America is a sick society

[Eric the Green]

(08-07-2017, 01:40 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-07-2017, 10:20 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I'd agree failure is theoretically its own corrective.  Europe had World War II fought all over its soil.  That's quite a corrective.  Kansas?  While they may be starting to get it, too few people in the rest of the country don't see a problem with a debt economy.  Too many people can also ignore the climate problem.  I don't know how long it will take before the problems get in you face not ignore-able.

History has given us several major changes, but the most dramatic have all happened in the last 200 years or so.  It's hard to base a recurrent theme of 80 year cycles on such thin gruel.  I guess we'll have to see if the rising Civic generation lives up to expectations and acts decisively.  I tend toward pessimism, so I try to overlay optimism on my projections to balance that.  I'm sure I don't do it well. 

We Boomers have made a mess of things, but certainly no worse than the Transcendentals did in their time.  Of course, the Transcendentals marched the nation into the ACW, so a better outcome can still be plenty bad.

I think the cycle does go back over 500 years, although its changes have been more substantial during and since the founding of the USA. But the record of coming through 4Ts is strong and goes back over 500 years at least. But you're right; the cycle such as it is does not guarantee success. The outcome of the ACW was positive and we moved forward from it to world dominance and success, but a better 4T than the civil war isn't saying much, that's true. It's also true that all 4Ts have been difficult and violent. So I see more trouble ahead in the 2020s. I think it will in fact be less violent than the civil war. 

My hunch is that some rebels could get upset at what the government pushes forward, and these are most likely to be right-wing rebels after the Left (such as it is; likely another Obama-type left, not a Socialist left) has recaptured the government for a few years. The rebels will lose fairly easily, in that case, and we'll move forward as a country from there; but the reverse possibility is also true, if the rebels of the mid-2020s come from the Left against an entrenched right-wing government that emerges from the current one and maintains power into the mid-2020s. If the only option for the Left in the 2020s (and probably any time after that) is to violently rebel, the Left will lose (and so will our country).

If the desire of the rebels is a vote by some red states to secede, however, which itself is a non-violent (although illegal) act, then the government of the Left might agree to let them go, instead of invade as Lincoln did after the rebels violently attacked federal property. A government of the Right might not be as willing to let blue states like CA go, but it could happen.