11-20-2021, 12:01 PM
(07-14-2021, 07:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:Paragraph by Paragraph response:(07-08-2021, 07:30 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: My guess: 2020s decade will be the transition. Will X be the next long-running generation in power or will they get just a couple terms/major players before a multi-decade Millennial run like Boomers had?
Something else to say: so far it is a clumsy transition. We have gone from Barack Obama (X, and he very definitely is a Reactive in style) to Donald Trump (Boom, and most of the vices associated with Idealists at their worst with practically no virtues) to Biden (Silent, and under freakish conditions in which a bare majority of Americans elect someone unusually old). Lifespans are longer than in the 1940's because the GI's set a pattern of remaining active and involved as long as possible while rejecting some bad habits.
What Crisis Era is not messy? The American Revolution and the Civil War were both big killers by the standard of the time. An American soldier was far more likely to survive the Second World War. If one compares the Plague of Donald Trump (COVID-19), the death toll is similar to a badly-bungled shooting war.
The mark of this Crisis War is one of two of the last three: political polarization. OK, political life was freakishly placid during the Second World War. With the near-collapse of the Republican Party in the early 1930's the Democratic Party achieved the sort of dominance one associates with a totalitarian Party without the flagrant violations of human rights (aside from the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, which was a moral failure and a blunder).
I see Barack Obama as a portent of the sort of leadership that America will have in the next 1T. Although he may in some respects seem like Adaptive sort who puts together Boom-like (Idealist) and either GI-like or Millennial-like (Civic) traits of masculinity, his pattern as a top political leader is characteristically that of what I call a Mature Reactive. (OK, so what is an immature Reactive? Someone who uses the political system to settle old scores or enrich himself, sells out to a foreign power believing that he has latched onto "greatness", or adopts a mean-spirited populism best described as a consistent middle-finger to the other side. Donald Trump may have paradoxically better fit that mold). Reactive leaders at their best have no great agenda to shake things up. They prefer protocol and precedent in law and diplomacy. They reject radical change and may have one big program but little else because the country is no longer amenable to great crusades. They are cautionary characters of the "I've-been-burned" school.
P1: What bad habits did GIs reject? After all so many of them smoked like chimneys and drank like fishes.
P2: Though not a Trump fan by any means I am a bit confused as to how the germ warfare which is COVID could be laid at his feet.
P3: You then have to be referring to American political life, because the regimes of Hitler and Stalin definitely didn't qualify for being placid. If anything we have been more placid since Reagan's "Morning in America" speech which actually was "Mourning" for those not in the top 20 percent of income status. And the society at large has been very accepting of what has been the status quo for the last four decades.
P4: But Obama did have a shake-up agenda when he campaigned for the office. It is known, especially within the black community, how excited they were to have their first US President. But did we just need to take a breath, count to ten, and realize that total transformation wouldn't be easy? The "I've been burned" school of thought not only produces demagogues, but also such pathologies as mysogony, to name just one.