11-15-2021, 11:11 AM
We now see three largely-full adult generations (Boom, X, and Millennial) fully within the ages of maturity in participation in the economy, and the tail end of the Silent Generation and the first segment of Generation... whatever entering adulthood. The Silent still include some active, prominent politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden, but even with the power that they hold they are clearly the last acts of the Silent Generation. People over 85 are at most relics of an older time and may be interesting for archival study of their personalities, but they are almost always irrelevant.
One of the usual marks of a 4T is the weakness of any Adaptive component in public life, and if you think Adaptive influence weak now, then wait a couple years. The oldest young Adaptive types born in the early 21st century are heavily laborers and college students. To be sure they can participate in protests and demonstrations that older adults organize... or provoke.
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As polarized as American political life is, demographics is destiny. The Hard Right has had nothing to offer Millennial adults except hardship on behalf of loud, rapacious, ruthless special interests, and such is not effective in winning hearts and minds. Should the Hard Right prevail, then it will have nothing to offer as an inducement to slavish compliance except fear. Such is the hallmark of authoritarian, dictatorial, and despotic societies more adept at doing things to people than at doing anything for people or even letting people improve their lot through enterprise or activism. The Hard Right has been winning its skirmishes so far through the creation of bogeymen. Not so long ago it was "gay marriage", which now seems ludicrous. Then it was "Radical Islam"... well, you probably know how I contrast the rather pacific norm for Islam in America to much that is wrong in the moral slum of the worst in American secularism. Better the mosque than the strip club! Now it is "critical race theory" which questions the dubious defense of people who put up a fight to keep slaves in bondage and the systemic racism that yet to disappear.
The Hard Right has been successful at creating and exploiting bogeymen for bamboozling people... but it cannot solve the questions of inequality of economic result. I predict that in the 1T, personal thrift (much easier as people recognize the hollowness of buying stuff for which they have no storage space or capacity for display) and recognize by default the appropriateness of simple living that means that they will have money in savings, securities, and insurance policies as the middle class had in the 1950's. After the failure of trickle-down economics to bring about some super-prosperity that would make economic inequality irrelevant, people will generally see themselves more competent than their supposed betters to manage personal wealth.
In my experience, savers are happier people than are spendthrifts. Just recently a poll showed that a majority of Republicans said that they would have been happier in the 1950's. Obviously there was much about the 1950's (Jim Crow, polio, male chauvinism, redlining, "gentleman's agreements" (is any member of your party a Hebrew?), the Red Scare, environmental degradation, Blood Alley highways, and cars that became death traps in collisions) that few of us would miss. Not many of us wax nostalgic about culinary tastes of the time (mushy vegetables and meats practically burned or the insipid music to which practically nobody listens to anymore.
OK, the 2030's will likely be a conformist time with at most partial mergers of some cultures. Traditions will be defended where valid or at least comforting. But failures from the 3T that hung on longer than is appropriate will be shamed and scorned. It is mostly 3T ways, innovations that had bog problems attached, that die.
One of the usual marks of a 4T is the weakness of any Adaptive component in public life, and if you think Adaptive influence weak now, then wait a couple years. The oldest young Adaptive types born in the early 21st century are heavily laborers and college students. To be sure they can participate in protests and demonstrations that older adults organize... or provoke.
........................
As polarized as American political life is, demographics is destiny. The Hard Right has had nothing to offer Millennial adults except hardship on behalf of loud, rapacious, ruthless special interests, and such is not effective in winning hearts and minds. Should the Hard Right prevail, then it will have nothing to offer as an inducement to slavish compliance except fear. Such is the hallmark of authoritarian, dictatorial, and despotic societies more adept at doing things to people than at doing anything for people or even letting people improve their lot through enterprise or activism. The Hard Right has been winning its skirmishes so far through the creation of bogeymen. Not so long ago it was "gay marriage", which now seems ludicrous. Then it was "Radical Islam"... well, you probably know how I contrast the rather pacific norm for Islam in America to much that is wrong in the moral slum of the worst in American secularism. Better the mosque than the strip club! Now it is "critical race theory" which questions the dubious defense of people who put up a fight to keep slaves in bondage and the systemic racism that yet to disappear.
The Hard Right has been successful at creating and exploiting bogeymen for bamboozling people... but it cannot solve the questions of inequality of economic result. I predict that in the 1T, personal thrift (much easier as people recognize the hollowness of buying stuff for which they have no storage space or capacity for display) and recognize by default the appropriateness of simple living that means that they will have money in savings, securities, and insurance policies as the middle class had in the 1950's. After the failure of trickle-down economics to bring about some super-prosperity that would make economic inequality irrelevant, people will generally see themselves more competent than their supposed betters to manage personal wealth.
In my experience, savers are happier people than are spendthrifts. Just recently a poll showed that a majority of Republicans said that they would have been happier in the 1950's. Obviously there was much about the 1950's (Jim Crow, polio, male chauvinism, redlining, "gentleman's agreements" (is any member of your party a Hebrew?), the Red Scare, environmental degradation, Blood Alley highways, and cars that became death traps in collisions) that few of us would miss. Not many of us wax nostalgic about culinary tastes of the time (mushy vegetables and meats practically burned or the insipid music to which practically nobody listens to anymore.
OK, the 2030's will likely be a conformist time with at most partial mergers of some cultures. Traditions will be defended where valid or at least comforting. But failures from the 3T that hung on longer than is appropriate will be shamed and scorned. It is mostly 3T ways, innovations that had bog problems attached, that die.
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.