What the next First Turning won't be like

[pbrower2a]

(11-02-2020, 06:08 PM)Mickey123 Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 03:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.

750,000 people died in the U.S. civil war, at a time when the population was 9% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of over 8 million deaths today.  There were 400,000 U.S. deaths in WW2, at a time when the population was 40% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of 1 million deaths today.

Meanwhile, there were around 700,000 U.S. deaths due to the Spanish Flu, at a time when the population was less than 30% of what it is today.  That is the equivalent of perhaps 2.4 million deaths today.  And this wasn't even during a crisis.

The idea that the core of the Crisis is going to be the coronavirus is silly.  There aren't anywhere near enough deaths, and we're going to have a vaccine within a few months in all probability.  Then it will take 6 months to vaccinate the population, during which time new vaccines will come out and they will also be used to vaccinate people.  With substantial herd immunity, the U.S. and the rest of the first world will move on.

This is just a small part of the crisis.  Much worse things are going to happen.

We had the usual start of a Crisis Era in the Crash of 2008, which was much like the Crash of 1929. So things turned out differently. Hoover failed to back the banks to ensure that there would be funds for payrolls and accounts payable, and America got the bank runs that made the Great Depression as horrible as it was. Obama did after a year and a half of the economic decline (which rally began in late 2007)   what FDR did after three years of economic meltdown, rescuing the System from itself. It may be that the severity of the economic meltdown made the rise of Hitler possible -- and the greatest scale of human tragedy since the Mongol invasions of East, South, and Southwest Asia and Europe as far west as Silesia. No Hitler means no Holocaust. Holodomor in Ukraine, of course. 

Much of what was so horrible about the last Crisis relates to the personality of Hitler. Without Hitler, Germany takes some different course, one in which German Jews play a key role much as American Jews played a key role in American life in the 1930's and 1940's in establishing the creative and moral culture. (Jews really did dominate the American movie industry in the 1930's, but before someone screams "conspiracy", one must recognize the result. The Hollywood Jews pushed a life-affirming wholesomeness by deputing a non-Jew to establish a motion-pictures code that the Jews found good for business -- no overt sexuality, no promotion of marital infidelity, no praise for bad people, no pointless violence (OK, bad guys can victimize people, but they ideally end up badly) and no mockery of any religious heritage. Jewish writers knew that most of their audience was not Jewish, so they created a stock hero that might seem unlikely: the wise Roman Catholic priest as the guide to ethnic groups (then Italian- and Irish-Americans) concerned about their kids turning to lives of crime.  Not surprisingly, Nazis became stock villains... 

There are differences this time other than Hitler and Tojo, for which there is no obvious equivalent, at least in American politics. American political life got very placid by the 1930's, probably because the Depression ensured that what remained of Big Business was more concerned with survival than with buying the political process. By 2010, Big Business that Obama and Democrats in general rescued from the consequences of its worst tendencies, had the means with which to buy the political process, culminating in the rise of Donald Trump and stooge majorities for him in Congress.