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

[pbrower2a]

(04-07-2022, 12:00 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(11-22-2021, 04:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-21-2021, 09:10 AM)David Horn Wrote: There has been Full-On Republican and Republican Lite for the past 40 years.  That doesn't change easily.  Yes, the more engaged can see through the fog, but the 90% who just live their lives don't really care.  To them, politics is an issue so far down their priority list, it only gets attention during big elections -- POTUS being the most common ones.  At the same time, they hold office holders responsible for everything from the weather to unfriendly neighbors.  There's no mandate for rationality.

It will take a hard hit in the gut to realign their thought processes.  Millennials have already had a punch or two, so they're already wary.  The older gens are too insolated and the come-to-Jesus moment still needs to happen for them.

Millennial adults are all old enough to remember two events -- the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and of course the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 which looks much like the first half of the economic meltdown of 1929-1932. If they can remember Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath they can also recall the speculative frenzy that initiated the meltdown of 2007-2009. Well-targeted use of the federal budget can solve another meltdown.

The Millennial Generation is unlikely to expect miracles from On High to solve their problems. Other generations may believe such out of faith (Boomers) or desperation (X). They have tried their formulas for supernatural miracles with no success. 

Note well that although Millennial adults have been slow to reach high political office, probably because the Silent and early-wave Boomers have held onto power longer than usual due to longevity, they are starting to reach nigh public office. To be sure there is but one Millennial in the US Senate (Jon Ossoff), such may be approaching the end. The Millennial constituency is still growing in public life. 

Civic generations typically get early starts in high public office in contrast to Adaptive generations (Progressive, Silent) and Reactive (Lost, X). What is different is that people in high positions have every cause to stay in or near the apex of power if they can live to old age without losing their ability to perform the functions of the job. The pay is great; the work is cerebral; the working conditions are excellent. Why quit? 

But -- Millennial pols may far better understand the interests of fellow Millennial adults, all of whom are of voting age. Even the oldest of their net-senior generation have reached 60, like Barack Obama. (By the way -- I don't see his career in public life over. Supreme Court?)
Millennial adults do not whine about their plight, but they will be receptive to one of their own who has logical solutions to their problems and who make coherent promises to fit their hopes.

I share many of your sentiments here. Personally I think the best way forward is for millennials to become "The Builder Generation". It's one of the only things conservative and liberal millennials can really hold hands on, and just about the only way we can muster any kind of collective confidence to help the country get back on its feet. It won't be the swift, dramatic, heroic victory of the GIs (imo, most people into S&H theory have only read The 4th Turning and over-emphasize the previous saeculum as if it was the norm, rather than one iteration of the cycle from which to observe broader trends).

Millennials will be as much re-builders as builders. They are unlikely to show sentimentality even to GI constructions that have met or surpassed their expected service life -- even if they admire the GI's who built them. I'm tempted to believe that huge swaths of GI-built "starter" homes will give way to huge blocks of high-density housing if housing is to be affordable. I can only hope that such is more attractive than the Stalinist architecture that prevails when construction must be cheap and swift, with ugly blandness as a result. Housing built for a population of 150 million is inadequate for a population of 350 million. Even without the ideology, Stalinist architecture (think of the Pruitt-Igoe Towers) dehumanizes people. 

We will need to disperse the American population, especially back to places that in recent times have faced economic ruin. Why not revive places like Detroit, Flint, Dayton, Youngstown,  St. Louis, Peoria, Muncie, and South Bend? Detroit, when the center of the auto industry (arguably a good analogue to Silicon Valley in its time)  attracted people from around the world when the auto industry was the High Tech of its time. Let's not forget that much of the high technology goes into vehicles these days.