How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Eric the Green]

(12-07-2016, 08:01 AM)Odin Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 05:56 AM)Tuss Wrote: Where are you from, Remy?

As a European, I largely agree with you and I think it's approximately the European experience. I used to claim the 2T ended in 1977. Nowadays I settle for 1980. So from the viewpoint of the theory it would seem we were ahead of the US. Or maybe it's just that this forum is heavily dominated by lefties who refused to accept the world had changed until Reagan's second term, by which time they were forced to wake up and smell "the Morning in America". For a good part of the early 80's, they instead retreated to their dens, where they made exciting forecasts, trying to persuade each other how Reagan sure enough was soon to drop the bomb. Subconsciously, nuclear Armageddon perhaps appeared more palatable to idealistic Boomers than admitting they could have been wrong about anything.

Reaganism was just as much an expression of the Awakening as the Counterculture, they are the right and left sides of the same beast. Underlying both was rebellion against the technocratic mindset that had developed over the course of the Great Power Saeculum and took full control during the last 4T, the mindset criticized famously by urban planning theorist Jane Jacobs.

Awakening and Counter-Awakening were coincident from the start, as the civil rights movement and the youth culture of The Beatles were accompanied in 1964 by the Goldwater-led right-wing movement that launched the career of Ronald Reagan. I don't see the latter as opposing the "technocratic mindset;" that was on the left and the hippie side. The right-wing was reacting to this as un-American, continuing to believe with GE host Ronald Reagan that "progress was our most important product" and that it was important to keep American growth going at whatever cost to the environmental damage which the hippies and liberals were concerned about, and which was the chief victim of the "technocratic mind set."

There is an aspect of "individualism" in both Awakening ("counter-culture") and Counter-Awakening, but the left and hippie individualism was about lifestyle choices, which also included feminism and gay rights as well as civil rights and psychedelia/new age idealism, while the Counter-awakening staunchly and loudly opposed these ("the moral majority"), thus launching the "culture wars," which became the 3T obsession. "Individualism" in this Counter-awakening was a means of depriving the Awakening of the government support it needed to help its process of liberation. 

This "individualism" was rooted firmly in the previous 3T and earlier times, based on the ideas of self-reliance and laissez faire. There was nothing new in it at all; it was purely and completely reactionary. "Get the government off my back" and "government is the solution, not the problem," they said. This "individualism," which has nothing to do with counter-cultural "do your own thing" lifestyle choices, is still firmly entrenched in political power, as it has been almost continuously since 1980, and still largely motivated by opposition to the Awakening.