Well, I'm back

[pbrower2a]

(01-23-2018, 11:51 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-22-2018, 11:05 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: ... But if boom times impel the Republicans to stay in power, and rule over times that become relaxed and complacent with the national divide just fading away into a new and successful gilded age, then I think the cycle of the saeculum has ended. The 4T would have been a brief dud in 2008-2010. There is no 1T without a 4T; there would be no way to characterize such a prospect within the saeculum paradigm. The pattern would simply not hold. But all the cosmic signs and the demographics militate against this happening. The cosmic signs may not always be easy to read, but on this point they seem unambiguous. We have severe conflicts ahead in the 2020s, and vigorous new departures for our country-- or what's left of it.

We're entering the second Age following the Industrial.  That alone is enough to change the tenor of things.  But that doesn't mean that we're at the end of history, merely shifting to a new paradigm.  We still have issues that need to be solved, and some are moving to the critical stage.  The real question: do they get resolved in this 4T period or merely delayed until the next 2T or longer?  Intellectually, I'm open to either, but emotionally I'd prefer seeing the issues resolved sooner than later.  

I don't always get my wish.

This is a new era, and for all its promise of ease and prosperity it will force some uncomfortable change. Capitalism saved itself from proletarian revolution by turning what Karl Marx saw as a sweated degraded proletariat into a consumer market for industrial output. Such was possible so long as the consumer goodies were precious and thus profitable to manufacture and sell. What Marx saw as exploitation in his day (workers toiling to exhaustion under brutal management for bare existence while the capitalists took everything else) morphed into corporate profits from employers making their net profits off the sale of a larger volume of industrial productivity. Workers could afford such things as radios, cars, new clothes, furniture, and refrigerators, but capitalists would make their profits off the sale of such things. So that workers could enjoy such things they would have to work fewer hours, and the higher productivity from such measures as electrification of production lines in the 1920s would make possible the 40-hour workweek in industry.

But the new economic order that came into existence in the 1930s in the democracies followed the  worst economic meltdown in the last century. Capitalism could save itself either with the brutal nightmare of fascism or by humanizing itself. The capitalist societies that made the opposite choices generally ended up at war with each other, and the capitalist powers that chose to humanize themselves survived the apocalypse of the Crisis of 1940. The Marxist prophecy of a proletarian revolution never materialized, unless you want to call the Soviet takeovers of central and Balkan Europe 'revolutions'.

We are now almost eighty years away from the Crisis of 1940, and the generational cycle has generational archetypes aligned much as they were around 1935. The Progressive generation may have been largely gone from influence in the 1930s because lifespans were not as long then as now, but even now anyone living into his eighties is living on borrowed time. We may see some prominent Silent today, but those are the last of their generation and they are approaching the end of the line. Some Boomers are still young enough for a final act in their lives, but they will have at most one act before being discredited or being forced to retire for reasons of health, mental (including senility) and physical  (the usual cancer, heart disease and other organic failure, and strokes).  To be sure, the elderly have been extending their lifespans through good habits (weight control, staying physically and mentally active, and staying connected) as GIs taught by example. But barring some unforeseen miracles in medicine, even that shows its limits. So far there are only so many times that the genes can replicate, after which time it is all over.

So we find ourselves in a time in which people consider their fanaticism rational and normal, in which ruthlessness becomes the norm in government and corporate bureaucracies, in which people running afoul of the tide of history are in danger of severe mistreatment, talk of apocalyptic evenets as decisive in a chilly manner, and in which just about everyone is scared that the aspects of the world that they have found comforting is at risk, and you almost have the elements of a full-blown Crisis. Almost -- because in America we have yet to see whether the vulgar, fascistic traits of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and of the economic elites delighted in the prospect of absolute plutocracy becoming possible.  Sure, people will get work, but the public sector will be privatized for monopolistic gougers, and managerial elites will faithfully brutalize every workplace possible. If you do not see the threat of torture chambers and exploitative labor camps because "this is America and we are too civilized and sophisticated", then remember that the Germans did not see that coming in their country too.  Even our political language is becoming debased, with elites redefining such a word as 'liberty' to mean that the elites are free to gouge the rest of Humanity so that they can gorge themselves in an aristocratic manner.

Howe and Strauss wrote in Generations of the Crisis of 2020 as a certainty because the generations would be so aligned in or around 2020. They dared not predict what the Crisis of 2020 would be, but they did suggest that it would be messy. It could involve civil or international war, and every institution that people thought that they could take for granted in 1989 would be in gross peril. That includes democratic institutions that the Founding Fathers enshrined in a constitution in the late 1780s, the norm of freedom (at least formal) for all for which the Union Armies ended up fighting for in the Civil War, and the basic decencies of economics for people who weren't born to wealth and privilege as defined in the 1930s and defended against gangster regimes in the early 1940s. These are liberal trends, and at no time in American history have liberal trends been so denied and reversed as in the last year.

Liberals have an advantage: they are the heirs of the likes of Samuel Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They lack the advantage of institutional control, as (perhaps Jewish wealthy families excepted for cultural reasons) the economic elites are consummately reactionary; those elites would love a return to what those elites saw as the aspects of the Good Old Days for them, those times when taxes were light, regulation was nearly non-existent (except to enforce sobriety and obedience among the proles and peons), monopoly pricing was the way to make the all-holy profit, and labor was cheap and cowed.  Those elites have a loudmouth vulgarian who fully stands for such as President, and majorities in both the House and Senate dutifully follow the instructions of corporate lobbyists that those elites have deputized to establish government of, by, and for the Master Class. I expect liberals to channel the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and the New Deal. I expect the Master Class and its acolytes to admonish us to obey them cheerfully and without qualification or suffer horrific consequences. Remember: few Germans saw what would happen under Hitler. Trump may not be Hitler, but I can easily see a plutocratic America morphing from the 500-pound gorilla (where does a 500-pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere he wants to) to the 500-pound tiger (what does a 500-pound tiger eat? Any critter that he can catch!) should it go bad.

We are one rigged election away from a civil war. The people defending slavery did not see Lincoln as a legitimate President and may have been unwise to contemplate how he might have ended slavery in America (this is my speculation, but he would have adopted the British model of emancipation that had worked well in the British Empire and would have worked well in America if given a chance).  Liberals might see the consolidation of an undemocratic plutocracy in 2020 as a rejection of everything that they cherish, and legitimately so. The difference? A fascistic America will be utterly inhuman. Torture chambers and abusive prisons merit nothing less than violent resistance. People will soon learn that death is far preferable to some brutal prospects in life. people will die and even kill to protect their loved ones. A phrase such as "Give me liberty or give me death" (Patrick Henry) or "Death to fascism, liberty for the People" (Stjepan Filipović, a Yugoslav partisan commander captured by the fascists and hanged as a rebel), absurd in normal times, can be eminently reasonable in a Crisis. Everything seems to be at stake in a Crisis.

Now for the big question -- will the post-industrial age be one of unprecedented ease and plenty, or will it be one of unprecedented inequality with brutality enforcing it? We may know in another decade. We do not know now.