11-30-2020, 01:03 AM
(11-29-2020, 04:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-29-2020, 02:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Let's not forget that the Skowronek cycle is in operation. Donald Trump may not have lost in a landslide, but he did lose. He is the definition of a "disjunctive" President, the Last Hurrah for a political phase at or near the end of its run. Of course one can ascribe his failure as President to his eccentric (to put it as sympathetically as possible) style as a leader, but his neoliberal ideology has begun to lose its appeal to younger adults.
To be sure, except for the Presidential election, 2020 was a status-quo election... but when things are not so bad for electoral canvassing, things could get very bleak for the GOP -- especially when the Democrats come out with new, younger candidates for seats now held by rusty old pols.
The Skowronek cycle was fulfilled. And it went along with the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction as well (a 20-year cycle and about half of the Skowronek Cycle), which usually indicates the fall of the party in power, and indicated for 120 years the death in office of the president elected close to its occurrence. We'll see how long the Republican red-staters and Reaganomics believers can keep up the great walls they have built to hold back the pressures to their power and status from within and from without. Certainly the war against immigrants is over, and the new Sec. of Homeland Security will see to that.
The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction will be about half-way between the outlines of Sagittarius and Capricornus, visible low in the southwest in the early evening for about an hour in the northern middle latitudes.
We have a huge disconnect between the values of the rich-and-powerful approaching the end of their political and economic relevance and the mass of younger, poorer, and often heavily-indebted young adults who get low pay and have the highest real costs of rent and education in American history.
There was no death of a President around 1980, but there was a near miss with an attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan. When that happened I was able to relate a more successful attempt almost 100 years earlier to the day, involving Garfield... and a certifiable nutter as an assassin. The difference in 100 years was that the medical treatment was better and Reagan, who wasn't as obese, was easier to treat. But 100 years ago? William McKinley. Trump has plenty of ways other than assassination in which to meet the Grim Reaper.
Reaganomics succeeded only to the extent that it compelled young people to lower their expectations and apply their college degrees to work in restaurants and stores. That was the heyday of the shopping mall, a heyday that hardly looks possible now. There hasn't been a new shopping mall built since 2006...
The political culture is changing while geriatric leadership lacks a clue. (Maybe Joe Biden is more flexible than most... and it is possible that he is a transition to a new political ethos).
COVID-19 has ravaged much of what many of us thought certain in American economic and political life. I see an analogy in 2020 with 1980 in the winning nominee getting about 51% of the popular vote by offering almost the diametric opposite of what the current President offers or offered, with the loser having a troubled Presidency.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.