Report Card for Donald Trump

[Mikebert]

(02-10-2017, 06:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(02-10-2017, 06:04 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(02-10-2017, 04:45 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Mike,

You missed what I asked you.  Are you, or your model, treating these social moments as being 10-12 or 20-22 years in length, with some individual variance?  If you are pegging the election of Trump as being a critical date, do you anticipate the events that stem from it as lasting for one decade or two?

On the order of two decades for the turning, not one.

Thank you.  Would this then imply, judging from your dates, that your model suggests a social moment in the 1980s and 1990s?

No.  My model has the 2T around 1968-1983 and the subsequent 4T around 2007-2024.  The model is very simple. You start with an accepted "crisis" period that almost everyone would accept was an American crisis. For example 1774-1789. You then add the quantity AL-21 to the dates for that turning to generation the next social moment era.  Here AL is the average of the mean ages of Representative, Governors, Senators and Supreme Court Justices. Since the model is explicitly political I refer to these as "political moments" which are defined as S&H do social moments with the world "social" replaced by "political"

Then repeat the process with the new political moment you derived, all the way down to get 1968-1983 and 2007-2024. The only moving part is AL, which tends to rise over time and so the turnings and the spacing between them lengthens. This model generates "political eras" similar to S&H turnngs Schlesinger's liberal/conservative eras after 1828.  Before 1828 it closely maps the Schlesinger, in that it has a political moment in 1802-1817, close to Schlesinger's 1801-1816 dates, whereas S&H have no social moment at all.

The dates I gave were simply events that occurred inside of periods considered 2T to 4Ts by 2&H. They have no relation to the model. They occur at any time during the turning.  You could chose your own set of events in the same way, and obtain the same conclusions about how long the S&H cycles are.  There is enormous slop in their cycle, you can have a 4T beginning as early as 2000 and ending as late as 2040 and still fit existing precedent, without changing any of the existing turnings. 

A cycle or wave is an oscillation in something.  A political cycle is defined by changes on political structures, as identified by scholars like Schlesinger and Daniel Elazar and by the concept of critical elections first identified by Key, which can be demonstrated by a plot of the fraction of the preceding 30 years one party held the White House.  This plot shows as oscillating trend


The turning points in the trend occur around these elections identifed as critical 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968 (predicted)
Note the colored lines.  Blue was a Clinton victory and two terms in office, purple is a two-term Trump and red is a one term Trump (the Trump = Carter scenario).  I made this graph about six years ago for a post on how can we confirm 2008 as the start of the 4T.  You can see that had Clinton won (which seemed likely to me--I wasn't the only who thought she had a good chance) 2008 would be confirmed as a critical election by the oscillator.  We would then have a financial panic and critical election in 2008.  The last time this happened was in 1932, i.e. the start of the last secular crisis.  I would consider that confirmation of a 2008 4T start.  And I would be confident in publishing a model for a generational political cycle that can explain Turchin's fathers and sons cycle in America.  But with 538 forecasting a 30% chance of a Trump victory I no longer felt confident about this and I slowed my work on the paper.  

Then Clinton lost. Trump's victory in 2016 does not rule out 2008 entirely, but a victory in 2020 would. So I am not sure how to proceed
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley