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Regeneracy=TARP, Climax=Trump, Resolution=Midterms?
#3
(11-04-2018, 11:26 PM)Ritterlich Wrote: Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

[Image: a4a8e8ac61df8c9c6a9874fd0aec534c.png]


Stock market prices from late 2007 to about now, explained with a graph. Roughly a year and a half after the corresponding peaks for the stock markets of almost 80 years apart (September 1929 and October 2007), stock market valuations had fallen over 50%. Stock market valuations might reflect things other than economic performance, but when one considers similarities between the 1920s and the Double-Zero decades (right-wing, pro-business President, speculative boom based on bad business, and a depraved 3T culture), the coincidences have a similar result. Speculative bubbles devour capital, diverting capital from job-creating investments in plant and equipment. Investment, heavily in real estate, leads to a glut. A financial panic occurs when people can no longer afford to buy into the bubble.

In the meltdown beginning in 1929 the stock market kept plunging for three years. The meltdown beginning in 2007 lasted roughly a year and a half. After roughly three years, America started to recover from the Crash of 1929 and huge mismanagement of the economy. After a year and a half following the economic meltdown of 2007, the American economy started growing out of an economic meltdown. Obama and FDR both backed the banks, but Obama got the chance after a year and a half of the meltdown began, and FDR could not really start doing so until after more than three years of economic collapse.

The timing made a huge difference. The 1929-1932 meltdown forced big Business into a survival mode in which buying the political process was an unaffordable luxury. Obama rescued interests who wanted a pure plutocracy and by 2010 started to buy the political system. Now that the United States has the purest plutocracy in the advanced West, we are where we are. Everybody wanted swift action to put an end to the economic meltdown. In the 1930s FDR could push a reforming agenda. By 2011 Obama could achieve nothing of the type.


Quote:However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

A nitpick: the 'conservatives' of 2018 are very different from the conservatives of 1968. The conservatives of 1968 sought to preserve the New Deal against radical change. The Movement Conservatives that we now have want a return to a time that they think wonderful -- a time in which capitalists had all the power in the economy and the political sphere and others were obliged to defer. Just look at the slogan "Make America Great Again", suggesting that America has lost something. People can look fondly at certain aspects of the distant past, recognizing that there were opportunities now absent and that real estate was cheap. A canon of housing lenders of the 1950s was that people should never get housing loans that will cost more than 35% of the (male) breadwinner's income even if the mortgage loan was a good deal. Today, many middle-income people get stuck paying 60% of their after-tax income on rent.

Note well that the missed opportunities of the alleged time of American greatness reflect that people missed those opportunities because economic realities forced people to pass them up. Around 1900, industrial workers typically worked 70 hours a week and had a 40-hour lifespan, the brutal working conditions usually breaking them down in the workers' thirties. Children were often pressed into manufacturing and mining to support parents old before their time, so such curtailed their formal education. Since about 1935 the industrial worker has a 40-hour workweek and a 70-year lifespan. It is easy to see why people of the time passed up on many of the opportunities that seem so obvious today. Such an institution as the supermarket came into its own in the 1930s.

The Hard Right longs for a return to a time in which people worked hard, competently, and cheaply under brutal management that workers feared but recognized as the best of all possible worlds. The elites of ownership and management want the perfect order of ultra-cheap labor (Third World pay) with high, First World productivity. Who needs a consumer economy when the elites are the only ones with the means with which to consume? (The unspoken answer is, of course, the working class more humanely induced to work with promises of prosperity than with fear of beatings or being condemned to starvation).

Much as many of us disparage Karl Marx, he got one thing undeniably right: in an industrial society, the worker has nothing to offer but his toil. He failed to recognize the nexus between productivity and wages that would be necessary for saving capitalism (saving capitalism was the one thing that he did not want to happen), a nexus that would form as employers found that a sullen and resentful proletariat was harder to control than a proletariat that could enjoy a consumer society. So long as the industrial order was making life better for people by producing new and better things that working people were starting to consume, the capitalist system worked well. Most Americans are at the point in which they can't improve their lives by simply buying more stuff. Measures of consumption can impress people if one recognizes that people are paying much more for things that used to be cheap (rent and taxes).

Quote:It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

Demographics explain much. The white proletariat can look back to a time when things were allegedly better -- when working people were starting to make headway because their union wages allowed them to buy cars, furniture, appliances, and single-family housing that their parents never had. Hispanics and Asians were not around in the same numbers, so they can interpret "Make America Great Again" refer to a time when they were not in America. Such people have little nostalgia for a time in which they were not there. Blacks? Those 'good old days' implied either second-class citizenship Up North, getting consigned to the worse jobs (last hired, first fired) and being obliged to accept substandard housing that white people no longer wanted as white people moved to the shining new suburbs with their bungalows, lawns, picket fences, and two-car garages -- or the infamous supervision of Jim Crow practice in "Kukluxistan".

The white proletariat and the non-white proletariat have similar economic results, but they could hardly see the world more differently.

Donald Trump does badly among educated people by what used to be the standards of Republicans. In the 1950s, the Democratic nominee for President (Adlai Stevenson both times) got crushed in the parts of America that were then best-educated in Eisenhower landslides. Republicans got about 80% of the vote of people with college degrees. As late as 1964, even in a landslide election that he lost, Barry Goldwater won a majority of people with college degrees. To be sure, far fewer people in those days had college degrees, and college graduation (or even attendance) still usually reflected that as late as the 1930s that one was part of the WASP elite, something that changed with the GI Bill that allowed people not WASP to attend college and get college degrees. Obama did extremely well for a Democrat (better even than LBJ in his 1964 landslide!) among college graduates*.


Practically by definition the middle class, whatever its origin, is doing well in America except for getting stuck spending 60% of its after-tax income on rent in places where the economy is post-industrial (Florida, perhaps? Certainly coastal California, Greater Washington, New York City, Greater Boston, and maybe the cities of the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle.  The Rust Belt? There are few middle-class opportunities in such urban wrecks as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Louisville. Maybe if one is a CPA, dentist, or a physician one can find adequate living in a place like Pittsburgh which has lost its old industrial base and can avoid paying 60% of one's income to rent. The middle class has no nostalgia for the sentiment behind "Make America Great Again"; it has college degrees and can see through the pitch.

*An overlay of the Eisenhower and Obama elections is remarkable. Any Presidential nominee who wins 330 or more electoral votes is going to win few states that FDR did not win in 1936 (Maine and Vermont), Nixon did not win in 1972 (Massachusetts), or Reagan did not win in 1984 (Minnesota). Obama won all four such states twice, which LBJ also won in 1964. In 2008, Obama won only one state in a 365-EV near-landslide that Eisenhower did not win twice (North Carolina) and won a state (Indiana) that had gone for a Democratic nominee only once since 1936. In 2012, Obama won 332 electoral votes (an unusual number because Presidential elections avoid the mean result, tending either to closeness or to landslides), which  is a huge number of electoral votes -- not one of them in a state that Eisenhower did not win twice.

If you look at the 1928 election of Hoover, Ike won the two Northern states that Hoover did not win (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) and the one state that Reagan never won (Minnesota) -- three states usually among the toughest for a Republican to win. Rhode Island was the third-worst state for Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984 (both won the state in 49-state blowouts), and Massachusetts and Minnesota were the second-worst and worst states for Nixon in 1972 and 1984, respectively. Ike won all three states twice, being the only Republican nominee to win all three states together since the 1920s -- and he did it twice.

Obama is unique in the President just for having a non-American father and, of course, not being white. This said, he has to be more like some other President than like others, and I see Eisenhower despite the very different curriculum vitae (Ike was a military man and Obama is a polished attorney, but I could imagine Ike as an attorney and Obama as a military man very easily), being about fifteen years different in age, and being in opposite Parties. This said, both exemplified caution, both put a high value on legal precedent and diplomatic protocol, both eschewed populism, and both ran squeaky-clean administrations. In the generational theory, both exemplify the mature Reactive type at its best as a leader -- someone who sees the hornet's nest and leaves it alone. The worst Reactive/Nomad types kick the hornet's nest. Think of Hitler.

Eisenhower and Obama may have had personalities that soothed the American middle class, which may explain much.
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.


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RE: Regeneracy=TARP, Climax=Trump, Resolution=Midterms? - by pbrower2a - 11-05-2018, 09:26 AM

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