I'm a sceptic that the 4th Turning started in 2008

[RadianMay]

(08-03-2020, 06:57 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Bob Butler 54I did call trigger on COVID 19 fairly early.  A big part of red ethics was small government, low taxes, ignore the science and ignore all problems. 
But its not. That's just their schtick. When in power they are all for big government employed for conservative purposes. They haven't held those values for 40 years.

Quote:It was fairly clear early that you could not get past the COVID 19 problem that way.  I figured this would be obvious.  The reds could have made an exception out of the virus and kept their values more or less intact.

The red values are perfectly intact. They are not acting on COVID for two reasons. First, because it seemed to be a blue state problem:


Here the "Hot Zone" is NY, NJ, CT, MA, MI, PA, IL. They are all blue in this election (check the polls). Note the different scales. The deaths were overwhelmingly happening in blue states. It seemed to made sense to let the Covid alone to destroy the Blue state governors. Have you seen the Vanity Fair article?

Second is because over and over again we have been told how it is people of color who are dying disproportionately. This is not seen as a party based, in part, on white identity politics.   So they values are completely intact.

[quote[ Now was Black Thursday a trigger?

It was not allowed to be.

Quote:It brought alive the perception that the combination of democracy and capitalism had failed. [/
Capitalism already failed years ago:

It's dead, but it keeps on going, like a zombie.

Quote: The Communists were waiting in the wings.  If the New Deal had failed, a revolution was the next step.

You don't know that. There is no evidence for it. We had an honest-to-god revolutionary moment in this country right after WW II. So did a number of Western countries. It was crushed by the state with ease. Nothing like that has happened since and certainly not in the 1930's. The threat if the New Deal failed was more liklely a populist like Huey Long or a Father Coughlin-like figure.

Quote:I deny that Black Thursday was comparable to the housing values collapse.

You are right, it was much less, not even as significant as the 1987 crash.

Quote:Black Thursday eventually made it clear that the old values had failed. The housing bubble collapse did not.

No! What happened AFTER Black Thursday did this, because the authorities ALLOWED it to happen. In 2008 they did not do that, having learned from their experience last time.

Quote:It is important to look at the real world event, and see if it makes the old values implausible.  Only then should you start using the ’T’ word.

Right now the Democrats are doing their damnest to prevent a trigger from happening. Republicans are exerting their old values to prevent taking action that would help Republicans come back to power. Democrats are trying to help them come back to power by trying to pass the Heroes bill.

Republicans say they will never vote for help to the states. Are you predicting right now that Democrats WON'T cave and vote on the skinny Republican bill?

[/quote]

Even some democrat states didn’t handle the initial coronavirus wave well. Just look at New York and Cuomo’s initial response, along with the disaster that followed. Just a bit ago California was in a very bad situation too, and now Texas and Florida too. It really seems no state has taken this thing seriously enough until a sizeable part of their own population starts to suffer. The area that seems to be somewhat out the woods is the mid Atlantic region, but who knows, this could change at any time.

I feel like for turnings, it doesn’t really matter a lot what’s actually happening, but how people perceive what is going on, and how they react to it. The theory cannot predict what will happen, but it attempts to predict how people will react once it happens (I think this was mentioned in the book one way or another). In this way, 1929 was much worse than 2008 or 1987, because that is the event that has made the most cultural impact. We still compare economic downturns to the Great Depression, it’s almost like a benchmark. That shows how deeply it has imprinted on our culture, as predicted for a trigger that started the 4th turning.

You could also think of the international effects of the market crash; it also caused a downturn in the German economy at the time, contributing to the rise of Hitler in 1932, which eventually escalated to WWII. If you follow the chain of cause and effect, it does appear the market crash to be the “black swan” or unpredictable event that triggered the crisis events that followed.

It also doesn’t seem that the Depression was “preventable”, because the economic theory that allowed the authorities in 2008 to prevent a complete meltdown was conceived in response to the Great Depression. The creation of this new economic paradigm (Keynesian) is the indication of a major change in institution characteristic of a 4T.

Thus, I do believe that 2008 is clearly not a trigger on the level of the 1929 Depression. If anything, it brought even less change than the 1970s recession, which brought with it the Modern Monetary Theory. Post 2008 just seemed like business as usual.

The current state of things and the apparent desynchronisation between generational constellation and turnings is really puzzling to me.