04-22-2023, 12:49 PM
If anyone is still paying attention:
Howe-Strauss theory is intended to explain things. It is non-partisan, non-sectarian, and apolitical. It expresses the causal links between demographics, mass behavior, child attitudes that eventually morph onto adult values, mass culture, and economic reality. Part of history is the catching-on of historical trends,and part is their eventual muting. Someone looking at Howe-Strauss theory to assume that Obama or Trump is the inevitable force behind history (like Bannon with Trump) gets it all wrong. Someone who uses it to support the 'inevitability' of proletarian revolution with a Crisis era as the most likely time.
I am tempted to believe that Obama will have a longer-lasting influence upon American history as a conservative force. Yes, Obama is on the cultural Left on feminism and LGBT rights... but both are going mainstream, and nothing becomes so conservative so quickly as revolutionary trends that entrench themselves as obvious. Nothing is inevitable until it happens, and only then do all the preceding trends seem to deny all alternative courses of events.
Howe-Strauss theory is intended to explain things. It is non-partisan, non-sectarian, and apolitical. It expresses the causal links between demographics, mass behavior, child attitudes that eventually morph onto adult values, mass culture, and economic reality. Part of history is the catching-on of historical trends,and part is their eventual muting. Someone looking at Howe-Strauss theory to assume that Obama or Trump is the inevitable force behind history (like Bannon with Trump) gets it all wrong. Someone who uses it to support the 'inevitability' of proletarian revolution with a Crisis era as the most likely time.
I am tempted to believe that Obama will have a longer-lasting influence upon American history as a conservative force. Yes, Obama is on the cultural Left on feminism and LGBT rights... but both are going mainstream, and nothing becomes so conservative so quickly as revolutionary trends that entrench themselves as obvious. Nothing is inevitable until it happens, and only then do all the preceding trends seem to deny all alternative courses of events.
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.