05-24-2018, 04:16 PM
(05-23-2018, 08:19 PM)TheNomad Wrote: (to me) I'm trying to get more expansive as I read the text or read your post. However, a lot of what you are saying is the same as I have been hearing for many years. With respect it is much fearmongering and simply saying someone is awful or the politics are raw. I've seen so much preaching of doom. I'm trying to look at events and consensus from what I see that are indicators.
I'm not seeing you apply that mastery to the events of this Crisis and what you think they mean/meant in terms of a new arm of the Saeculum passing or coming. You say trump must go for the crisis to end, but that's unrealistic. In the past, there was one side of a political spectrum that pushed out the other. But that doesn't mean a complete bonfire of everyone on a side. They are still around. I called trump a POSSIBLE ABERRATION in the model. But even after reading your post and others, I feel like YES there is a resurrection of neocon that is trying to happen. The vultures are swooping hoping to take advantage of trumps invitation. But that doesn't mean the seachange has not already occurred. I think the GENERAL CONSENSUS (and this is what the authors use to portray a to portray shift in cycle) the GENERAL CONSENSUS is trump is an aberration and I doubt in 2018 elections and definitely not in 2020 elections that a neocon mindset will or could prevail.
We thought it was impossible last time. But the current "powers" (and the general dislike of it) along with the genera consensus will become clear very soon. But one must look beyond the current to prognosticate. It shouldn't be about what we see now. I think that is the whole point of the books.
Time remains for casting off those who disagree with the most dictatorial or despotic President in American history. Time might remain for establishing a regime of fear that causes people to accept an inequitable, repressive, and conformist America that deprecates any display of intelligence in use for deprecating the whims of a President who has a personality cult behind him.
I would like to see Donald Trump as an aberration and an anomaly that Americans repudiate quickly. This man can hurt people who thought that he stood for traditional values. Consider that the New Deal consensus depended heavily upon farmers who had had enough of falling commodity prices. So imagine a Democrat getting a chance to say "better honest taxes than corrupt and destructive tariffs". Tariffs are taxes, and they are grossly inequitable in their effects (they are regressive taxes om an advanced industrial society), and they badly distort the decisions that people would make in a free market.
Nothing forces political changes inconvenient to political elites as does political failure, including gross failure of economic stewardship. Until about 1930 Americans considered the economy too important for leaving to any but the experts -- the land-owning elites of the South and the industrialists and financiers of the North. Today we hold the politicians accountable for inflation, high unemployment, and hurtful taxes and tariffs.
Fear is part of the political repertory. One can question whether politicians play to appropriate fear (the North Korean dictator is crazy and he has a lust for nukes and missiles) or to fears involving not-so-legitimate concerns (some black man may want to marry and have children by your precious white daughter... or that Muslims want to take over America and establish Sharia law). Great politicians like FDR and Churchill address legitimate fears that they did not create.
We are seeing some trends that suggest 1T patterns. Exposure of sexual harassment that powerful people used to get away with is putting an end to some once-distinguished careers. Same-sex marriage is being recognized rapidly as an inevitability. Go figure what that means. This said, I do not pretend to have a crystal ball. Powerful people want certain things to happen, and they have the funds with which to promote such. On the other hand, we are also recognizing that the idea that Donald Trump and most Republicans have of American greatness is very different from many of the rest of us.
The gun culture may have peaked. How many people must die so that we have lax laws involving guns?
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.