Signs of a Dying Empire

[pbrower2a]

(08-03-2021, 02:34 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-03-2021, 02:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Well, well, well. America got a political breather with the defeat of Donald Trump, if in a close election that could have gone the other way easily. Democrats kept the House and got a working, if the definitive bare majority, in the Senate with what were some surprising D wins of both Senate seats in Georgia. I'm going to say this about Jon Ossoff now: as the first Millennial in the US Senate he is one of the most obvious prospects to be President of the United States from his generation. Oh, he's Jewish? If we can vote for someone with a black African father as President we can vote for a Jew to be President.

Of course, on the very day in which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Senate seats  from incumbent Republicans, Donald Trump's most fanatical supporters who accepted the indefensible claim that Donald Trump "really" won stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the Electoral votes with the aim of selecting a result of their choosing.

What President Donald Trump sought to do that day was what many dictators have done, nullifying an election that he has lost. We got a breather, but at the same time over 600,000 Americans have died of a respiratory virus that most of us thought just never showed up in an advanced industrial society. Over 600,000 people have ceased breathing because COVID-19 overpowers some of our most effective and desperate means of saving lives from shortness of breath. Most importantly, the vast majority of those deaths was preventable with appropriate behavior, like wearing masks, washing hands frequently, social distancing, and (finally) getting inoculated.

Related to this - after giving it some thought, I'm increasingly believing that if the climax of this turning has already happened (hopefully it has), it was November 3, not January 6. A Crisis climax involves the entire society and affects every part of life. January 6 was a normal day (or, as normal as a day near the peak of a pandemic can be) for those not in and around the Capitol - if I had not checked any news sources that day, I would not have known what was happening. At the moment of the storming, in fact, I was receiving a furniture delivery. There are probably millions - yes, millions - of people in this country still even now who do not know about it, or only have a vague idea of what occurred.

Obviously had Trump won the presidential election we would be in deep trouble in America. Would terror or incompetence prevail? Would America start having revolutionary-Left movements that attribute all the pathology of a corrupt plutocracy under a sociopathic leader who has the overt support of economic elites? Would we be enduring strikes and riots that lead to some Trump-organized secret police that resembles the Milice of Vichy France? Mercifully that prospect has entered the realm of "alternative history". 

Had Trump won, then January 6 would simply be a formality that nobody could stop. Trump's most fanatical supporters thought the election reversible because they believed that any election that did not have a Trump victory as its core could only be a fraud. Maybe the election of 2000 was shaky, but the results were clear in 2020. Trump and his people are highly ignorant of many things, including statistics and demographics. They could not understand how such states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin could slip away from him when he had firm leads. Here's the obvious explanation: it takes much more time to count the votes from Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh than those in places in which dairy cattle far outnumber people. Nobody can reasonably expect any Republican nominee to win much of the popular vote in the giant cities. Such has not happened in decades, so why should Donald Trump or his supporters believe otherwise now?

I saw the opposite in Ohio and Texas; in both states, Joe Biden had early leads that vanished quickly because the rural vote that was strongly R and came in last was enough to offset early D leads from Akron, Austin, Canton,  Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Dayton, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Toledo. I know enough about demographics to understand how Ohio seems to be drifting  R: as its cities other than Columbus hemorrhage a comparatively-liberal population (and Columbus largely gets its population growth from such places) the rural areas don't. The rural areas, never particularly liberal, have become even more traditionalist and reactionary while they become a bigger share of the Ohio electorate. Texas, in contrast, is able to attract urbanites from elsewhere in America (and that includes Ohio, of course)... and while its black population except for people migrating from outside Texas is stable as a voting bloc, the Mexican-American contingent of the electorate is increasingly gaining in numbers. The urbanites from outside Texas, much like those moving to Virginia about twenty years ago, are bringing their liberal beliefs with them. Add to this, Texas is increasingly becoming a microcosm of America, becoming closer to America in education and prosperity, which bodes ill for Republicans who depend heavily upon "low-information voters" that Donald Trump so lavishly praised.

Trump is offense to anyone with intelligence and conscience. But in case anyone still thinks it a great horror that Trump lost, we have the dubious opening for someone similarly ruthless, cruel, reactionary, bigoted, and demagogic who can make promises to reverse LGBT rights, destroy or eviscerate labor unions, put an end to environmental regulations, bring back school prayer, ban abortion once and for all, and "separate the races" again. The difference will be that the fellow who builds on the legacy of Donald Trump will be more politically astute, knowing enough to destroy the formal opposition before purging his own Party. That's when the single-Party or dominant-Party system takes over, when the key to success for a youth is to join some GOP equivalent of the (Soviet) Pioneers so that they get opportunities to attend diploma mills that feed young people into positions of influence and professions staffed only with politically-trustworthy people. That's also when political dissidents are given quickly-assembled passports and forged welcome papers to Austria, Australia, or Argentina (alphabetically the first of the likely), and are led to military transports on which they are drugged so that they can be dumped into the open ocean.     

Quote:November 3 was completely different. It was impossible to not know what was happening. It was all people talked about for weeks. It was an obsession. Businesses were boarded up in Washington DC. All braced for impact. Instead of the chaos that most expected, for four days an eerie calm descended upon the nation - everyone locked in position, waiting, until the general public became confident in a Biden victory on November 7. It felt as if someone had pressed "pause" on the 3rd and then pressed "play" on the 7th, and anyone who went to a public place between those two times could feel the tension in the air. I know I did.

I felt the tension myself. The news media called the last states at an agonizingly-slow pace, figuring that the election of 2000 could be much like that of 2020, except with a public much more polarized into opposing factions that despise each other, and with all the self-righteousness on both sides ratcheted up, fearing the absolute worst. America is about as polarized between Left and Right as Spain was on the brink of its Civil War in the 1930's, between people fully modern and people with ideas characteristic of a pre-industrial, wholly-agrarian era. On both sides, if one lives in areas in which one side or the other predominates -- which means just about everywhere -- many people did not know people on the other side of the political divide within their communities except as loud-mouthed lunatics at the fairgrounds. The other side is immoral, amoral, perverted, stupid, cruel, unpatriotic, grossly ignorant, or -- whatever. Surely I missed some derogatory adjective here. American politics used to be votes on subtle differences between opposing Parties. That came to an end in the 3T and the polarization has become increasingly intense. 

if there is any edge it is now with the Democrats, who have even adopted some values that one ordinarily associated with conservatives (adherence to precedent and protocol, acceptance of the hierarchy of intellectual and technological achievement, sobriety, and acceptance of tradition (if several different traditions at once because those are not going to meld easily and none of them has any chance to prevail over the others). It is hard to see any liberal virtues that Trump or the contemporary GOP has. Republicans have a mangled response to COVID-19, a natural disaster that they could have met only had they recognized that economic principles do not come before survival, their last president acting much like a despot who scared the bejeesus out of so many Americans, the Capitol Putsch, and the vast majority of relevant Republican pols seeing nothing wrong with the Capitol Putsch. In that Putsch I see a model that should scare the bejeesus out of anyone calling himself a conservative: the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin storming the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917 and inaugurating one of the most absurd, dehumanizing, murderous, and persistent dictatorships ever known. Yes, we have rule for defining who wins a Presidential election, and those defined Joe Biden as the winner.            

Quote:I'm starting to wonder if the 2020 election is best understood as a sort of peaceful or indirect civil war (the climactic final battle of the culture war?) and everything since then has been an aftershock. 1/6 is perhaps best compared to the Lincoln assassination, as an act of reactionary aggression (and/or failed attempt at a Hail Mary victory) by a fiercely devoted member/members of the losing side shortly after the loss occurred.

It could be the beginning of the end of a Crisis Era. COVID-19 kills like a bungled Crisis-Era war, at least by American standards. Perhaps this war will have no Medals of Honor for some soldier who threw his body onto a live grenade to ensure that even if he died by being blown into an unidentifiable mess, his buddies would survive. The super-villain this time is a virus, and not a Hitler or Tojo whose conduct is easy to compare to some anthropomorphic Devil, or even misguided people on the Other Side during the Civil War, or a distant king whose sanity is suspect. 

Success builds a constituency because more people seek to emulate it than to thwart it. Disgrace never redeems itself.       

Quote:If this is the case, then it likely points to:
- the coming 1T beginning relatively sooner rather than later (potential starting point: 2024 election?)
- toward it being more similar to the post-Civil War 1T than the post-WWII 1T. It will be a rebuilding time, not a rebuilt time.

I am one of the more optimistic posters in suggesting that we are closer to the end of the Crisis of 2020 than to its beginning. Few people in the summer of 1942 could have foreseen that Hitler would off himself while cowering in a fetid bunker or that the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere  would not keep growing until it encompassed at the least Australia. The fascists expected that Churchill, FDR, and Stalin would be the ones to dangle at the ends of ropes if they survived the war in which the fascists saw themselves as inevitable victors. But three years after the Wehrmacht advanced on Stalingrad, Hitler would be dead and Tojo would face the harshest judgment possible. 

Crises move fast in the end. Maybe the winners either fully exterminate the enemy or, more simply (and safely) win the peace. I've seen video of the US Army entering German cities, and you would think that the Germans saw the US Army as liberators. Winning the peace is as decisive as one gets.    

Quote:- The "cold civil war" may continue, but it will feel gradually weaker in prominence, and ultimately unimportant. It may be reduced to oversized arguments over small things, to the point that people will almost laugh about it. It will not threaten to split the nation apart. The two sides of the culture war will very slowly begin to correspond less perfectly to the political parties, which will become more and more similar, even as they claim to be as different as ever (and may superficially seem to be diverging even further).

Obviously it will lose its relevance, and as it starts back-guard defenses it minutiae of policy and culture, it will fail. Defense of rogues is bad politics, but right-wing authoritarian types are far slower to get the message. The culture war will be won by people who can get their way in their own communities if not elsewhere. We might even see political events unthinkable in recent years. 

One way of looking at it is the Skowronek Cycle, in which American history breaks down almost neatly in eras that begin with a highly-successful President setting a new agenda that leads to political successes. With those successes come diminishing returns, so the last orthodox follower of the president who initiates that cycle has no clue about his failure until the failure is all too obvious. Like Buchanan, then  Hoover, Carter and Trump. Like Lincoln, then  Theodore Roosevelt (although McKinley was muted as a failure), FDR, and Reagan. Maybe Biden? Skowronek cycles, two of which generally coincide with one Saeculum, may keep America from going off into the ultimately-dangerous zone of rigidity in which rot develops that keeps getting worse... and worse... and worse.  

Quote:This 1T will be a relatively energetic one, unlike the post-WWII one. Society will not become "robotic."
- Even though the 2020 and 1896 elections bear a remarkable resemblance, and 2024 and 1900 may well continue this, the Seventh Party System will ultimately look more like the Third than the Fourth, with "general intensity" decreasing for a while after 2024 and a tendency toward narrow wins in all parts of politics. We may see a very clear mirroring of the Third, with Democrats repeatedly winning the Presidency by narrow margins while Congress is always narrowly divided and flips frequently and erratically.

- The conformity of this 1T will not be "society tells individuals what to do" (like 1946-1963), it will be "society tells individuals what *not* to do" (like 1865-1886). We are already seeing this develop - in fact, the beginnings of this can be seen as far back as ~2013.

Unlike the last High, when the Idealist generation of the time faded rapidly from public life, the Boom Generation will still be present. The most ruthless, selfish, and arrogant Boomers generally prevailed in political and economic life... until now. Donald Trump exemplifies nearly everything potentially wrong with Idealists. For a parallel, just think of the Transcendental slave-owners who saw the treatment of slavery as a necessary evil as inadequate, but instead saw it as a good thing -- even for the slaves -- and thus worthy of praise from others as necessary for human progress. Such was arrogant in the extreme. 

Plenty of Boomers -- and they are already almost entirely old by the standards of any other time for an Idealist generation -- will come out of the shadows to reshape the American culture and its institutions. Boomers show no sign of abandoning the practice of remaining active and connected into elderhood. Boomers may be the lightest smokers of all generations to their time, and their drinking has largely abated. (OK, smarty-pants, you may say: we can't hold our liquor as well as we used to. I will drink to that -- one drink, because that is my limit at age 65. My metabolism is just too slow now to do heavy drinking anymore. Soon enough that drink might have to be mineral water or fruit punch without the alcohol).
  

Quote:Just throwing some thoughts around, I guess.


Edit - okay I really need to figure out how to express all my overtheorizing better, writing longposts really is not great, sorry about that

We are all at the theory stage.