05-26-2018, 11:21 AM
(05-26-2018, 09:39 AM)Mikebert Wrote:(05-24-2018, 12:50 PM)TheNomad Wrote: Those kids in Florida -- Heroes and Artists (who are in the model supposed to be helpmates) are already of voting age and they are armed with networks and technology with one voice. They will not ALLOW the government to put them in harm's way over assault weapons coming into their schools anymore. Their voices can only be expanded upon to read a sea-change in MOOD. I view that mood as having already changed....I am proposing maybe the Crisis has already come and went.
What I sense here is more hope than analysis. What happened to the Parkland kids has happened to others before, and it continued on afterward. There is no evidence that it will be any different this time. If Republicans hold on to their majorities this fall, the Parkland kids will have failed. Odds are most of them will move on from high school and the issue will lose salience. We really don't know what will happen.
You suggest 911 and 2008 were big enough deals for them to comprise a 4T. This of course is possible, but if its the case then, event wise, the 4T ended years ago. For the 4T to continue past 2010 or so, more stuff has to keep happening. One might think Donald Trump is something, but I do not see all that much difference between Trump and the alternative, Ted Cruz, who it seems to me would be just as bad (or good) as Trump. Trump hasn't done anything that a bog-standard Republican wouldn't do. He has embraced GWBush's neocon ways, his economics and his social policy.
Now if Clinton had won that would indicate a 4T continuation as the only time Democrats have won a third term were in social moment turnings. This has not been the case for Republicans who won third terms in 1988, 1928 and 1908 (all 3Ts) and 1872 (1T). But that did not happen.
There was no change in foreign policy. We began a crusade in the Middle East in 1991 that continues on to this day. If we had a 4T, it didn't affect our crusading.
Economic trends of flat wages and rising inequality over the past 40 years are still in force. If we had a 4T it did not affect the economy in any persistence fashion that I can see.
Social moments are supposed to be a time of political turmoil and popular unrest. In past 2Ts and 4Ts were have seen lots of riots, assassinations, domestic terrorism, violent protest. None of this is present. To see social violence today one had to consider rampage murders (e.g. mass shootings) as an additional category of unrest like riots. I do this as so can show the expected spike in violence for this 4T, but it is not clear this categorization is valid. If I don't include these events then the past couple decades fail "the 4T test" for this measure too.
Finally a 4T is supposed to restructure the government. That hasn't happened either.
There is not a very strong case that we even had a 4T.
It is a weak case, for the reasons you say.
Even persecution of Muslims and so on has not risen to the level of what happened to perceived opponents in previous 4T wartime periods.
One thing to point out though, is that the kids have vowed to continue to be active. We'll see if they do this, but if so, they will be joined by a continual stream of new activists that has happened after almost every mass shooting. Mass shootings will continue and get worse until the politics of guns shifts, whether by the Parkland kids, Everytown for Gun Responsibility, Gabby Giffords' organization, or the next groups that form, and all of them together.
Hope is not analysis, but analysis alone is not prediction.