09-26-2016, 01:31 PM
(09-25-2016, 11:00 AM)Einzige Wrote: Part of the problem with this mode of analysis is that the pre-New Deal period is pretty muddled.
Theodore Roosevelt does look like a Prophet, and Taft looks like a Bureaucrat. On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson seems in a lot of ways to have been closer ideologically to Roosevelt than either Harding or Coolidge - who we are supposing were the Disaster to Teddy's Prophet - were. And while Herbert Hoover was a Roosevelt-supporting Progressive in the nineteen tens and his governance vaguely reflected that, supposing that Hoover alone was the Disaster leaves us without a place for Harding/Coolidge in the equation.
Moreover, the New Deal was in a lot of ways a continuation of Theodore Roosevelt's political system. We don't have the benefit of the new Prophet rejecting the legacy of the preceding one here, as we do with Reagan rejecting FDR.
Further, I have a bit of a problem with Marc Lamb's analysis of 9/11. If it were a direct analogue to the wave of anarchist terrorism in 1919/1920, we should have expected there to be some sort of equivalent to World War I under Clinton in the 1990s. But of course there was nothing of the sort.
I think this particular cyclical model works pretty well for 1932 to the present, and also looks vaguely applicable to the Jacksonian period. But I have a very hard time squaring it with the Civil War and the Gilded and Progressive Ages.
World War I is an example where a larger cycle has to be considered. WWI was the collapse of Western Civilization as it had been known. It was "the decline of The West" as Spengler put it. This was the key event in the beginning of a new cycle of civilization. This 500-year cycle is more significant than an 80-90 year saeculum. People here might tend to forget this, but historians agree with this. WWI was an epochal event on a scale of once in a millennium.