The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-21-2022, 08:34 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: There is no shooting war yet, but those who rose up and attacked the Capitol may rise up again. The prediction is that if the Democrats win in 2024 (which is likely to happen only if Biden runs again), then another battle will begin that will take 4 years. It looks like the last battles, whether foreign or domestic, will be in 2029, as until then it will only be scattered attacks here and there that have to be put down. It could end quickly, this 4T, but as I see it that does not mean such a quick end will happen soon as we see things in 2022.

When the big structural problems are resolved, the 4T becomes a 1T. The big structural problem for now is that the current GOP has gone from tentative, kitten-like steps down the fascist road to tiger-like leaps. 

Unusual events mark a 4T -- and the final events are often just as weird, whether the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or Adolf Hitler offing himself in a fetid cellar. Consensus marks the beginning of the 1T (it will not be any Age of Aquarius!) One part of the consensus is that most of those on the losing side realize that they were wrong. Whether that happens on November 8 of this year or in the 2024 general election, and it looks as if electoral politics is likely to be the measure this time in America, matters little. 2028? If that means another Trump-like figure, then we are in for another wave of political crisis with perhaps the institution of an authoritarian state and vicious deeds by its leadership.      

Quote:Before the 4T ends, the changes will need to be made that establish a new society, if we are to have a good 1T. This has been the pattern in past 4Ts near the end. Once a 1T begins, changes cannot be made, except perhaps in a defeated country. Some of these changes may happen as early as 2025 this time, IF Biden wins, but this time they will elicit further resistance. The needed changes must be made to enter a renewable energy economy. Neoliberalism must end so that companies can be regulated. Raising taxes on the wealthy must be possible again. Democracy must be reformed and civil rights protected, and substantial reforms are still needed in these areas. I don't know if further gun control can be enacted or not, but the militias must be disbanded.

All true! A 1T is a time of economic and technological transitions more than of culture. I can imagine a sort of Era of Good Feeling in which Americans recognize that Obama-style political practice is far safer and more satisfying than any alternative. We will be far safer if Donald Trump goes from an object of fear and disgust to something easily mocked. 

We will need pervasive changes in land use just for economic reasons. The quarter-acre lots for single-family housing will need to go if housing is not to be pushed into the zone of astronomical rents for others. Those who have an economic stake in the system have a responsibility to make their contributions to protect the system and to feed the goose that lays the golden eggs. We need a tax code friendly to small business as opposed to shareholders and executives of giant, monopolized corporations. We need to scrap "too big to fail" in favor of the attitude "too corrupt or incompetent to survive". The demise of retail giants such as Sears, K-Mart, and Bon Ton demonstrate the appropriateness of smaller, more community-based small business in retail. The demise of such chain restaurants as Bennigan's, Big Boy, and Perkins'  creates openings for mom-and-pop restaurants that have less bureaucratic toadying.  

Quote:Until and unless these changes are made, the saeculum as we know it will end. The only thing that will follow will be continual decline. There will be no set time when a 4T can be designated 80 years or so from now; it will be one continuous 4T from 2029 onward, like in Russia from one great war to the next, but there will be no end, unless a rapid recovery happens in Europe or elsewhere, perhaps in 2029, and the USA is conquered and rescued by them. As I see it, this too can only happen at the end of a 4T and extending into the early 1T years, as in post war Europe and Japan in the 1940s or Reconstruction in the late 1860s.

It would be a repressive and freakishly-stale (if less violent) 1T, a suppressed 2T that fails to shake assumptions, and a particularly-depraved 3T. That is one way that a Saeculum can work, and if that is the next one for America it might be a death spiral with America becoming an Evil Empire intent on destroying what freedom exists elsewhere. That could be a near-inverse of World War II in which America is partitioned or at least occupied by recently-hostile powers instead of what happened to Germany, Italy, and Japan after WWII. That could be the "Republic of Gilead", a "Union of Christian and Corporate States", or a Christian-fundamentalist version of Iran.

Bad polities may repress changes that might moderate or improve things, but all that they preserve is the rot that typically bring down the System. That is the warning of Arnold Toynbee.     

Quote:Because global warming is already so baked in, further climate crisis events are inevitable through the 21st century, but the issue is whether tipping points will be crossed that make hothouse Earth inevitable. If the tipping points are averted, which must happen in the 2020s, then we will muddle through in a new saeculum. Adaptations will be made. Further changes will be made during the Awakening in the late 2040s and 2050s. The nature of the next 4T, in that case, will NOT be climate and weather related, but something else.

Some effects, mostly bad, are to be expected. I have seen projections for Europe, where summers will get much hotter and droughts will become more pervasive and normal. The Sahara is on the brink of colonizing Spain, and most of southeastern Europe (basically Hungary and lowlands of Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and southern Ukraine) are likely to become too dry for wheat production. Wheat requires less rainfall than any other grain crop, and those countries rely heavily upon grain production for their economies... and many countries rely upon wheat from these countries to feed their populations. Tropical diseases are likely to appear in lower-middle and middle latitudes, as shown with West Nile Fever appearing in Michigan.     

Quote:I know the peak in the stock market was on Sept.3, 1929, and a peak in this may have been in 2007, but the substantial crash did not happen until Sept. 2008 which only then developed into the Great Recession.

The Stock Market meltdown of September 1929 itself was merely a correction. Life went on, and people who had stupidly invested in 'easy money' got burned. Real prosperity comes from everything but 'easy money' investments, such as industrial commitments to job-creating plant and equipment, acquisition of specialized education and training such as medical school, creation of intellectual property, or the establishment of small business. 

The real crash, which gutted the value of existing assets from before the speculative frenzy, began in 1930 after the so-called "suckers' rally" in which people saw bargains in the stock market and snarfed them up. Then, and only then, did unemployment soar as a recession began and worsened into a full-blown depression. That is when solid investments during the saner part of the 1920's "New Era" boom lost their value. Things started to go back to normal immediately after the 1929 Crash -- but not after the real crash of 1930.

A minor insight -- why do so many market crashes happen in September and October? Investments in the stock market are largely by rich people who, as befits their class, typically send their kids to expensive colleges and boarding schools and withdraw money for that purpose typically in September. Middle-income people do not do that.