted voters of the South on issues of 'race', 'crime', and 'welfare'.
Societies adapt to the realities of technological change and cultural currents, lest they ossify their potential rot. But the rot keeps rotting and degrading the structure while the facade remains impressive... until things collapse.
Since the American Revolution, Crisis Eras seem the shortest eras of American history. They demand too much and change too much for people to want to remain in them. That is a good thing. A Crisis Era may be necessary for adjusting to the technological reality of the End of Inevitable Scarcity, at least in manufactured stuff. Until about forty years ago one of the surest and most reliable ways of getting rich if an investor or to get a middle income if a worker was to be involved in the manufacturing of needed wares that many people did not yet have. That is over. The technology of manufacturing is such that all sorts of things once dear are now incredibly cheap. Much of what was durable then that still remains in existence is available today in such places as Goodwill. Just look for VHS tapes. Goodwill isn't accepting old TV sets... nobody wants CRT TV's any more. Manufacturing is largely for replacement.
Wanna live cheap? If I must relocate a significant distance, then I am likely to give up much of my stuff to Goodwill and buy stuff like what I gave away for free... cheaply. So cheaply that it is less expensive than using a moving van. I will keep my classical CD's and about half my video collection. Much stuff can be taken in an SUV. Some might be sent by crate by a truck line. The material basis of life, except for medicine and real estate (if in a place that actually has economic opportunity) has never been so cheap.
OK... on points:
Quote:1. Gosh, that 18-year cycle keeps getting longer and longer!
Mass culture establishes the value of kids very early and greatly shapes the attitudes of those kids as they reach adulthood. One of the big differences between Boomers and X is that beginning in the late 1970's the pop music quit pretending to have any philosophical import or moral edification. Pop culture went from imaginative to hedonistic. Although Boomers may have turned to older pop that had more intellectual content, X would have nothing to do with what they thought hollow pretense.
Shocked by what they saw in X, Boomers eventually created a new cultural environment suitable for Millennial kids. Disappointed in the consequences of X culture and especially the political repercussions of the right-wiong tendencies in America in what those did to young (then largely X) adults, creative people of Generation X (Never, never, never deprecate the creative talent of a Reactive generation!) gladly collaborated.
The Millennial Generation trusts reason more than ideology and science more than superstition.
OK... the culture made for (and now by) Millennial culture seems to be lasting long beyond the childhood of Millennial adults. The divide between Civic and Adaptive generations typically forms about as the Crisis comes to an end.
Quote:2. What? We be 4T only when a "grey champion" from the Democrat Party suddenly appears? Guess that cycle really is "political."
Obama was potentially that, having most of the characteristics of a Grey Champion. Still, the Crisis rarely resolves until the Civic generation is fully in adulthood... or at least enough of it is. One difference between FDR and Obama, and this may be critical, is that the economic meltdown of fall 2007 - spring 2009 (a sesquiannum) was not as protracted as the three-year meltdown from late 1929 to 1932. After a year and a half the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 was as severe as that of 1929-1932 -- but the system stopped the meltdown by protecting the banks and jump-starting the economy. By 1932 Big Business was concerned with survival and considered enforcing its political will an unaffordable luxury. By 2010 Big Business was able to start buying the political process in an effort to establish America as a pure plutocracy. It came close to succeeding with Donald Trump. FDR, in contrast, could press major reforms.
I wouldn't make too much of partisan identity. It is only coincidence in the grand scheme of things.
Quote:3. Cheer up. 2020 may turn like 1928, and the Democrat Party can then finally wipe those evil Republicans off the face of the map. lol
Trump is a disaster. He has so bungled the response to COVID-19 that he has lost all credibility. Wise people do not now contradict scientific expertise. The death toll from COVID-19 in America is approaching 140,000, a toll larger than four average recent years of vehicular deaths. I had a summary at 125,000 that I think worth reading. The toll was then bigger than such college towns as Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Norman, Oklahoma; College Station, Texas; Berkeley, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and New Haven, Connecticut. Imagine a disaster that takes out Lansing (the state capitol) or Ann Arbor (home of Michigan's premier university) out. That is how bad this plague is. It may not be a once-place wipe-out.
This said, the Governor of Oklahoma just got diagnosed with it as the result of attending a Trump rally in Tulsa. What will it take? Maybe we have had enough.
He has taken the side of white nationalists, the sorts who can't give up their Confederate flags and other Confederate symbolism (or even worse -- neo-Nazi $#!+). Consider what some black kid sees in a statue of a Confederate leader: someone who expended huge numbers of poor-white cannon-fodder to keep one's slave ancestors in bondage. That is the wrong lesson for our youth, whatever their ethnicity. But even worse he has said that there are good people on both sides after a violent confrontation between racists and anti-racists.
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.