The Partisan Divide on Issues

[David Horn]

(01-17-2022, 02:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: How can there be a 1T or a 2T without a proper 4T preceding it? That's not how the cycle works. If nothing is done in this 4T, climate change and inequality with all the social and health problems that go along with these will be so engrained and democracy so destroyed that no-one in the 2040s and 50s will have any means or any hope of correcting these problems. 1Ts are stand pat eras; 2Ts are about cultural change; 4Ts are supposed to be the time when we fight it out on so-called "real issues" and make the institutional changes. This is the job of the prophet, nomad and civic generational combo. Others cannot do it. Two senators are blocking us right now. We have to find a way to break through this in this decade, or we die. We are toast and we are through.

Reality rarely matches expectations; this 4T certainly hasn't.  The question you ask is, can a poor 4T generate a 1T?  I think so.  After all, the last 1T varied greatly from country to country, and all seem to have been real 1Ts -- even Japan and both Germanies.  But you're right that the lack of progress will make things far worse than solving problems today.  2040 will be bad.  That doesn't mean that it's an unredeemable scenario, just highly challenging.

Eric Wrote:Biden is right; we are at a deciding point. He may have to find a way to work with some Republicans and get half a loaf for now. 4Ts don't have to solve all the problems; just enough so we can continue to function and resolve the conflicts so that our republic survives and progresses. If we can do something, then the people of the next 2T (especially early in the 2T) will have a chance to make further reforms along with opening up the culture to real spirit and real free and embodied experience again, and to propose ideals and values to be acted on in the following 4T and beyond.

I agree up to a point.  Always compromising with intransigent stupidity also validates the stupidity.  I don't have a solution for that.   

Eric Wrote:Another point is that neoliberalism and other reactionary ideologies have been so dominant for so long, that if not overturned in this 4T after such a long 40+ year conservative period, the USA will have (and already is to a large extent) become so used to the Reagan model that it will just become the norm forever. The pendulum is supposed to swing. If it no longer swings, our politics and our civics is dead and the turning pendulum is broken too.

My wife was born in 1959 and has been immersed in neoliberalism her entire post-adolescent life.  She's a liberal but still can't see many of the inherent fallacies for lack of any evidence to the contrary.  Even younger people have less.  We need leaders who can make eye-opening possible, and there are few of them in evidence.

Eric Wrote:This is now longer than the period in the romantic age of 1815 to 1850 when all change was prohibited and all ideals were frustrated by restored monarchs after the French Revolution and Napoleon. The only way it was broken was by opening a period of realpolitik industrial nationalism with some reforms thrown in, leading to the eventual death of the old European civilization in a 30-year holocaust in the 20th century.

Again, leaders are the missing factor.