Election 2020

[Classic-Xer]

(10-23-2020, 06:34 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-22-2020, 11:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Here is Howe's description from his website. He gives credit to a four-phase model of social change devised by the famous sociologist Talcott Parsons, who hypothesized that society moves into a new phase every time the availability or demand for social order rises or falls. I don't know his work.
https://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/...nings.html

Quote:Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis. Old Artists die, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Artists is born. This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group. In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. America’s most recent Fourth Turning began with the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II. The generation that came of age during this Fourth Turning was the Hero archetype G.I. Generation (born 1901 to 1924), whose collective spirit and can-do optimism epitomized the mood of the era. Today’s Hero archetype youth, the Millennial Generation (born 1982 to 2004) show many traits similar to those of the G.I. youth, including rising civic engagement, improving behavior, and collective confidence.

In Parsons’ terms, a Fourth Turning is an era in which the availability of social order is low, but the demand for such order is high. Examples of earlier Fourth Turnings include the Civil War in the 1860s and the American Revolution in the 1770s—both periods of momentous crisis, when the identity of the nation hung in the balance.

I just marvel after watching the debate how closely this matches where we are, with Biden as the agent who seeks to restore the social order and respond to the threats to the nation's very survival. Biden says this election is a decision of what kind of country we want to be, and offers solutions that require community purpose. Classic Xer would call it collectivism. And there was Trump, the very embodiment of the social disorder that threatens the nation, defending completely his policies of not dealing with our problems and allowing them to fester and destroy us. All this means we are surely not near the end of this 4th turning. Much strife and struggle remains bringing down the Republican walls the block the 4th turning's agenda, and work to lay the foundations for the new social order we will take for granted once the first turning starts around 2029.

Then Ivanka or Spencer Cox can win the presidency, and it won't matter much more than it did when Ike was elected. But someone besides Kamala Harris must enter the breach for the Democrats in 2024 or it will all come crashing down before it starts. Tom Cotton has a stronger horoscope score in the new system too.

What one person wants greatly one may not get, but a society as a whole that does not have perverse means of achieving its ends (the extreme example of a society having "perverse means" is of course Nazi Germany, and this time there is no Great Power as horrible as the Third Reich)... Trump is certainly a political pervert, and it may still be premature to decide whether he has any relevance to American life after January 21... 

We want order, and Trump has offered chaos that we never thought possible. He is the first President to egg on the fascistic Right of racists and even traitors (the Michigan Plot), and it is safe to assume that those parts of the GOP that have a stake in a viable Establishment have decided to join the Democratic Big Tent... at least for now. Trump's idea of order is to centralize authority, especially in federal law enforcement, while making it cruel and unaccountable.

Americans are for law and order on the whole. Trump may deride Black Lives Matter (BLM),  but BLM has a legitimate and narrow objective of making police less trigger-happy around black people.  So we make our police more accountable in the presence of black people. That does not make life easier for outright criminals of any kind.

Some powerful people have sought to institutionalize the depravities of the 3T (mostly the neoliberal era) in a New Order of extreme inequality of opportunity and economic result, something that created the rift that made the American Civil War inevitable. This time it would lead to an authoritarian order in which 95% of the people are responsible to a tiny minority of about 2% of the people, almost certainly a hereditary elite itself responsible to nobody. Orders like that tend to implode, as did Imperial Russia. 

For now I cannot predict the future of the Republican Party. The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, make no mistake, are conservative Republicans of the old style. Most are out of power, typically having retired from high public office. Do they take back the GOP and drive out the Trump Cult, or does the Trump Cult establish a firm hold on the GOP? With the former (although the politicians would likely be on the whole new and  'clean') and we return to partisan norms of a time other than this one. Or do the conservative dissidents from Trump find their way into the Democratic Party in some 1T equivalent of an Era of Good Feeling, only for the Big Tent to prove unwieldy?

Note well that there is much conservative thought within the Democratic Party, with people who do not want pervasive change in economic relationships. Model minorities are typically quite conservative on cultural matters, and they do not want their economic position to come under attack from proletarian revolution. 

Much will be clearer by the middle of November than is now.

The future of the Republican largely depends on us at this  point and the future of Democratic party is directly asso0ciated with its right now. We have the remnant of one party who are viewed as being in cahoots with the other party who are both into bridges with half the American electorate and don't seem to be concerned about pissing millions of Americans off these days. They seem to be living in the same false reality as all of you guys today's. It's really dumb but desperate power hungry and greedy people doing dumb things is normal during testing times like these.