Quote:A crisis addresses the most basic problems the people perceive needing to be fixed.
Does it? The problem most Republicans perceived in 1860 was preventing the spread of slavery, not freeing the slaves and most certainly NOT political equality with black people. And yet that turned out to be what it was about.
Quote:Notably, you are correctly concerned about the division of wealth, but is that at the center of any of the current crisis issues? I don’t, alas, see it. Thus, it is not apt to be addressed.
It is central, as it is for all secular cycle crises (which include 5 of the last 6 4Ts). In each secular cycle rising inequality creates an enlarged elite increasingly in competition and eventually in conflict with each other. Eventually they duke it out, the losing side suffers a loss in position, reducing total elite numbers and inequality, allowing the cycle to begin anew.
For example emancipation stripped Southern elites of wealth equal to 1.7 times Southern GDP (that’s along the lines of the losses American elites would suffer if we had a Socialist revolution—can you see why they saw no choice but fight the war?). They ceased to be elites. The slaves went from being property to free men, a HUGE equality increase. Problem solved.
Quote:There is also a difference between a catalyst and a trigger. The typical crisis will have several catalyst illuminating the primary issues. There is generally only one trigger, something which makes the following regeneracy inevitable, which gives the weight of resolve to the progressive faction. Last time around, I could argue for two triggers, the stock market crash and Pearl Harbor, but generally there is one.{/quote}
Trigger is the term often used in the T4T discussion site to refer to the catalyst. They mean the same thing, or at least I used the word in that sense.
Quote:When the people have solved what they care about, I anticipate they will shift to a high mentality.
You are assuming the people know what they want solved. Do you REALLY think the BLM movement is about police killing of black men per se? That is simply the triggering event. The immediate underlying issue is the experience ordinary black men have in numerous interactions with police. These interactions are signals of disrespect. But behind that disrespect is the lack of progress working class black men have made in the fifty years since the Civil Rights bills: Real incomes are no higher, and the fraction of black men aged 20-29 in prison relative to white men is unchanged from 1970.
Now I will note that during the time when the New Deal economic paradigm was in force, black men saw their wages relative to white men rise from 40% in 1940 to 75% in 1980. Since then, no progress. There HAS been progress for working class black women--just not the men. and this shows up in the incarceration rates for black men and the disrespect they experience in interactions with police.
If you think that the problems perceived by the BLM movement, by the Occupy movement, by the Poor People’s Campaign etc. can be solved without taking on the excess elites and the inequality that breeds them, you are in for a rude awakening.