Was 911 & the Cultural Aftermath/Change in National Mood Part of This Crisis Period?

[pbrower2a]

(11-20-2018, 06:45 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: My answer to the OP question is NO.

The crisis is about democratic globalism having lost the hearts and minds of Western nations. Then two competitors arose to fight for its place: Obama-style progressivism and Trump-style identitarianism. It has nothing to do with 9/11 and the war on terror. It has a lot to do with the Lehman Brothers crash, followed by the euro-zone debt crisis. 2008 is the best date to start the 4T, but one could argue the civil war which broke out in Iraq in 2006 was a foretaste of the crisis (from the Western perspective, from the Iraqi perspective it was perhaps beginning of 3T chaos, while the rest of the Arab world had to wait until 2013 or so to see it). Neoconservatism became wildly unpopular in that year, and since military intervention is an important aspect of pro-market globalism. The war was not hugely unpopular in 2003-5 (outside intellectual circles), but after the civil war started, people started to agree with the anti-war types. Also, 2006 was the year nativism started to become popular in America, while in Europe it had to wait for the 2010s.

It may be globalism, and it may have republican forms, but it is anything but democratic. The neo-liberal globalism had as its basis the idea that the economy was best run by and that politics were appropriately run by experts -- people of economic success, and not 'losers' like the rest of Humanity. Competition would cheapen everything, especially labor, bit monopolization and vertical integration would foster an economic order in which the Right People got whatever they needed to make things work especially well -- obviously for themselves alone.

Economic inequality creates stresses in its own right, and the more severe the economic inequality the greater the stresses are upon everything, including the economic institutions and the political structure.

A 3T has its portents of trouble, as with the anarchist and Bolshevik crazes circa 1920 and with the Crash of '21. The political system is still strong enough to patch things together., only to foster a speculative bubble that destroys itself. The financial panic at the end of a 3T (as in 1857, 1929, or 2008) is the worst in the lifetime of any but the oldest living persons.



Larger version from Wikipedia

Late-3T leadership is typically weak and permissive, and tells people to go ahead and initiate a new era of unprecedented and eternal prosperity based upon low taxes, easy money, and cheap labor. The last 3T leadership can no longer patch things together. As the bubble bursts, institutions, including government, are discredited. Then comes the 4T.