Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

Here we go:

For those who despair of the offensive, catastrophic Presidency of Donald Trump, this gives hope. 

https://medium.com/@mishaley/how-history...04e6ac19bd

I see Donald Trump as Jimmy Carter without the intelligence, integrity, moral compass, and personal decency: without those, Jimmy Carter would have been an unspeakable nightmare as President. 




Maybe it is not comfortable to compare Barack Obama to Richard Nixon; if anything I would more likely compare him to Dwight Eisenhower for being similar in temperament and style and having squeaky-clean administrations. Obama proves to have been more of a hawk than Eisenhower -- then again, Osama bin Laden was still an infant when "the torch has been passed to a new generation". It could be the difference between a Civic type who thought wrongly that he could get away with almost anything (Nixon) as long as he got the desired results and a mature Reactive (Obama) who knew that he could get away with practically nothing -- as House and in turn Senate majorities for the other, increasingly-authoritarian Party made clear. That is a generational difference.  

Going back to the establishment of the Constitutional union:




The Founding era may be unclear, but it is safe to say that 

(1) each political era ranges from 32 to 48 years
(2) of them make a generational cycle out of Howe and Strauss
(3) each political era begins with either great promise (Awakening era) or great threat (Crisis era)
(4) the last leader of the era is a tired or pathological expression of what started the era.  

So Washington establishes the norms of the Republic and John Quincy Adams is as far as it can go before a populist, Jacksonian era that never tolerates a meaningful challenge to the cancer of chattel slavery. Jackson was a colorful populist and James Buchanan tried to keep the Republic from (imploding? exploding?) by appeasing the slave interests (Hey, Northerners -- you can keep your liberal ideas, but you must enforce the reality of slavery by arresting fugitive slaves!) Lincoln won the Civil War and restored the Union by treating the defeated South in as kindly a way as possible; the industrial basis that gave the North a compelling edge in the Civil War fostered the rise of Gilded Age plutocrats who fostered economic and technological progress that those plutocrats arrogated for themselves in a winner-take-all system. By the time of Teddy Roosevelt, America needed to drop its social myopia and its tolerance for bad business (child labor, horrible patent medicines, free-for-all for polluters)... and got the change. Had TR not done that, then maybe Taft would. Theodore Roosevelt's modest reforms petered out with the return of politics of the disastrous Harding-Coolidge-Hoover return to a "New Era" best compared to another Gilded Age with a bit more gilding. That Little Gilded Age ended with something commonplace in the Gilded Age -- a speculative boom that led to the very nasty economic meltdown that always ensues. (Paradoxically FDR took much from the Progressive Era and enhanced it, so he may be more a throwback to Theodore Roosevelt than to Woodrow Wilson... but that is practically a quibble.

The oddity about Nixon seemed that he was more a throwback to Teddy Roosevelt in his agenda than to Gilded Age or New Gilded Age politics. Reagan started America in earnest into the neoliberal ethos in which enrichment of economic elites would become the sole economic purpose while deprecation of the intellect (OK, "Bright Boy" Carter couldn't solve everything, so if people want to believe in young-earth creationism, snake-handling, "Flood geology", and a mythological history of America such as that the Founding Fathers were closet Fundamentalists even if the word Fundamentalism did not appear in the lexicon until 1926 and that the Founding Fathers were often best described as Deists) -- fine. If one wanted to be a dolt in the Individualist Era, then such was as much an expression of individualism as was indulging oneself like an aristocrat on executive compensation... or having a huge audio-video collection.

If Dubya seems like a telescoping of the three awful Presidencies of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover into eight years with a costly and inconclusive war thrown in, and Obama seems to have tried to be another FDR... Trump is beyond any question a moral and political disaster. Trump is Ronald Reagan (even down to possible senility) with far more personal cruelty, less regard for legal niceties, more contempt for learning and expertise, and no loyalty except to his own self esteem. Trump has been appeasing some nasty dictators overseas much as Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan appeased the slave-owning planters; I do not see that going well. 

With the exception of McKinley (who came close to being a one-term President, if through assassination instead of electoral defeat), the last Presidents in these cycles are one-term Presidents, Presidents associated with something tired (J Q Adams, Carter), unworkable (Buchanan, Hoover) or corrupt (Trump). Corruption and incompetence on the scale of Donald Trump is rare at the federal level in America; even at the state level it is not good for staying in office. We have no precedent for Trump for his scale of corruption, cruelty, and incompetence. 

Maybe I lack the imagination to see how Trump can redeem himself and establish himself as a pattern for the next forty or so years... but it is now about time for a President who can break some of the objectionable patterns of American life, make life good for more Americans, and create a consensus that completely repudiates what the Individualist Era became -- starting with a flawed, if transformational President and ending with a sick parody of the transformational President of the era. America will want an antithesis of Trump very soon if not already. The generational constellation is ill suited for any maintenance of exploitative individualism of the Trump style.