(03-25-2019, 04:06 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Did things happen fast in the 1850s? Not toward a solution.Things happened very fast. Just three years after Dred Scott the South was seceding. A little more than four years after that the South had been utterly defeated. The Southern ruling class lost 60% of their wealth and ceased to play any significant national role for more than a century. I call that massive structural change.
You can't base predictions on one pre-conceived assumption, such as that change only comes after a big economic collapse. Events are more complicated than that.
Economic collapse is only one route to the sort of structural change I am talking about. It's the mildest form. Civil war is another. So is revolution, and mass-mobilization warfare. Environmental catastrophe is another.
Major structural changes are not merely changes in government from. The Black Death was a major structural change in that the population had fallen by 50% by the end of the century. The government structure hardly changed. The War of the Roses was a major structural change because it eliminated the greater part of the English elites reducing polarization and allowing the population to begin to recover from the Black Death that had happened more than a century earlier.
The English Civil War was a major change in the government, the monarchy was abolished, briefly replaced with a republic, which devolved into a dictatorship, and then went back to a monarchy. The net effect was nil. Two turnings later they was another major change in government, the monarchy was replaced with a constitutional monarch with a new King, who also ruled over a commercial republic, in which other elites had a lot of say. This system was more or less exported to Britain and is the system still in use today. Tis structural change stuck.
The rest of the 4Ts we are already familiar with.
But in each of these periods there was a conflict, the losing side did not go gently into that good night.
Now both of us, I am sure, would agree that the Republican dispensation in force since 1980 is not going to form the basis for structural change. And I cannot see any dispensation forming around Democrats who promise many things this year cannot deliver any of them without a commanding majority in the Senate. Recall Dems that could not enact economic policy that successfully addressed the financial crisis. It was known THEN that the stimulus was three times too small. The inadequate policy they did get was the BEST they could get, and they had 59 seats!
Even if Dems get 50 seats, how are they going to achieve with 50 what they couldn't get with 59?
If they are to make real change they need help from external events.