Neither of the current major party candidates is the "Grey Champion".

[Einzige]

(09-14-2016, 12:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-03-2016, 05:09 PM)Einzige Wrote: All I'm proposing is that Trump might pull out a surprise nailbiter, flail around in office for four years and get punted by a True Progressive like a Republican Jimmy Carter. The 2020 election would then be the climax, with everything else a descending action. Vóila, James II/Glorious Revolution analogue.

What is the MOST unlikely element in this scenario is that there could be a "true progressive like a Republican Jimmy Carter."

Besides the fact that Jimmy Carter is not much of a progressive, the idea that such a progressive could be a Republican is much less likely than Trump getting elected president.

You misunderstood me. I was drawing parallels between Trump and Carter.

On the one hand, in terms of their personality, they're worlds apart. Trump of course is a bloviating narcissist, while Carter - or his public persona, at least - is a humble Southern Baptist.

But, politically, there are a Hell of a lot of parallels between them. They're both significantly more moderate on a number of issues than the Party base they represent. And they're both from States that were rapidly trending away from their own Party at the time they were nominated. And Carter, like Trump, butted heads quite often with the activist Congressional wing of his Party. Hell, they both even used their business credentials as political branding, Carter the peanut farmer and Trump the hotelier and real estate mogul.

I'm positing a chain of events that looks something like this:

Clinton I = Eisenhower
Bush II  = Kennedy (his incredibly narrow victory) /Johnson (his increasing "radicalism", foreign adventurism, domestic ills)
Obama = Nixon, sans Watergate; consequently, Clinton II = a Ford who never became President in his own right
Trump = Carter
??? (Elizabeth Warren? Tulsi Gabbard?)  = Reagan

This, roughly, is the model:

Quote: 


The Prophet—The prophet comes to the scene with a completely new ideological approach to a stagnating problem. People attach themselves to the prophet affectively, and his (or her) key strength is communication. The prophet is able to package the ideological and structural changes such that ordinary people can not only understand it (in its own ideological space), but hook into some part of it, become affectively invested in it. The prophet will run over the opposition effectively on issues that would have been taboo even a few years before, largely because people have been primed communicatively for a general social transformation. The prophet will usually become an iconic figure within the ideological boundaries, and within the culture at large. The examples in the recent 30 year cycles are, of course, FDR and Reagan.

The Bureaucrat—The bureaucrat will usually be attached to the Prophet as a calmer and less radical figure, though he will share the ideological worldview of the prophet for the most part. He will be perceived as a less exalted continuation of the prophet, but it is precisely the lack of the affective investment that will sink the bureaucrat in the end. The bureaucrat will be perceived not as a transformational figure, but as a capable manager of a change that’s already taken place. But because he can’t inspire the sort of attachments that the prophet could, he will usually be doomed to a short reign, as the affective energy swings in the other direction. The examples in the recent 30 year cycles are Truman and Bush Senior.

The Interregnum—Because the affective attachments of the prophet waned during the reign of the bureaucrat, it really has nowhere else to go. It swirls around attaching itself to various secondary issues, though the bureaucrat may try to hook it into a war posture. As the reign of the bureaucrat comes to an end, then, you will often see deeply invested social conflicts (McCarthyism, the Culture Wars and L.A. Riots, etc.), as the affective energies once attached to the ideology gets set loose across the social landscape. This will lead to what i call the interregnum: the emergence of the other ideology within the 30 year cycle. In the case of the Roosevelt cycle, we see the emergence of Eisenhower. In the middle of the Reagan cycle, we see the emergence of Clinton. In both cases, the interregnum will be run by a relatively mild version of the second ideology, since the affective energies attached to the prophet have not completely disappeared. Because the interregnum will be relatively mild in terms of social transformation, it will almost always end in a painfully close election, since the distinction between the ideologies will seem less severe, and the middle group of undecideds will be unable to hook into one program or the other: Kennedy/Nixon; Bush/Gore.

The Disaster—As the ruling ideology endured the interregnum, it intensified its polarity as a matter of distinguishing itself from the mildness of the second ideology. When it gets into power after the interregnum, it throws this radicalization wholeheartedly at whatever social problems it perceives. For this reason, the Disaster is an amped up, highly volatile affective era, as we move from relative mildness in the distinction between ideologies to hard core distinction in the development of policy. In the first 30 year cycle, you thus get the rapid changes in civil rights laws and the war on poverty, while in the Bush 2 era you get the most extreme tilting toward neo-liberal economics, far beyond what Reagan could have dreamed of accomplishing. This radicality, moreover, will lead to the kind of social instability that makes war more probable, and pushes the ideology above any connection to reality. It thus leads to disaster for the ideology: the 60’s as the moment when the 30 year Democratic cycle became so radical that it could not sustain itself; the 00’s as the moment when Reaganism collapsed under the pressure of ideological purity.

So, if you’re smart, you should be asking the following: What about Nixon? In my view, Nixon/Ford/Carter were transition figures, placeholders as the electorate waited for a new cycle. The affective attachments of the period are confused, swaying from deep hatred and unmitigated love, to depression, and general ennui. They were, in short, unordered attachments. It’s not a mistake, I think, that the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were thus a period of structural readjustment in the economy and massive technological transformation of the society. The affective attachments, set loose from the mainstream ideologies, sunk themselves into all forms of economic and cultural production, actually collapsing the distinction between economy and culture in the process.

Now, you might be asking: are we in for another period of transition? Certainly, the economic factors would point to a situation nearly parallel to that of 1968: the dominant ideology has sunk the economy into a ideological black hole, perhaps requiring structural readjustment in the same way as the early 1970’s was the economic push of neo-liberalism that was only later cashed out as Reaganism.

I would simply add to this my perspective that there is a fifth full aspect of this cycle, the Transition, consisting of a premature figure who interrupts the majority discourse and prefigures what is to come rhetorically while still being rooted politically in the old system - Nixon/Obama - and a final figure who attempts one last check on the ascending discourse, rooted rhetorically in the old system while politically prefiguring what is to come - Carter and, potentially, Trump. [Ford and, by extension, Clinton are in this view basically superfluous, with Ford doing nothing more than serving as a placeholder for Nixon's final two years in office and a Clinton Presidency not at all necessary to complete the cycle.]

Granted, this cycle did not quite play out in the era prior to Roosevelt, so perhaps I'm reading too much into it. We'll see.