(12-28-2016, 08:11 AM)Odin Wrote: Mike, I think one issue here is that you are interpreting the election results, here, in a too superficial way. If you look closely, a lot of the things that resulted on Trump's victory have their origin in the 2008 Crash.We will date turnings from long ago and in other places fairly readily without have the sort of detailed knowledge about that era that someone who lived through has. A superficial examination is all that is required to see the last 4T and the two before that. What we don't know is whether in the future there will be a series of events that will look just as obviously 4T as the last three 4T, but the dating of these events makes a 2008 start date look unnatural. For example, suppose there is another financial crisis under Trump, but this one is dealt with successfully leading to Trump being followed by another two-term Republican under which the economic malaise of the past 3-4 decades is resolved, after which a 1T is clearly in place in the mid-2030's. In this scenario a 2008 4T start makes little sense.
On the other hand, suppose Trump ends up as a Republican Carter, and in 2020 comes a Democratic Reagan. In this situation 2008 makes a lot of sense (i.e. Obama = Nixon, and Bush = Johnson, who tried to have guns and butter and ended up wrecking his party.
And then again suppose we get a recession, but with no panic and Trump responses with a vicious war against ISIS and fellow travelers in Syria/Iraq, that results in a successful conclusion of the War on Terror, after which a period of calm ensues that looks like 1T. In that case the theme of the 4T would be fighting the terrorist threat in the Middle East, and so might be dated from 2003.
In all of the previous social moments, we have had the luxury of knowing when they ended. This helps enormously in putting down dates. Although I would like to believe that Obama's election was the start of something that is not yet over, maybe I am wrong and it never was anything, just a false hope.