Trump, Bannon and the Coming Crisis

[anandrajan]

(11-24-2016, 08:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-23-2016, 08:25 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-23-2016, 07:09 PM)anandrajan Wrote: I just joined this forum after reaching it via googling for Kaiser, Bannon and the 4T. Apologies if this has all been hashed out before, but Kaiser's article in Time indicates that he thinks Bannon wants to engineer a horrible crisis because that's what he expects in the 4T. I watched Bannon's Generation Zero and a talk by him and based on these, I'd expect him to engineer a financial world war of some kind. Has this already been discussed?

By the Strauss & Howe Generational theory, a crisis is unavoidable, and in fact we are in the beginning or middle stages of it.  Strauss & Howe do not insist that all crises involved major wars, but the three they cover in their seminal book Generations all involved major wars - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII.

To the extent Bannon believes this theory, and it seems he does, he will not be engineering any kind of war.  The war will happen on its own.  Bannon may try to shape the crisis so the war is less destructive to America.

Note that some related theorists believe that the coming war will necessarily be nuclear, and involve the expenditure of all nuclear weapons on all sides.  Compared to that, a financial world war would be rather less destructive.

The bleak scenario is that the Right gets its way permanently, implodes in some aggressive war that goes badly, or falls to an equally-intolerant Leftist (Marxist-Leninist) regime as the result of a Socialist insurrection. The brighter one is "one and done" with Donald Trump as Americans choose to be rid of authoritarians who have nothing to offer but toil and fear. A 240-year history of democracy will not go down easily, especially when many Americans know how to contest irresponsible rule (the Civil Rights struggle of Southern blacks). This time there will be more people, more places, and more issues -- and a government likely as clueless as the likes of Bull Connor in an earlier time. The Hard Right cannot expect the military and police to obey orders to fire into peaceful protesters; not even Ceausescu or Marcos could pull that off.

My concern is that we take the cyclic aspect of Strauss and Howe too literally and act as enablers during the crisis period. After all, awareness of 4T can help forestall or diminish its impact if we collectively act to inform people of Bannon's crackpot apocalyptic views. After looking at a lot of posts here, it's easy to see that this forum is unique in that (i) it has a dark view of the next decade or so but (ii) sees a light at the end of the tunnel by 2030. Given this predictive vision, we could collectively be a composite Hari Seldon (from Asimov's Foundation series) and diminish the crisis and its length. All it would take is to (i) inform everyone of Bannon's apocalyptic craziness, (ii) talk to white nationalists if possible and explain the clear cut vision of the next 1T and (iii) reach high profile Trump supporters like Scott Adams (Dilbert) via twitter etc. and explain how the Trump presidency is likely to go off the rails (global financial crisis, actual WW III etc.).