Thoughts On Where We Are, and Where We're Going

[David Horn]

(09-11-2018, 01:29 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A regeneracy is a united county pushing new and militant values.  Fourth Turnings are generally marked by a Pearl Harbor, a Fort  Sumter, a Lexington Green.  I do not anticipate similar all out violence to resolve the red - blue culture difference.  Second Turnings are not violent, but are marked by an extremely emotional moment associated with new values.  I am not seeing an escalation in the Spiral of Violence.  I am especially not seeing the country united, and not even Trump's blatant failure will make the red base abandon their values.  Not yet.  If an extreme blue partisan tried to lead without incorporating the middle of the country, he would still flip the see saw, pass power back to the reds.

We need fanatics.  We need progressives committed to the new values early.  We need people like Thomas Paine or the abolitionists.  There ought to be people expressing ideas ahead of the idea's acceptance.  There are.

But a S&H theorist has to keep hold of the evidence.  Regeneracy has not happened yet, nor are we heading in that direction.  The country is not united behind new values.  We seem to be heading towards a war of ideas, not a literal war.  We are certainly not in an actual war.

You should not let your fanaticism blind you to reality, make a joke out of the theory's view of history.

There is one solution that doesn't require a dominant view of where we need to go: a schism.  I doubt it will happen formally, but functionally, it already has.  It's hard to see how that may be implemented without a fracturing of the nation, but we really are, and have been since the beginning, two separate nations.  The two value structures are simply incompatible in their current form, and no one seems to have a guide-on that will lead us to a workable solution other than going our separate ways.