Neil Howe: Where did Steve Bannon get his worldview? From my book.

[Eric the Green]

(04-20-2017, 05:05 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-13-2017, 08:40 PM)justpassingthrough Wrote: Hey again. I found this forum with Google, after seeing that the old one seems to have been removed. Judging by the names here, someone obviously set this up to replace it. I ran across some of the stuff in the OP, which is what sent me back here. I can also add a new one:

Neil Howe NPR Interview (04/11/17)

Interesting interview with Howe, mostly about Steve Bannon. The rest of the left-leaning panel generally attacks Howe and his theories (reflexively, given that they now associate them with Bannon), but he defends them as usual.

I wasn't aware of this connection until now. I remember being aware of Generation Zero when it was released, but never knew Bannon was involved in it. So now apparently S&H is in the White House. Howe consulted with Bannon on the movie, and seems to know him fairly well. 

It is clear that Trump's campaign was based on the kinds of currents S&H defined for a 4T.  I had previously thought it started on 9/11, but I'm willing now to accept that maybe it didn't. Howe has been consistent in declaring the 2008 crash as the catalyst of the 4T. I'm still a bit skeptical of the accuracy of the book's specifics, but the general idea has always seemed legitimate.  

I know just about everyone here will still be on the left, and the left is losing its mind after realizing the vice grip they thought they had on society was imaginary. Howe seems to be in their crosshairs now, because Bannon has had a high opinion of the book. Anyone who's paid attention over time knows that Howe is probably a moderate Democrat, who loved Obama and is now vaguely critical about Trump. His familiarity with Bannon might temper that to some degree.

I made a post on the old forum before the election, joking that maybe Trump is the "Orange Champion". Who knows? If these cycles exist, they would never happen if they were predictable enough for people to see them coming.

The thing I don't want to see, and no one does, is a major war. But while S&H's predictions about the nature of 4T culture and government seemed far fetched a few years ago, they now seem possible. Social conservatism combined with economic populism, nationalism, or however you want to define it, which S&H predicted, was the opposite of Obama. Trump has sounded those themes loudly, but with a relatively incremental policy agenda underneath. The left has howled about Trump's immigration policies, but they're nothing compared to what FDR and Lincoln did domestically (Japanese internment, suspending habeus corpus, etc.).

I guess all I have to say after running into this S&H stuff again is that Howe has more evidence now than he did a year ago to substantiate his theory.

Now that I think about it, I was saying a lot of the things that Trump ended up campaigning on years before, going back to 2006, on the previous forum. Especially about immigration and trade policy being organized around the corporate demand for cheap labor. I wonder if Bannon ever read any of that. That said, Trump has had the same views on trade for decades, so I'm not saying I personally influenced it. The real question is, if Bannon ever posted on the old forum, what was his user name?

FWIW, David Kaiser was in Bannon's movie, and took serious exception to what it argued.  Essentially, Bannon is (was?) trying to use the leverage of cyclical history to move the country his way. He latched on to Trump, and Trump latched on to us.  So far, that's all that's happened.  In 2 years, we'll know a lot better just how successful either Trump or Bannon manage to be.  My gut: they will manage to institutionalize ideological gridlock, but not much else.  I expect the Trump era to be a nothing-burger.  Bluster only carries you so far.  On the other hand, if he actually manages to do something, it will eliminated quickly though the damage done may be substantial.  In short, nothing positive and short odds on something bad.

That's right.

Lots of people mis-interpret theories and philosophies of various kinds, and contrary to what that Gen X author (whoever he is) says, it does not matter how scientific or religious or philosophical it is. Just remember what people have done with Darwin, Einstein, Freud; whatever it is, people will mis-interpret it.

I applaud Strauss and Howe for bringing cycle ideas back into a study of history. Of course, I also think astrology, as the premier study of cycles, is worth studying too, and Strauss at least did not. But their theory has made better predictions than any pundit ever did, and helped us understand people and history better than anyone which that Gen X author would define as more-scientific ever has. It is remarkable how often people fit with the S&H archetypes, and how history has repeated or at least rhymed in cycles. Skeptics of cyclic history schemes of course say that they choose "convenient examples." That's what they always say, but if there are enough examples, then it's hard to honestly ignore them. When we can all see how the cycles and generations theory works in real life, it's hard to deny. The fact that we are in an era now that, as they predicted, resembles past crises, and that the younger generation whose traits they predicted in 1991 have turned out to be just as they predicted, is evidence that pundits and skeptics can't match who think events and people are just random.

I think we were better served when authors like Toynbee and Spengler, Hegel and Marx, and Northrup Frye, were more-respected. Today's academic tendency to limit "knowledge" to specific random facts verifiable by empirical investigation, is as limited and dangerous as overly-speculative ideas based on no empirical evidence. Mere random facts give us no compass for understanding life or reality. There's a place for noticing patterns, and for recognizing cycles. You don't need an empirical investigation to tell you that the Sun rises every day, that the seasons change, that life moves through phases, that women menstruate in time with the Moon; and from that to conclude that life moves through cycles. Jung and Plato may not have theories you can put in a test-tube, but the idea that there are archetypes works for many people, and a full understanding of reality is impossible without understanding types of various kinds. As Kant showed, you need concepts as well as percepts to know anything.

The remarkable thing about astrology is how well it jives with the Strauss and Howe theory, even though these authors of The Fourth Turning clearly deny any belief or interest in astrology. So, just by coincidence, is it, that the definition of a saeculum in T4T is exactly the same, to the year, as the meaning of a cycle of Uranus around the Sun given by astrology's leading theorist, Dane Rudhyar, as "the length of a typical human life?" Or that astrologers knew about the 80-plus year return of great crises in American history and its dates long before Strauss and Howe were even born? And yet no Steve Bannon character used this astrological cycle to predict and justify a coming war or the dismantling of the administrative state. Actually, as they admit, Strauss and Howe were not the first to notice this cycle, even though they put it together well for the first time. And perhaps the earlier advocates of this cycle may have known about the astrological cycle, which might have gotten more coverage in earlier times like the 1930s.

Bernie Sanders could use these theories to predict his version of the future, just as easily as Steve Bannon and Donald Trump can use it to predict theirs, if he so chose. And we know that Al Gore was interested in the theory too, and so it's part of the background of his vision of a coming crisis too, which unlike Bannon's, is all too real according to science.