How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Tuss]

(12-16-2016, 09:33 AM)Remy Renault 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.

I am Franco-American. Born in raised in the US but live in France now. Anyhow, what makes people think the early eighties were still part of the Awakening? Even the music from 1980-1982 had that typical "eighties" sound to it. Same with a lot of the movies from that time. They felt more 3T than 2T.

Absolutely. The notion that the Awakening didn't end but lasted all they way into the mid 80's is absurd on the face of it.

For instance, they actually attempt to convince themselves that the New Romantic desire to "Go back, go back!" and turn back the clock, and let's eradicate the sixties like it never happened, is somehow expressing the progressive, limitless and know no bounds to "liberation" mindset of the Awakening.
The Synth/New Romantic sound of 1980: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StpPgV7GAYw

It's just like you can picture the hippies dancing around the Native American campfire, right.

One way to explain this weird phenomenon of mislabeling the Turnings might perhaps be that the late 70's/early 80's actually was a very bewildering time for the generation pushing the cultural spooks. The Boom couldn't recognize themselves in this new era - characterized as it was by the tastes and sensibilities of the Jonesers/Xers more than themselves, what seemed a worrying alliance of reaction between the old and the young, if not actual counter revolution. So they were unable to orient themselves within it, couldn't understand it and they didn't like it. It took some time for them to figure out how to exploit the new Zeitgeist for their own purposes, and get back into operation, so to speak. So when we arrive in the mid 80's they finally have come up with a plan to summon the former Maoist village meeting in complete consensus: the full embrace of a lassez faire/privatization dogma as a way of rescuing some cherished aspects of their ideals into the future. In other words, their disgust with order and authority (to be replaced by "values") and the celebration of the "authentic" free wheeling individual. (Maybe someone could express this better?)

And being the prime Narcissistic generation that they are, who want to be in control and credited for coming up with everything and every cultural agenda, they simply set about to eradicate the early 80's, its mentality and aesthetics, as just too troublesome to fit into a preferred world view. Thus we suddenly have this weird idea that the early 80's belonged to some kind of "Counter-Awakening", yet part and parcel of (their) Grand Awakening, still.

And they, of course, inaugurated this new Turning as having begun in 1984. (A year which was absolutely the same as 1983 and 1985, and not distinguished by anything in particular.)

While every objective criterium points in the opposite direction...

By the way, the early 80's in the eyes of an Xer wasn't necessarily commited to Neoliberalism. If Xers had been older and mature enough to commit themselves to an elaborate system of thought, chances are it would have gone in a more "realistic", anti-utopian and actual conservative direction.