What will happen when this turning ends?

[pbrower2a]

(12-23-2019, 03:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-23-2019, 04:03 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: If you are curious about the future, you can browse the timeline on Orion's Arm:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b2afc424975

Or maybe this one:
https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentu...entury.htm

And all of this is speculation, because noone can know the future beyond trivial statements like "there will be cold days in December 2200".

From S&H perspective, a lot depends on who wins the current 4T. If the Left wins, we will have something like "environmental emergency" high. If the Nationalists win, they won't be able to establish a proper 1T because the elites despise them. This would indicate a blank period followed by another 4T or a 2T with a lot of Civic themes like the Solidarity awakening in 1980s Poland.

The future can't be known, at least not in any detail, but don't forget I have predicted the basic outlines and major events of recent decades.

The elites may despise Trump but many of them are all too happy to support him because he lowers taxes and regulations, and our elites basically only care about those things. But otherwise I think I agree. If the nationalists win, then the 1T would be a period of tremendous decline as the business elites will get carte blanche to continue destroying our government and filling the courts with reactionaries. But the rising ethnic groups and millennials may not wholly go away, so that may be the soil from which a new awakening could grow. Such a 2T would be a tough row to hoe, but meanwhile the nationalists would be able to deceive and comfort the white masses with their cover ups and fake news so that for them it might feel like a normal, if blank, 1T. 

I am fairly confident the Left will win and continue our economic and ecological transformation toward a sustainable nation and world during the 1T. That would also mean that, unlike if the Right-wing wins, the 2T may actually be somewhat calm and euphoric, even as it could be drastic in the level of change effected on cultural as well as political levels. It could be like Lyndon Johnson without Vietnam, or at least a smaller one stopped by the peace movement before it gets out of hand.

One thing will be certain: the 1T will be to a great extent a repudiation of practically everything 3T. People will recognize the mindless hedonism, the focus on the short term, and the every-man-for-himself ethos as causes or intensification of the Crisis or the frustration of solutions. Behavior out of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (relating the depraved mass culture of the later stages of the Weimar Republic) that became the play I am a Camera  and in turn the musical Cabaret with many possible stagings, including the strange but effective musical in horror-movie form as cinema.  (I consider the cinematic version a horror film because it has the usual elements of a horror film, including the absence of intellectual and moral pretenses, freakish characters, and above all bad things happening to good people. The only likable characters in the movie are Jews -- and you get a portent of what will happen to them under you-know-who). Another aspect will be the complete repudiation of what went wrong in the 4T. People will be looking for root causes and will find ways to root those out of our system in education, culture, politics, and business practices. 

America will be less tolerant of economic inequality because such will be seen as having stunted children and created a cynical view of many. Americans will insist upon more equality of economic result in all parts of the country and among all ethnic and religious groups. People of great talent will get to succeed, but the huge gap between worker and administrator in living will lessen. We are more l;ikely to see something like 5-to-1 ratios in income between executives and workers, and executives will have more likelihood of having started out on the shop floor than having been lifted from a CPA firm.  So economic realities will be more like those of the 1950's than like those of the last two decades: the business executives will be old men or women who know the company from the ground floor up and have an idea of how the plant operates or what life is like for a teller or sales clerk. 

Taxes will be higher on elite incomes, especially if the income is 'passive'. But taxes will also be graduated so that those who operate small businesses of the types that flourished in the 1950's with Lost owner-operators will get a revival: mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, service stations, and even small-scale banks and manufacturing outfits. People with talent will find more niches than they now do; talented people will not be so quickly consigned to proletarian work because they come from the 'wrong family'. 

Our current flat tax on business income encourages monopoly and vertical integration, with executive elites exploiting bureaucratic power to maximize their income.    

Culture got bland in the last 1T -- but then, the Missionary Generation was dropping out of cultural life. Figure that Boomers, should they follow the same pattern as the GI and Silent Generation of remaining active and taking care of themselves in old age, may still make huge contributions to cultural life as the Missionary Generation didn't. To be sure, Boom culture has not been as rich as Missionary culture (in music alone -- who is our Mahler? Debussy? Sibelius? Ives? Scriabin? Bartok? Stravinsky?  We don't even have a Vaughan-Williams or Respighi yet). it could be that American culture is so commercial that it has little room for ars gratia artis. No, Thomas Kincade, with his houses so brightly lit that they seem to be on fire, doesn't cut it.  

I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump will have the unenviable role of a scapegoat for all that went wrong in America. Awful as he is as President (admit it, conservatives -- you would have been far better off with Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney as President, but so would we all), he is not the cause of all wrong. 



This is the sort of political expression that makes someone so awful as Trump possible. By 2030 we will generally see Barack Obama as a wasted opportunity to improve America, and Trump as pure rot. So our economic elites were unwilling to make any sacrifices on behalf of America as a whole and chose to fund reactionary politicians who concur with them that the role of the common man is pure responsibility and little reward for enriching and indulging elites responsible to themselves alone? That is not good for creating any sense of community.