First Turning "purge"

[pbrower2a]

So what will be purged? Lets start with the culture. I expect the worst X elements in culture such as the cynicism and destructiveness in pop music to be gone -- and to not return until the next Reactive generation comes onto the scene. I expect communications to be more sanitized, with seditious material being treated much like Communist propaganda was in the last 1T. Society will insist that cultural expressions not harmless almost to the point of insipidness will have some clear motive of profit or educational value. 1T culture will be undeniably commercial. Look to 1950s and early 1960s television to see what will be the general pattern.

Whatever will be discredited in the Crisis Era will be treated with ridicule if not condemnation. Even if the victors do not vilify the nations vanquished in a 4T they will suppress the most loathsome characteristics of the defeated enemy.

Economics? Anything that looks like a quick-buck proposition with a shaky foundation in finances will get quick rejection. There will be much activity in real estate, but it will be much as housing was done in the 1950s; bankers will be obliged to look at lending as a long-term proposition. Bankers will not get the chance to bet on appreciation of the property on which a mortgage loan is made. I look at the sort of lending commonplace in the early years of the Double-Zero decade, and see shyster dealing, especially in real estate, that we will never tolerate again until about 2080. Offer a loan with negative amortization around 2035, and if the borrower defaults, YOU go to prison for fraud if you offered or authorized the loan -- even if your bank made money off it. Lenders made crooked deals in markets with rising real-estate prices, and if the borrower defaulted, the banker got to take the proceeds of foreclosure. IN the 1950s, foreclosure usually resulted from the death or disability of the breadwinner because bank officers expected borrowers to stay with the same company and not even change careers within the company. So if you were a factory laborer you were a good risk, but if you went to night school while doing factory work to take accounting, you were a poor risk by the standards of the time.

Curious about Donald Trump? He will be seen as having either inaugurated a new era of American greatness and be lauded like Washington and Lincoln, or seen as a scapegoat for all that was wrong in America. I expect the latter. We are far from seeing the last of Obama-like pols in American life. I see him as X at its political best, and if you follow me closely, you will notice how often I compare him to Eisenhower for temperament, integrity, and effectiveness. How would you like another President, liberal or conservative, who is clean of scandal, who has at most one big new program for America, who tries to stay out of wars. respects legal precedent and diplomatic protocol, eschews any form of populism, and tries to work across the aisle? (Democrats of the 1950s let Eisenhower do that, but Republicans would not do so for Obama, and that has nothing to do with the desires of those two Reactive Presidents.

I already see conservative dissent forming with President Trump. There will be conservatism in the 1T, but it will look more like disdain for deficits, trust in the tried-and-true, rejection of populist demagoguery, and overall blandness in public life.