Does this 4T seem a little 2T-ish to anyone else?

[Eric the Green]

(04-05-2022, 05:52 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: It's hard to see anything 2T-like about this time except for institutional failure. The fullest danger of a 4T is likely past.  A successful 4T does not end in picking and choosing what 3T characteristics to preserve. Most of those must die. The ephemeral fads are not the sorts of things that become 'classics'.  Maybe we have enshrined some 3T music, literature, and art from the second-to-last Saeculum, but that is on the truly high end of achievement. In music, Bartok's violin concerto, Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, Prokofiev's third piano concerto  as well as late Puccini would fit well into any time.

Politics of the 3T leading into the Great Depression and Second World War created much of the mess, and I hardly need go into the details. Neoliberal ideology may not be as horrible as fascism (including the Second KKK) and bolshevism, but all that it could ever achieve is the impoverishment of the vast majority on behalf of an economic elite that already has more than anyone can justify. America needs a new version of a New Deal, a Marshall Plan for the poor. Let's get this straight: although individual poverty may be the result of perverse choices and tragic misfortunes, mass poverty in an era of unusually-high productivity and technology that would have been a dream for anyone whose lifespan might have been eighty years ending around 1960, mass poverty can only be the result of perverse decisions from On High. Someone stupid enough to fritter away a fortune as a high-roller has shown that he deserves poverty.

Americans will soon as a whole will have a temperament better suited to 1950 than to 1990, with the obvious exceptions that nobody wants to see a return to Jim Crow, official suppression of homosexuality, or male chauvinism. Decisions made earlier against such are as likely to remain intact as the standing of the music that I mentioned above. Well, we're not going to tear up our Interstates in favor of restoring the old Blood Alleys that we used to have; we are not going to re-introduce polio, and we are not going to abandon personal computers, either. "Junk" culture has a way of dying... and must. depravity has never served Humanity well.

A Crisis Era has a way of focusing objectives from chaos to order. The last stage (and do not be fooled) decides which vision of the future will prevail. The Hard Right would love to establish an America that is a fundamentalist-Protestant version of Franco's Spain in which right-wing clerics establish what is moral and the economy is plutocratic in the extreme, with high technology dedicated to military prowess, repression of dissent, and a service-based economy built upon super-cheap labor that makes the country a great place to visit on a holiday (with high real pay earned somewhere else) but a dreadful place to live. Intellectual life is reduced to praise for the Franco-like Leader who ensures that he is the worldly version of the One from Whom all blessings flow.  The other vision is that we have something more like Adenauer's Germany, if without the shame of having to lament horrible deeds and without the memories of smoking and shattered ruins.

Free markets have their merits, but they are not enough. We need to break the crony capitalism behind neoliberal economics once and for all. We need to revitalize places that have recently been abandoned in an age in which importing is cheaper than manufacturing. No nation has ever prospered by importing its luxuries -- and that includes flat-screen TV's, i-devices, cars, and men's suits. A veneer of sybaritic excess among elites that depends upon mass poverty to intensify elite indulgence is  possible even in some of the poorest countries.

The true test of how prosperous a country is is not how well the economic elites live but instead how well people who do much the same things anywhere (like barbers, carpenters, or schoolteachers) do.

We need so many changes if we are going to return to progress that benefits most people. As of now, one senator stands in the way of a good start. That is an egregious situation. At a minimum we should write to Sen Manchin and remind him of the consequences of his inaction, even if he does not listen or respond. If Manchin does not act this month, it appears to me that we are putting ourselves in maximum danger of a totally-failed 4T, and if that happens this will mean people on Earth will never see anything like a circa-1950 mood ever again.