11-14-2016, 08:05 PM
The working out of the Crisis is simply the most dangerous part of the 4T. This will likely be a time of great civil unrest, economic distress, and even political instability. America has never had a despotic ruler, and it is questionable whether Americans will take well to a leader who imposes great suffering on behalf of economic elites. I see ethnic groups becoming veritable tribes... and regional divisions becoming dangerous. Add to this an unsteady hand in foreign policy, and the international scene can go very bad very fast.
Transformation of America into a social order with plantation-style inequality will not be easy. I would expect terrorism to flourish in a resistance against economic elites. I can imagine kidnappings... and massacres.
This 4T probably ends with an America very different from what Donald Trump wants. It could end in climactic violence that forces Americans to decide whether they want to split into separate communities with a map very different from anything that we now know except for locations of cities and bodies of water. Even the 50-state pattern could become a thing of the past. Names of the sundry successor states are mostly beyond current imagination.
We could see independent city states in seas of rural areas, with areas just beyond the urban fringe being as different from the nearby cities as ... well, choose your analogy. Rural America and urban America are now very different countries.
About all that might be left would be easy travel between the independent political entities and a customs union. That may be all that anyone wants.
The 4T will end when people quit seeking to kill each other over differences. That might not be enough to save America. We could end up with a map of Germany around 1700. Of course there was no Germany except as a linguistic zone.
People will wonder how so impressive a political order as the USA could shatter -- and the explanations will be:
1. People gaming and perverting the political order perhaps even into tyranny.
2. Polarization of America along regional, religious, and ethnic lines.
3. People demanding the subjection of others and those called to subject themselves refusing to do so.
4. Atrocities.
As the political reality stabilizes and violence abates, the 1T will be underway. Population exchanges will supplant massacres. people How things are in an area around Indianapolis could be very different from areas only 40 miles away from the city limits, and much more similar to a city so far away as Seattle. I see no possibility of any homogenization of the rural-urban dispute.
We are not in the climax yet. We aren't even near it, most likely about six years from now.
Transformation of America into a social order with plantation-style inequality will not be easy. I would expect terrorism to flourish in a resistance against economic elites. I can imagine kidnappings... and massacres.
This 4T probably ends with an America very different from what Donald Trump wants. It could end in climactic violence that forces Americans to decide whether they want to split into separate communities with a map very different from anything that we now know except for locations of cities and bodies of water. Even the 50-state pattern could become a thing of the past. Names of the sundry successor states are mostly beyond current imagination.
We could see independent city states in seas of rural areas, with areas just beyond the urban fringe being as different from the nearby cities as ... well, choose your analogy. Rural America and urban America are now very different countries.
About all that might be left would be easy travel between the independent political entities and a customs union. That may be all that anyone wants.
The 4T will end when people quit seeking to kill each other over differences. That might not be enough to save America. We could end up with a map of Germany around 1700. Of course there was no Germany except as a linguistic zone.
People will wonder how so impressive a political order as the USA could shatter -- and the explanations will be:
1. People gaming and perverting the political order perhaps even into tyranny.
2. Polarization of America along regional, religious, and ethnic lines.
3. People demanding the subjection of others and those called to subject themselves refusing to do so.
4. Atrocities.
As the political reality stabilizes and violence abates, the 1T will be underway. Population exchanges will supplant massacres. people How things are in an area around Indianapolis could be very different from areas only 40 miles away from the city limits, and much more similar to a city so far away as Seattle. I see no possibility of any homogenization of the rural-urban dispute.
We are not in the climax yet. We aren't even near it, most likely about six years from now.
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.