07-19-2020, 09:40 PM
(07-19-2020, 01:34 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(07-15-2020, 05:58 PM)and every 4.8 years over 1952-1980Marc 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
That 18 year cycle (and 2001 4T start) was partially invalidated by the 2006 election (and ruled out by the 2008 election), when it became clear that 2000 was not a critical election. And the idea that turnings today are 20 years long (and the 2008 was a critical election) was partially invalidated by the 2014 election and ruled out by 2016). It is looking like Biden will win this fall, which will rule out 2016 as a critical election.
Critical elections are usually given as 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1980. The last five of these elections occurred in a social moment turning, whereas 1800 is an exception. I would suggest that the First Continental Congress also served as a critical election in that representatives of the colonies voted to set America on the path to change the faction in control of the government, in which case we have 7 critical elections, with six of them falling into a social moment turning, which has about a 6% probability of happening by chance, making it the best political indicator of the presence of a social moment turning (in this case a 4T) at that time.
I would have thought "2008" a critical election and for a short time Obama and the Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress made that election a portent of major change. Then the reactionaries such as the Koch brothers invested heavily in the political process to install people intent on tax cuts for the super-rich, regulatory relaxation, monopolistic organization of business, and the gutting of worker's rights -- just enough to establish political gridlock while Tea Party types made their loud appeals for "freedom" from Big Government in favor of Corporate America. By 2014 the Hard Right had won both Houses of Congress, and by 2016 a Hard Right demagogue running upon the nebulous slogan "Make America Great Again" became President.
But far from establishing the Christian and Corporate State of the right-wing dream (a New Feudalism in which the vast majority of Americans suffer for the greed of a few who exercise unconstrained and irresponsible power) we have a gang of conspiratorial bumblers. (Most conspiracies are full of bumblers, and people who want to get something done do it themselves or do so by honorable means that fall outside any imaginable stretch of the words 'criminal conspiracy'). Conspiracies usually involve gangland activity, murder-for-hire plots, and such ludicrous fantasies as Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the largely-debunked conspiracy theories around the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Quote:Trump loses then 2020 becomes the next critical election candidate. Right now I see no reason to believe Republicans won't win in 2022. If that happens and Biden chooses not to run it is possible Democrats could lose in 2024. Even if Democrats win in 2024 they are not likely to win in 2028 if they are still losing congressional elections like Clinton and Obama did. And that rules out 2020. There was 48 years between the 1932 and 1980 critical elections. A critical election 2028 or 2032 would not be out of line. And this would put the earliest date for the end a 4T in the 2030's or later, which stretches out the saeculum so long as to disprove the theory, IMO.
I searched Google for "Skowronek cycle", and look where I ended up:
http://generational-theory.com/forum/thread-5980.html
A thread in this Forum, and one in which I post frequently:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=318258.0
I also found Skowronek's book and reviews and analysis of it in academic areas. I have added a post to the Generations thread, as that thread had stopped just before COVID-19 struck, If Trump didn't clearly fit the word "disjunctive" -- perhaps because he had just gotten away with being impeached but not convicted -- he does now. This isn't partisan bickering. I can't imagine any prominent Republican politician (OK, Ted Cruz would be at least as abrasive as Trump on something else, but I can't imagine him so botching COVID-19 as Trump; he might be disjunctive, if for other reasons) botching COVID-19 as badly as Trump did. Democratic pols of all kinds seem to have done their appointed tasks well, as have some Republican leaders.
The strongest evidence that Trump is a disjunctive leader is that things get done despite him and contrary to his desires. If that isn't failure, then what is? Dubya may have had culpability in the crooked real-estate bubble, but once the experts told him what had to be done to keep the economy from going full-blown 1930's, he went along. If one can;t be an excellent leader,then at least one can be a pliant and effective follower... not great, but Trump shows us what can be worse.
Quote:So for me 2022 is the fish or cut bait moment for the theory. S&H forecast a crisis turning that would create structural changed. George W Bush had a group of changes he wanted to make in foreign political and in the political outreach for the GOP. Obama had a number of policy changes around health care and climate change he wished to pursue. Trump ran on structural changes wrt to foreign policy, immigration and trade. Anyone of these agenda could have been the core about a 4T was built. What was stopping them was politics. The S&H 4T theory that says, given the proper constellation of "generations" a crisis catalyst triggers the structural change. Each of these three presidents had a catalyst, 911, the 2008 panic, the 2020 pandemic.
The Election of 2020 is now in the spot in which Trump cannot win it on his own, and Joe Biden would have to be a disaster as a candidate to lose it. Obviously he leaves us some questions unanswered. First, will he be up to the task? Most people his age are out to pasture, so to speak, and anyone over 75 is at risk of serious diseases that can ravage their mental acuity as well as other aspects of health. Second, should anything happen to him, the VP will have to be able to take charge quickly and decisively even if to continue the path that Biden sets.
The big third issue is whether liberal Democrats can fend off the Hard Right more effectively in 2022 than Obama could in 2010. OK, the worst Boom leadership -- executives of giant corporations, executives paid very well to treat people badly, are themselves retiring. X executives may be as politically reactionary as any, but they cannot get away with as much. They must earn what they get, and they know that. They are not going to do well without doing good. The sorts of people associated with the Tea Party and the Religious Right, cores of the mass constituency of the American Hard Right, are themselves aging without replacement. Meanwhile the Millennial Generation is about 20% more Democratic than Republican... and it is going to start finding its way into many House seats and other positions of high responsibility.
The Generational Cycle may have answered the question for us on the third issue.
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They all failed to use it to produce the structural change which would given them an electoral edge afterward. We kept on trading off between the parties with presidential or Congressional turnovers every 4 years in average over 2000-2020 (same rate as the two decades before). Compare these to every 6.7 and 10 years on average over the 4T-containing periods 1932-1952 and 1860-1800, respectively. This has been no 4T yet, at least politically.[/quote]
The disjunctive "ender" President, according to the Skowronek cycle, is the unwitting instigator of change that he does not expect... and that demonstrates his incompetence and ultimate irrelevance. Donald Trump is precisely that. Buchanan. Hoover. Carter. Trump.
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.