09-15-2016, 12:10 AM
Somehow I cannot see Kennedy/Johnson as quite the disaster that Dubya was. Dubya was a thoroughly-awful President, essentially the telescoping of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover disasters of twelve years into eight. Any decay during the Kennedy/Johnson years was of a cultural consensus (the Counterculture with the introduction of the Boom Awakening).
Attempting to force an eighty-year cycle, I can easily see Harding-Coolidge-Hoover as a 3T disaster, FDR as a 4T prophet, Truman as a 1T Bureaucrat, Eisenhower as a 2T interregnum, Kennedy-Johnson as a 4T over-reach, Nixon-Ford as a very flawed pair, Carter as a 2T delay, Reagan as a TR-style radical reformer, Bush I as a Taft-like successor, Clinton as a Wilson-like placeholder, Bush II as a 4T disaster, and Obama as... an FDR-like Prophet?
McKinley, the last real Gilded-Age President might be an interregnum. Just try figuring out Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland!
Attempting to force an eighty-year cycle, I can easily see Harding-Coolidge-Hoover as a 3T disaster, FDR as a 4T prophet, Truman as a 1T Bureaucrat, Eisenhower as a 2T interregnum, Kennedy-Johnson as a 4T over-reach, Nixon-Ford as a very flawed pair, Carter as a 2T delay, Reagan as a TR-style radical reformer, Bush I as a Taft-like successor, Clinton as a Wilson-like placeholder, Bush II as a 4T disaster, and Obama as... an FDR-like Prophet?
McKinley, the last real Gilded-Age President might be an interregnum. Just try figuring out Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.