02-08-2019, 12:53 PM
(02-08-2019, 08:45 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: The oldest Millennials are >35 already. Soon, they'll be too old to be a footsoldier in any war, period. No, I stand by my opinion that rich old people (*cough* Silents *cough*) use their influence to do lobbyism, and that's why we don't have a proper Crisis. Trump would love to lead like FDR - but they don't let him. They know well enough how much they'd lose if a government took action, so they preserve the status quo, no matter if it suffocates the country and the people.
I don't understand BTW how Strauss & Howe could live in DC and never mention a topic like lobbyism. After all, the puppetmasters are more important than the puppets.
That's a good point. I imagine the youngest millennials, by S&H dating and not Pew demographic dating, will be in their early 20s when the war comes, if it comes, so they can be footsoldiers like the youngest GIs and even Silent/GI cuspers were in world war two. But the Silents like the Koch Brothers and others are still pulling the lobby and money strings and keeping congress and presidents shackled. Not that I have any faith in Trump, but the forces of obstruction do pull on him.
This may not be anything new for a 4T; the Compromise Generation, at least as S&H defined it (extending through 1780s cohorts, maybe too far), were at the helm in the 1850s, which was actually the early 4T like our times, restraining any real move to restrict or eliminate slavery and keeping southern planters' interests uppermost with the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott Decision. Only in the later 4T (the 1860s) was this Adaptive Generation rule broken, at the cost of civil war that time.
In the 2020s, the dam will break again, though not without conflict and resistance of some kind. One more election and the dam could get real shaky, and the elections of 2022 and 2024 will break it down. The right-wing will still have the supreme court and possibly the senate, however (which over-represents rural red states), which may keep much resistance in place. The progressive and reform/revolution tides will be very strong though.