How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Mikebert]

(12-22-2016, 02:10 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: You're absolutely right, and for all of those reasons I would be suspicious if the 4T were almost over.  It's why I don't and have never bought into the 2001 start date for the 4T.  But, and I am at work and don't have my book with me to quote from, if we take 2008 as the start date, we haven't departed from the script as laid out in T4T.  There was an initial catalyst leading to an abrupt change in mood.  This didn't spiral immediately out of control, but was papered over, even as both parties quarreled over how to fix it.  Mass protests and disturbances increased (Occupy, Tea Party, BLM, the whole pro/anti Trump extravaganza, etc.), and the political factions battled over where authority resided and how (and on whose behalf) power should be exercised, disrupting longstanding norms in the process (filibuster, Supreme Court nominations, government shutdowns, an admitedly half-assed attempt at the Electoral College).  This culminated in the past election, which saw the Republicans seize control of the White House, both houses of Congress, the majority of most state governments (legislatures and governments both), handing the Republicans the most power since before the Great Depression, under the banner of the most outsiderish and outlandish president in recent memory (if not of all time).  An administration, I might add, led by the oldest first-term president ever and a cabinet heavily comprised of Boomers, rather than Xers.  The Democrats are flailing, leaderless, with majority of the most prominent figures in their late 60s and 70s.  All that has to happen now is a strong internal focus, maybe the long awaited Great Devaluation, coupled with a newly martial spirit in favor of declared national interests, and we are on track to finish the 4T in the mid 2020s in textbook fashion.  How exactly are we off script?

Let's go back to an analogy you used once, that I always rather admired, and build from there.  Let's say, in an alternate timeline, that the 1929 stock market crash happened a year earlier, in 1928.  Al Smith gets elected President of a country that still had a strong anti-Catholic slant.  The Federal Reserve was not quite as committed to draining liquidity from the system, Al Smith implements his moderate reforms, and the country limps on, riven by the conflict between an unreconstructed Republican party rallying the booboisie against a "crypto-Communist" Catholic.  Overseas, things are pretty bad, although they never quite bottomed out as much and Germany ends up under the influence of some right-wing Prussian type whose not quite as batshit crazy as Hitler.  1936 rolls around, and after a bitterly contested election, the presidency falls to the mutant hybrid lovechild of Wendell Willkie and Huey Long.  War with Japan is still brewing, but maybe tensions with the more moderate fascists in Europe are lessened, and communism remains more threatening.  Failed 4T, or just a slightly different permutation of the same?

Why do you think 2008 is the start?  Clinton did stuff that was all later reversed. It's like he never existed.  The incoming Republicans are promising to undo everything Obama did. If they do that Obama will be just another Clinton, and will have accomplished nothing.  A failed president.  Do you see Bush II as anything other than a failed president?  Even Republicans see Bush I as a failure.  So that is four failures in a row. Four presidents who will become nonentities like Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, William Taft, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. 

Never before has a 4T feature a string of forgettable presidents. Washington, Lincoln and FDR were not forgettable nonentities.  They did stuff that was continued on after they were gone and as a result have come to be seen as great.  Obama did not do that.  So unless Trump becomes another one of the greats, making Obama a Buchanan/Hoover figure, Obama will become just another 3T nonentity and that makes 2008 questionable.