Global Trumpism Lecture explaining the Turnings

[Eric the Green]

(04-10-2019, 12:30 AM)Snowflake1996 Wrote: Brown University Political Economist Mark Blyth shortly after the 2016 US Presidential Election released a lecture explaining macroeconomic regimes from the New Deal to Supply Side Economics to today's Populist uprisings and how they are all interrelated. I believe that his theory ties heavily into both the 4th/1st Turnings of the 1930s-50s along with the Great Awakening and Unraveling leading to today's Fourth Turning.

Here is a link to his lecture. I encourage everyone to watch it in its entirety if they can spare an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY


His thesis statement is this: The New Deal and post-Great Depression era coupled with the emerging threat of Communism led to our institutions focusing on Full Employment first and foremost to provide higher wages and strong unions. Eventually, the hyper-focus on this sole macroeconomic variable caused rifts in our economy that led to the high inflation of the late 1970s which crippled creditors. As a result, we switched course starting in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s with folks like Reagan and Thatcher by targeting inflation. By targeting solely inflation for about the same time period we targeted full employment, we have now created a new set of problems in our society and that that led to the system blowing up in 2008. Since the system wasn't properly reformed we have spurred both right and left wing populists revolts throughout the first world (And possibly in developing economies looking at Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, etc). 

As a result of the 4th and 1st Turning Civic GI's flexing their collectivist teamwork agenda onto society due to their upbringing in the Great Depression, our economy eventually looked like this in the late 1970s:

1. Targeting full employment at all costs
2. Labor share of national income at an all-time high
3. Corporate profits at an all-time low
4. Strong Unions
5. Low inequality
6. National Markets
7. Finance and Central banks are both weak
8. Legislative bodies are strong
9. Great economy for debtors
10. An economy focused on the collective

Then, as a result of the 2nd and 3rd Turning Prophet Boomers rebelled against collectivist society and with the 1970's stagflation began exerting their individualist agenda which focused on itemizing society, After about 30-40 years we now have this:

1. Targeting inflation at all costs
2. Labor share of national income at an all-time low
3. Corporate profits at an all-time high
4. Weak Unions
5. High inequality
6. Global Markets
7. Finance and Central banks are both powerful
8. Legislative bodies are weak
9. Great economy for creditors
10. An economy focused on the individual


While the global financial crisis is generally considered to be the start of the Fourth Turning, there wasn't a system reset. Look at all 10 bullet points above and you'll see that our current economic system in 2019 is almost identical to the one in 2007. Populist movements of the Left and Right have sprung up across the western world as a rebellion against the current system.

It's worth noting that according to Howe we aren't even halfway through this turning. It's also worth noting that if the current conomic expansion reaches to summer 2019, it'll officially be the longest documented economic expansion in American history. Could that spell another major bubble and crash? We'll see how everything falls between now and 2030.

This outline in my opinion skips over the most important trends. And focusing on one economic policy, plus attributing the shift to one generation, the boomers, leaves out most of what happened.

The Boomers did not rebel against a collectivist society that provided equality and full employment. Boomers in youth rebelled against the negative aspects of this society, and what it produced that was not as glowing as the author claims. This society was, first of all, spirit dead, as the T4T authors put it. The culture was conformist and crass. Workers were cogs in machines, and women were mere baby-makers. Minorities were suppressed, and the environment was polluted beyond belief. This wonderful economic machine was creating wars in which Boomers were drafted to die in, which served no purpose whatsoever except to provide income to the munitions makers. To gloss over all of this is not valid.

What's usually called the "neo-liberal" libertarian-economics, free-market-fundamentalist ideology that took over in 1980 was not the result of boomer individualism. It was a reaction by corporate powers to the threats posed by reformists, many of whom were Boomers and Silents. 2T movements such as consumerism and environmentalism threatened their power. The counter-culture of boomer youth threatened the moralistic religious establishment. So, they hired a charming actor to deceive the people, and he succeeded in instituting Reaganomics. Fake news about a non-existent economic boom in the 1980s was then used to convince the people that government is the problem, that taxes are theft, and that regulation hurts business and dries up the trickle-down effect. 

None of this had anything to do with individualism or the boomers, who were less likely to vote for Reaganomics than other generations back then. Today though, slightly-more than half of all the people in today's older generations have been hoodwinked into supporting this hoax. Millennials alone see through much of the deception, in majority numbers at least, mostly because they are more ethnically-diverse. But they tend to lump all the older generations that created this hoax together, and call them all "Boomers." In fact, in youth, the boomers would have been their allies, as are those boomers today who remain awakened.

And this had little to do with the difference between the goal of full employment versus the goal of curbing inflation. Inflation was caused by government deficit spending on wars, and by the energy crisis. When these abated, thanks to government and corporate collusion with oil oligarchs abroad, inflation eased. Reaganomics curbed union power and reduced wages, and this also reduced inflation. But the main effect of Reaganomics was to create inequality by reducing taxes on the rich, keeping wages low, and allowing business deregulation. The latter was the chief reason for the crash of 2008, as well as the climate crisis. 

And the only "individuals" who benefit from neo-liberal policy are the wealthy few who own corporations and big businesses and who speculate in the finance market, and these are hardly "individualists." Far from it; they are the worst sort of conformists. Real individualists do not say "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." These are as far removed from the hippies of Haight Ashbury as you can find.

So what happened after 1980 was the opposite of what the Boomer youth wanted in the 2T. Boomers supported government programs to help the poor, and supported McGovern who wanted more of them. Neo-liberalism, by contrast, is mainly a GI-gen and Silent-gen creation. Reagan was always the arch-enemy of Boomer individualism, going back to his days of suppressing it as governor of California.

As for right-wing "populism," that is just another fraud. Real populism is the people rising up to take back power from the tyrants. Populism does not mean the ignorant rabble rising up to take power. But that's what populism means if it is used to describe Trump and other right-wing movements today. There is little difference between Trumpism and all the other right-wing movements that have developed since the Awakening began in 1964. Neo-liberalism remains at the heart of it. Trump has just made its covert racism and nationalism overt. That's the only difference. Refugees and immigrants have stoked this difference, much as I predicted, due to the climate change and civil wars of today.

That is what is really happening. Today many people are easily confused by accepted ideology, and need to take a closer look.