11-18-2016, 03:02 PM
David Kaiser, historian and author, posted a column today in Time.com that is highly relevant to Fourth Turning theory, and how Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon fit into the current crisis epoch: "Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon and the Coming Crisis in American National Life"
http://time.com/4575780/stephen-bannon-f...emailshare
Below are select excerpts:
During the 1990s, two amateur historians, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, developed a new theory of American history in two books...They identified an 80-year cycle in American history, punctuated by great crises that destroyed an old order and created a new one.
Though their theory is not widely taught in colleges or discussed in the media, Strauss and Howe may well play a major role in Donald Trump's administration. Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who has been appointed Trump's chief strategist in the White House, is very familiar with Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis, and has been thinking about how to use it to achieve particular goals for quite a while. I know this because Bannon interviewed both Neil Howe and myself in 2009 while he was making a documentary film about the ongoing financial crisis. The film, called Generation Zero, discussed those ideas in some detail...
Strauss and Howe's major prediction has now obviously come true: Few would deny that the U.S. has been in a serious political crisis for some time, marked by intense partisan division, a very severe recession, war abroad and, above all, a breakdown in the ties between the country and its political establishment...
The power of Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis comes from its lack of a specific ideology. My own interpretation of it is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place. To use the most striking example, both the United States and Germany were in the midst of a terrible economic and political crisis in 1933. The United States turned to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; Germany turned to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism.
In 2009, when Bannon and I met, I [had] hoped that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress would use the economic crisis of our own age to revive the values of the New Deal. Bannon obviously had other ideas about where the crisis would lead.
As it turned out Obama failed to embark on a New Deal. He evidently believed that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with our system and that it could be fixed with only marginal adjustments. Late in his term, he told David Remnick of the New Yorker that presidents could not, in fact, remake American society, and that that was a good thing. That differentiated him from Lincoln and FDR--and also from today's Republican Party.
Since at least 2000, in my opinion, the Republican Party has managed to seize and generally keep the initiative during our current crisis precisely because it is the revolutionary party of change, while the Democrats are essentially the party of the status quo...
Trump, Bannon and the rest of the Trump campaign have already managed to destroy the old political order...
What will they do? Their rhetoric and personalities, viewed in the context of Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis, suggest they will not be bound by existing precedents and that they will rely on their own view of the heroes and villains of our time.
Generation Zero slanted the story of the economic crisis rather cleverly. On the one hand, plenty of contributors pointed out that greed and shoddy banking practices had brought about the economic collapse, but the ultimate blame is placed on liberals, bureaucrats and established politicians. And just as Republican politicians and commentators have done for the last seven years, many of the contributors--speaking at the dawn of the Obama administration--pictured a horrible fate under Barack Obama, featuring economic catastrophe and attempts to impose socialism.
This, however, is one of the terrible things about crisis periods: many people will believe almost anything. The United States faces a terrible crisis right now even though our economy is much improved from eight years ago and we are not involved in a large war. And the Republican Party and Donald Trump are poised to take advantage of it. In my opinion, Trump, Bannon...and the rest will use their opportunity during the next year or two to undo as much of the Democratic legacy as they can--not only the Obama legacy, but that of FDR and LBJ as well.
Meanwhile, however, two other dangers lurk--one of then embodied in my most vivid memory of my own encounter with Bannon...
Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking flourish during crisis periods. This represents perhaps the biggest danger of the Trump presidency, and one that will bear watching from all concerned citizens in the months and years ahead.
An editorial comment of my own:
I disagree somewhat with Kaiser that the Trump campaign has already "managed to destroy the old political order." Neoliberalism, the latest and most pernicious mutation of capitalism, is the old political/economic order that still holds sway in America and, indeed, in much of the developed world. Neoliberalism is broken, of that I have no doubt. But it still clings desperately to life and could, in fact, enjoy one supercharged last gasp in a Trump administration.
I agree with Chris Hedges that we are in an interregnum, which Antonio Gramsci defined in his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Cornel West believes that neoliberalism has already given way to neo-fascism with the triumph of Donald Trump. I'm not yet ready to concede that point, though, as Kaiser suggests in his conclusion, the Trump presidency bears close watching.
http://time.com/4575780/stephen-bannon-f...emailshare
Below are select excerpts:
During the 1990s, two amateur historians, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, developed a new theory of American history in two books...They identified an 80-year cycle in American history, punctuated by great crises that destroyed an old order and created a new one.
Though their theory is not widely taught in colleges or discussed in the media, Strauss and Howe may well play a major role in Donald Trump's administration. Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who has been appointed Trump's chief strategist in the White House, is very familiar with Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis, and has been thinking about how to use it to achieve particular goals for quite a while. I know this because Bannon interviewed both Neil Howe and myself in 2009 while he was making a documentary film about the ongoing financial crisis. The film, called Generation Zero, discussed those ideas in some detail...
Strauss and Howe's major prediction has now obviously come true: Few would deny that the U.S. has been in a serious political crisis for some time, marked by intense partisan division, a very severe recession, war abroad and, above all, a breakdown in the ties between the country and its political establishment...
The power of Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis comes from its lack of a specific ideology. My own interpretation of it is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place. To use the most striking example, both the United States and Germany were in the midst of a terrible economic and political crisis in 1933. The United States turned to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; Germany turned to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism.
In 2009, when Bannon and I met, I [had] hoped that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress would use the economic crisis of our own age to revive the values of the New Deal. Bannon obviously had other ideas about where the crisis would lead.
As it turned out Obama failed to embark on a New Deal. He evidently believed that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with our system and that it could be fixed with only marginal adjustments. Late in his term, he told David Remnick of the New Yorker that presidents could not, in fact, remake American society, and that that was a good thing. That differentiated him from Lincoln and FDR--and also from today's Republican Party.
Since at least 2000, in my opinion, the Republican Party has managed to seize and generally keep the initiative during our current crisis precisely because it is the revolutionary party of change, while the Democrats are essentially the party of the status quo...
Trump, Bannon and the rest of the Trump campaign have already managed to destroy the old political order...
What will they do? Their rhetoric and personalities, viewed in the context of Strauss and Howe's theory of crisis, suggest they will not be bound by existing precedents and that they will rely on their own view of the heroes and villains of our time.
Generation Zero slanted the story of the economic crisis rather cleverly. On the one hand, plenty of contributors pointed out that greed and shoddy banking practices had brought about the economic collapse, but the ultimate blame is placed on liberals, bureaucrats and established politicians. And just as Republican politicians and commentators have done for the last seven years, many of the contributors--speaking at the dawn of the Obama administration--pictured a horrible fate under Barack Obama, featuring economic catastrophe and attempts to impose socialism.
This, however, is one of the terrible things about crisis periods: many people will believe almost anything. The United States faces a terrible crisis right now even though our economy is much improved from eight years ago and we are not involved in a large war. And the Republican Party and Donald Trump are poised to take advantage of it. In my opinion, Trump, Bannon...and the rest will use their opportunity during the next year or two to undo as much of the Democratic legacy as they can--not only the Obama legacy, but that of FDR and LBJ as well.
Meanwhile, however, two other dangers lurk--one of then embodied in my most vivid memory of my own encounter with Bannon...
Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking flourish during crisis periods. This represents perhaps the biggest danger of the Trump presidency, and one that will bear watching from all concerned citizens in the months and years ahead.
An editorial comment of my own:
I disagree somewhat with Kaiser that the Trump campaign has already "managed to destroy the old political order." Neoliberalism, the latest and most pernicious mutation of capitalism, is the old political/economic order that still holds sway in America and, indeed, in much of the developed world. Neoliberalism is broken, of that I have no doubt. But it still clings desperately to life and could, in fact, enjoy one supercharged last gasp in a Trump administration.
I agree with Chris Hedges that we are in an interregnum, which Antonio Gramsci defined in his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Cornel West believes that neoliberalism has already given way to neo-fascism with the triumph of Donald Trump. I'm not yet ready to concede that point, though, as Kaiser suggests in his conclusion, the Trump presidency bears close watching.