"Anti-Nationalist Civics"....What?

[Eric the Green]

Quote:"the concept of our country"

I consider this to be about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the reform movements that have expanded their meaning. Not entrepreneurs or individualism.

(07-08-2022, 10:32 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(07-08-2022, 05:54 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Maybe it's time for a civic generation that is cosmopolitan.

I can see why you would say this, but imo, it is unlikely for reasons listed below. With that said, I'm not against being cosmopolitan (quite the opposite. I have great respect for men of culture). I also don't think these things have to be mutually exclusive. I consider myself a "libertarian nationalist". Part of the reason I am a nationalist is precisely because I love traveling to other countries and experiencing their culture. I want all kinds of countries to be proud of their culture, because I want people in those countries to be inspired to keep doing what their country does best. I want 
- Japan to keep producing the best anime and sushi
- Italy to keep producing the best opera 
- Taiwan to keep producing the best tea
- France to keep producing the best cheese
- Ukraine to keep producing the best music 
and, in our case
- the US to keep producing the best entrepreneurs.

Among the arts, the USA has done the best in literature. It is, I would hold, the arts which represent and create what is the most enduring legacy of any culture. Also notable is the quality of our universities. We have lots of good entreprenuers, and I'm not against them, but most US business has produced just a bunch of physical tools of greater convenience; not especially that much to be proud of. And lately we don't have as many businesses, but corporate behemoths that are mostly engines to produce money for stockholders, owners and CEOs.

Quote:

Quote:Many of the problems the USA faces are also faced elsewhere in the world. Climate change, vast income inequality, fascism/populism, and COVID-19 aren't restricted to just the US - they're found the world over. We can't expect to fix these in only one country and be fine.

Covid isn't a primary cause of the 4th turning to begin with. Imo, the causality here is backwards. For example, the Spanish Flu was a 3rd turning phenomenon (1918 to 1920), also affected the entire world and killed about 10 times as many people. Covid isn't causing a 4th turning, a 4th turning is causing our response to Covid.

Similarly, neither is climate change. I'm not saying it isn't real, only that Americans and Europeans haven't really been the ones feelings its negative effects. Climate change is more likely to be a 4th-turning-esque event in, say, the Philippines or Okinawa. The threat represented by global warming is a future threat. That doesn't make it unimportant, but it is not a primary contributor to higher, current levels of wealth inequality, dilapidated infrastructure, decreasing purchasing power and other issues that represent tangible poverty and physical danger.

Climate change is a problem largely created by the United States, and others have copied us. For that reason, we need to set the example first of all, and help others in the energy transition. We are not doing this, thanks to the power of the Republican Party, and its power to co-opt one or two senate Democrats and take over the Supreme Court.

What is the "cause" of the 4th Turning? According to the authors, none of the events during the 4T are its cause; rather the generational constellation is the primary cause, and then how they respond to various catalysts. And how the cycle has unfolded and what issues it has dealt with.

I assert that, if there is a cause, it is principally the ideology of neoliberalism. But various awakening trends, and reactions to them, are being played out.

In our 4T, it is best to describe the various crises as features of the 4T, more than causes of it per se.

Climate change is top of the list, as I predicted it would be. We can't go through a year anymore without its results, which get worse every year: droughts, floods, storms, fires, breakdowns in other countries that cause migrations to the USA and Europe, instability everywhere, revolutions, repressions, threats to national security....

The cause: our attachment to old industrial models, especially use of fossil fuels, commercialism/consumerism, and also factory farming and deforestation. This has been greatly accelerated by neoliberalism (libertarian economics, Reaganomics, trickle-down economics, free-market ideology; this has many names), because its chief aim is to get government regulation off the backs of companies who want to extract, pollute, destroy, emit, etc.; all without restraint, and with a sole eye to profits and stock prices.

Far from being a crisis for the future, it is an immediate problem today, and because of feedback loops and tipping points, in the near future within 10 years or so it will become a crisis that will not be reversible until long after our civilization is gone-- and lost for thousands of years. We take action in this 4T, or we die. And so far, action looks difficult. Only if the midterms work out for Democrats in 2022 will this action have any chance to occur. Maybe the reaction to Roe v Wade being terminated will be the catalyst for a turnaround in the polls now and on election day. We can hope.

Covid has certainly become a feature of our 4T, and other pandemics before it in recent years have been a warm up to it. It also is largely caused environmentally (like climate change) by our encroachment on Nature and animal habitat. Covid has been devastating, and it has not been the government coercion to deal with it that is the problem, but precisely the opposite: lack of government coercion-- with the excuse as stated by President Trump that he didn't want to cause a panic, so he just denied the problem and then lifted lockdowns too soon because he wanted to avoid the recession that would hurt his re-election chances. Instead, his denials and lack of action extended the 2020 recession and hurt his chances.

The original catalyst of our 4T remains the crash and great recession of 2008. Obama did a good job of containing this with his stimulus program, but neoliberal propaganda in the form of the Tea Party movement supported by the Koch Brothers ended this stimulus prematurely and caused extensive state cutbacks, so the recession lingered and never really ended. All this only made the rising inequality of our society greater, and it is this inequality, the product of neoliberal policies since Reagan, that is the principle cause of poverty, distrust, resentment and alienation that people still feel, especially younger people who do not have the community or the opportunity that previous generations have. They do have some sense of solidarity in recognizing their plight, and the causes of it, while older generations remain largely duped by neoliberalism.

Now we have a war by a tyrant invading eastern Europe, and the need to support a nation seeking its freedom and regaining the independence it gained in 1991 and in its 2014 revolution. This war, the needed sanctions on the tyrant, and economic recovery from covid, have together sparked inflation.

Gun violence and massacres is another pandemic, making everywhere in our country unsafe and all the people afraid. Guns are more and more allowed to be carried everywhere, so intimidation and threat has replaced the love-in friendliness and open trust gained from the 2T. Republicans block all action on this issue, so it just gets worse. The alienation and lonely atomization among youth today, another product of neoliberalism, seems to drive some of them to violence.

Then there is conspiracy theory culture, originally stemming from the propagation of JFK conspiracy theories starting in 1966, and mushrooming in the late 1990s and since 9-11-2001. This has extended the covid pandemic, because of anti-vax propaganda dissuading people from getting vaccinated, and the vaccine companies themselves are not sharing their patents, thus helping to cause more variants in the covid virus. Biden's failure to act sufficiently on this and on other matters is hurting his popularity. This conspiracy culture has also created the willingness of 30-40% of Americans to believe Trump's big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

This in turn helps to propel the ongoing attacks on our democracy by the Republican Party, which may be the biggest and most-damaging aspect of our 4T. This 4T is far from over, and the threat of more civil violence and rebellion hangs over the country as it struggles against this Republican threat. States passing laws or Courts deciding that state legislatures can change election results to favor Trump and Republicans is the biggest threat, as well as greater restrictions on voting. Failure to control guns is allowing militias to stockpile weapons for the looming fight, and to intimidate voters and election workers. The split in our Senate makes action on this and on all our problems virtually impossible.

And then there's the increasing Christianization of the country at the hands of our Republican Supreme Court, and its determination to make neoliberalism permanent in spite of its being voted out of office first in 2008 and then in 2020. The Court is determined to take our country back before the recent times of toleration/more support for immigrant, non-white, non-christian non-males, and to take us back to the uniformity and patriarchy that the MAGA crowd seeks; or even further back into fascism and the dark ages. This is further increasing the country's division, especially since laws in red states (like abortion laws, anti LGBTQ laws, enabling of police violence) are becoming so oppressive that more young people will be moving from red to blue states, and resistance to our fascist Court and Republican Party will continue to grow too.