(08-19-2021, 03:03 AM)galaxy Wrote: I'll ramble for a bit...
(08-18-2021, 04:02 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Should the COVID-19 pandemic being declared in March 2020 be considered at least the start of the regeneracy? The big thing I think it's doing even still now is getting everyone to evaluate their lives all around. While we have vaccines and they are working, it seems it's not fast enough to stop the momentum of what changed before the vaccines, like remote working for one. Recent news articles been changing their tune to 'living with COVID' and it overall becoming more of a long-term thing rather than the temporary crisis it was thought to be in its 1st year.
It certainly seems like one to me. 2019 feels more and more like the distant past. From here where we are in August 2021, 2019's society and culture increasingly looks almost more like 2007 than it does the present (though 2008 is still an obvious major shift). In some ways there's a feeling of people having "woken up" or broken out of some kind of holding pattern they were stuck in (trapped either by apathy or by circumstance), the shock of the pandemic having "shaken loose" many of the "stuck" parts of society. A good example of this is the current job situation, where people are now simply refusing to accept low-paying jobs anymore. While the legal minimum wage is still $7.25, the "cultural minimum wage" is now double that or more, a stark contrast to the fast-paced, nose-to-the-grindstone economic culture of 2019.
It's very clear even now that the pandemic has been and continues to be some kind of key turning point, whatever you want to call it. Howe has said that the regeneracy is an era rather than a moment (https://www.lifecourse.com/media/article...12015.html), so perhaps in this 4T the regeneracy coincides with the pandemic.
This, however, raises a new question. I've talked before about my theory that we have just passed the climax last winter and that the end of the turning is likely around 2025, but here's the thing...the regeneracy seems to occur before the climax. So our possibilities are:
1. This is not the regeneracy, however much it may look like one - either the regeneracy has already occurred, or we are near the end of it now, perhaps with the end (and climax) of the regeneracy more-or-less coinciding with the climax of the turning
or
2. The 11/3/20-1/8/21 period (2020 election to peak covid) was not the climax, however much it may have seemed like a climactic "final battle" of the culture wars with each side distilled to a near-caricature of itself
or
3. This 4T is somehow different from others, and the climax is somehow in the middle of the regeneracy, or, the regeneracy coincides with the resolution as a reaction to the climax (the closest thing to this would probably be the Civil War and the nature of the following 1T as being a "recovering" rather than "recovered" era - I have thought for a while that that Crisis may have extended beyond the end of the war, potentially through all of Reconstruction. This comparison can work really well with the interpretation of the current Crisis as being a Cold Civil War).
So let's examine these for a moment. #1 implies that the regeneracy has already occurred, and has either ended or is close to its end. So I see two possibilities for this:
- The regeneracy began gradually, probably setting in during Obama's first term but without a clear defining event*, and continued, gradually intensifying and being pretty intense by 2015, until the pandemic began. The pandemic is simultaneously the climax of the turning and a sort of climax of the regeneracy.
or
- The regeneracy began in 2016 (and we are near its climax now). According to the article I linked, the regeneracy involves "...something dramatic that unifies the country or causes the people to break into separate unified factions." If the 2016 election wasn't that, then I don't know what is. Since 2016, we have seen a huge increase in political involvement and engagement, with 2020 having the highest turnout in over a century, and major changes in the identity, composition, and ideology of the parties. The lines along which political battles are currently fought are very different from the battle lines of the Clinton/Bush/Obama era.
*2010 was also a large jump in political polarization, so perhaps there is a middle ground that can be found between these two possibilities.
The one big point against the idea of a pre-pandemic regeneracy is that the political parties seem to be the only "institutional" or "structural" things regenerated prior to 2021's economic "stimulus" (with as many non-stimulus things as possible packed into it) and pending infrastructure legislation. Even just last year, the postal service was being allowed to fall further into disrepair, through a very 3T-style mixture of neglect and attack on it, during what seemed to be the heart of a 4T.
However, "physical" institutions are only part of the picture. There was a behavioral shift to more 4T-ish patterns that was apparent as early as 2013 and became extremely strong in 2017, and I suppose the regeneracy need not affect all things that need to be regenerated at the same time. Perhaps we're seeing a progression, from partially regenerating behavior, to regenerating politics, to further regeneration of behavior, to regeneration of the physical world (government, institutions, etc).
Possibility #2, I don't even want to talk about. It's terrifying. For five years now, so many of us have been saying "how could it possibly get any worse?" before watching it get worse. I don't know if I can survive another five years of that. Anyway, the essence of it is that we experienced a very long lull since the start of the turning in 2008, and the start of the pandemic** is the spark that has begun the regeneracy, with the climax still to come and potentially years away.
**or the 2016 election, I suppose, doesn't make much difference really
Possibility #3 ties in to my past post about there being two types of 4T. One type ends triumphantly with a strong, confident, "reconstructed" society. The other ends with the national mood being one of relief rather than victory. People say "I'm just so glad that's over" rather than "yeah, we did it!". It is a 4T that was survived rather than defeated, with the work of rebuilding still to be done (which will be done during the 1T, and the 2T will begin once that work has been completed). Perhaps the nature of the regeneracy is different between these two types of 4T, and this current turning only seems unusual with its apparent "mid-regeneracy climax" because we have not seen a "normal-length" 4T of this type since this nation's founding until now (or, as I said above, perhaps the Civil War 4T went on longer than we think...1860 to 1876?)
Excellent analysis. I have known of events that seemed to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, including the 2007-2009 economic meltdown, 9/11, Reagan's "Morning in America", and the consequences of Watergate. COVID-19 looks starker than any of the others. If there is no shooting war, there is the mass death characteristic of one. COVID-19 tests the competence of ideas that have not fully worked themselves out, and it is likely to force demographic changes with political consequences.
Yes, demographics are everything in a political order in which identity is seemingly everything in political life. I wish that quality mattered more in the political choices (that is, votes) that people make. We need better than to vote for those who pander to our identity. 640,000 dead and counting... In my grim reckoning I quit counting off cities at Baltimore because there is a 40,000 gap in population to the next-larger city (Louisville, 29th)... but we COVID-19 deaths in America surpassed Memphis and Detroit for certain and most likely has surpassed Las Vegas (642,000 according to the 2020 Census (I was using the 2019 estimates until recently). COVID-19 has killed more people than live in the city that put America into the automobile, the 27th-largest city in the USA. Sure, Detroit is a dump, but do you know what is even worse of a dump than Detroit?
Any mind that denies or trivializes the dangers of COVID-19, especially for some sick political agenda!
Sorry about the rant.
The Trump cult isn't going away quickly, but if we have a genuine Regeneracy, then such will make his cult completely irrelevant. I look forward to seeing Trump banners used as dog blankets, as dogs don't understand politics. Do you really think that Fala, Socks, or Bo thought that there was anything unusual going on in their masters; lives? (OK, Socks was a cat, but close enough).
The polarization that has so marked and marred political life, ensuring gridlock, results from people voting on identity instead of results. Maybe we will get less fussy about insisting that the politicians for whom we vote are like us.
Let's look at your possibilities:
Quote:1. This is not the regeneracy, however much it may look like one - either the regeneracy has already occurred, or we are near the end of it now, perhaps with the end (and climax) of the regeneracy more-or-less coinciding with the climax of the turning
In essence we have the Regeneracy delayed into the latter years of the Crisis. Powerful interests have sought to ensure that their sort of politics will prevail as long as is possible. These interests want rapid consumption of natural resources, development of inefficient real estate, privatization on the cheap to profiteering monopolists, further concentration of wealth and bureaucratic power within corporate behemoths, and the evisceration of trade unions. All of these are 3T practices, and 3T practices taken to their logical conclusions lead to economic calamity typically in the form of a panic. The economic order gets high profits without having to invest in plant and equipment and without the need of a consumer market.
This time we arrested a second Great Depression (and the sesqui-year of economic decline from the autumn of 2007 to the spring of 2009 is nearly parallel to that of the sesqui-year beginning with the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929) by backing the banks. We still left plenty of businesses deemed "too big to fail". The most vulnerable of businesses (department stores and low-end casual dining) still failed.
COVID-19 demonstrated that many of the arrangements that we have, including a reliance upon sweatshop working conditions to keep consumer prices down, has a high cost to pay, and not only in the misery of workers doing the work.
Quote:Possibility #2, I don't even want to talk about. It's terrifying. For five years now, so many of us have been saying "how could it possibly get any worse?" before watching it get worse. I don't know if I can survive another five years of that. Anyway, the essence of it is that we experienced a very long lull since the start of the turning in 2008, and the start of the pandemic** is the spark that has begun the regeneracy, with the climax still to come and potentially years away.
So we may be captive to a part of the American economy and political structure that wants an unsustainable order and is able to patch things so that solutions that do not include the mitigation of social inequity, the end of crony capitalism, and the improvement of public services and infrastructure. COVID-19 demonstrates well that the ethos of "every man for himself" ensures the worst possible results. Neither pure socialism (Marxism-Leninism) nor pure individualism (Ayn Rand) can work. Both attract their devotees who fail to recognize the failures of both. We have dodged marxism well, but neoliberalism is much under the influence of Ayn Rand.
Liberals got the message about COVID-19 early; a disproportionate share of right-wingers did not. The anti-mask and anti-vaccine people are largely on the Right, and they have been the ones contracting COVID-19, spreading it, and dying of it. Their political culture will take a severe hit through the loss of their constituency of voters. One mark of a political Regeneracy will be political losses by the political figures tied to what will then be seen as old, stale, and ineffective ways -- often in unlikely places. When the Hard Right starts losing in places like Mississippi and North Dakota while making no headway elsewhere, then we will be in a political order very different from what we know.
I see the Michigan plot (a right-wing conspiracy to kidnap and apparently lynch the Governor of Michigan) and the Capitol Putsch as rearguard efforts to thwart political and economic change that the Hard Right dreads. I'm stopping there because I do not predict the results of criminal and civil trials and their consequences to persons, institutions, or economic interests.
Quote:Possibility #3 ties in to my past post about there being two types of 4T. One type ends triumphantly with a strong, confident, "reconstructed" society. The other ends with the national mood being one of relief rather than victory. People say "I'm just so glad that's over" rather than "yeah, we did it!". It is a 4T that was survived rather than defeated, with the work of rebuilding still to be done (which will be done during the 1T, and the 2T will begin once that work has been completed). Perhaps the nature of the regeneracy is different between these two types of 4T, and this current turning only seems unusual with its apparent "mid-regeneracy climax" because we have not seen a "normal-length" 4T of this type since this nation's founding until now (or, as I said above, perhaps the Civil War 4T went on longer than we think...1860 to 1876?)
The same Crisis might have different results upon its participants. The Axis Powers awakened a sleeping giant in the USA. learning the hard way that the United States was, if not an Evil Empire, as dangerous an enemy as is possible if one misbehaves. To be sure, the Japanese mauled the USA badly in its one large colonial liability (the Philippines) which Americans already recognized would eventually have to be set loose. Britain somehow staved off Nazi rule, but found itself exhausted. Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa) got nothing out of the war. Countries that ended up under Nazi or (thug) Japanese conquest in whole or part were ravaged severely.
That is before I discuss the Axis Powers, all of which were defeated. Italy got off light, simply being divested of the Fascist regime. Finland got off as well as it could, becoming a military and diplomatic puppet of the Soviet Union without losing its formal democracy and capitalist system. Then again, Finland was less criminal than any of the Axis powers. Japan was defeated and divested of its colonial possessions, with its wartime leaders put on trial for their lives as war criminals. Germany was split between the Allies. Maybe it is possible to see heroic endings for Italy and Japan for achieving liberal democracy with some measure of stability if divested of any capacity for conquest and subjection of other countries. Conquest and subjection of other countries is a very bad habit, one that sober people surrender due to the harm to themselves at the least.
This said, the Second World War demonstrated the vulnerability of colonial empires. The Dutch could not return to Indonesia; the French had at most a shaky hold on Indochina; the British would yield Burma to independence along with the whole of South Asia. Even the all-powerful America had to meet its promise of independence for the Philippines.
As for military figures -- Eisenhower (34th President of the United States) and Homma (executed as a war criminal) could not have had different fates.
....This Crisis Era is most likely approaching its end. Within four years of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mussolini was executed by partisans with his cadaver dangling head-down, and Hitler and Goebbels had offed themselves in a fetid bunker. Himmler bit into a cyanide capsule rather than face judgment. Japan was under occupation and its wartime leaders other than Emperor Hirohito were in custody. Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan were dead once and for all. COVID-19 is already forcing social changes that will divide American history between pre-COVID and post-COVID, perhaps not to the extent of the American Revolution, the Civil War, or World War II. I expect much about American political life and its social consequences before COVID-19 to become unsupportable, irrelevant, and discredited. The political transformation of America that established a federal, constitutional Presidential republic occurred near the end of the Revolutionary Crisis. The progress of the Civil War mandated the abolition of slavery during the war itself. Major reforms of the American economic order that created political change that stuck happened early in the Crisis of 1940; it is easy to see the Marshall Plan as the New Deal in practice overseas. Few polities go through a Crisis Era without some huge transformation unless those countries have somehow evaded the Crisis. Anyone who expects us to go back to the norms of the last 3T is a fool.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
