The denouement?

[Eric the Green]

(08-16-2022, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

So far, that "some improvement" is all we've gotten; although this is supposed to be a decade of reform, according to where Saturn is and the 30-year cycle delineated by some historians like Schlesinger. And it's easy to see this in every recent such reform decade, except perhaps the previous one which had to buck the neoliberal era and the 3T. This time, a reform era coincides with a late 4T, and both last through the 2020s, and are not about to end before the decade does. Often with reform eras, it takes a couple of years or more to see the biggest progress start to come through, as for example the biggest New Deal reforms or the civil rights bill and Great Society and the height of the progressive era's reforms, and the crisis climax, which can see some drastic institutional change as well as a climax and resolution of conflict, is also often not due to come until the last years of the 4T.

In spite of everything, including a gray champion president that's seen as TOO gray, my prediction seems to be coming true now. In 2022 I expected according to my latest book for some reforms to pass, but I knew that the Democratic rulership that was due to start after the 2020 election was going to be tenuous at first. Now we'll see if the Democrats can pull an upset and keep the House (and they now have a slight lead in the generic poll at 538.org), and come through with their current poll numbers that indicate a pick-up of 3 seats in the Senate, and the willingness among the 48 real Democrats, given the urgency of the times, to bypass the filibuster if they get 51, we could see further reforms to pass in the next few years. And the resistance is ramping up too as the reich-wing gets ever angrier at losing power, (again as I predicted decades ago), and the risk of civil violence usually grows as we enter the last years of a 4T and a reform era in the late 2020s, much like what happened in the late 1960s and late 1930s. Sometimes the later years of the reform era verge on or enter revolution, so we'll see if our nation even holds together, or if we can achieve a victory over the reactionary autocratic and aggressive foreign forces of our times.

But none of us, even older Boomers, should be "sitting out". The civil war actually WAS resolved positively-- just not in the longer run. Too much reversal happened as the 1T deepened. So we'll see how far a retrenchment goes in the next 1T. But I also see a ramping up of the green revolution and the sixties movements again in the late 2040s, as the Awakening comes on quickly again (like last time) and the 3rd cycle of modern revolution fulfills itself. We older folks may just be sitting out then, or perhaps watching from above. The reversals this time may not last. We certainly can't afford to go back to the fossil fuel era, for example.