06-12-2021, 02:32 PM
(06-12-2021, 12:26 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(06-10-2021, 10:32 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Should this Crisis Era result in electoral changes that disenfranchise people on such questionable principles as property ownership or income or voting become distorted into some extreme mockery of democracy (let us say, employers vote on a worker's behalf, then the result will be anything but triumphant. Major changes in the way people do things -- from politics to labor-management relations to inter-ethnic interactions.
I can imagine the Trump Court messing things up badly, as by allowing State legislatures to decide a state's vote if it dislikes the popular result.
A society that freezes malign reforms at the end of a Crisis Era sets itself up for the perversity blowing up in the faces of the Leadership the next time. Obviously I hope for the best so that we can avoid the worst
The Anglo-American saeculum and 4T has never resulted in malign reforms, except perhaps later in the 1T as after the civil war when many of the reforms were retracted. I suspect we cannot afford to lose and settle for malign reforms in this 4T. We are going to either face up to the fight, or lose our country and probably civilization itself. There can be no "next time" and no salvation from a failed fourth turning, unless a benign foreign power (like the USA itself was after WWII) conquers the USA and makes the needed reforms for us. Seems an unlikely prospect.
All of us who are concerned will need to be active in getting the millennials out to vote in Nov.2022.
I can already predict the cause of the next Crisis, the ecological catastrophe that fully manifests itself when AGW has its worst consequences of inundating huge swaths of prime cropland in the rich alluvial plains of much of the world. Agriculture is the backbone of practically all economies, and the poorer the country, the more such is so. No technological fix can allay hunger and starvation; mass hunger topples governments of all kinds in revolution. It is best that the world do everything to forestall and mitigate the effects. Maybe there will be some sea-level rise, but if AGW happens slowly enough, then deposition of eroded soil from mountains will keep pace with rising sea levels.
AGW will create a refugee crisis on a scale that no war or persecution has ever caused. Figure that the rich countries that might have the means for resettling people in their countries will themselves have the sort of economic distress that fosters right-wing populism. Donald Trump is a portent. If the advanced industrial world could not open their countries to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, then just think of how tight the borders might close upon refugees from inundation and desertification!
Yes, deaths resulting from desertification and inundation as consequences of AGW will be genocide.
The more problems that a society solves before the 4T, the better goes the 4T. Trump-like pols (and Donald Trump will not be the last of his kind in America; the next one may be swifter and more resolute in the gutting of human rights in America). I spoke of th e Trump majority on the Supreme Court. I can imagine such a court deciding that those who own the wealth have the rights and that workers do not. Such reflects Donald Trump himself, who believes that the Common Man must be responsible those who have the wealth and bureaucratic power of wealthy corporations and that those who wield the wealth and bureaucratic power owe the rest of Humanity nothing. How long will reactionary majority on the Trump-era Supreme Court last? Perhaps long enough to establish some Christian and Corporate (which is one way of saying "fascist") social order. The pretext will be economic growth... all for the Few, of course.
We can slow AGW, but we cannot stop it in time for the Crisis of 2100 which begins around AD 2080. Yes, the timing is already all but set for the next Saeculum, including the Crisis of 2100.
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.
