(06-02-2020, 11:29 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: "Half Crisis". So far as I can tell (based on lists others posted) most 4Ts include full blown Crisis wars. In America:
1. Glorious Revolution-King Phillips war in the American Colonies.
2. American Revolution.
3. Civil War.
4. Great Depression/World War II.
On the other hand, people did list a handful of 4Ts which lacked these wars. It seems possible for a country to enter a 4T mood without such.
Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland avoided the Crisis war of 1940. Sometimes "armed neutrality" works. It might have worked for America in 1941, but some Japanese fire-breathers chose to attack Pearl Harbor.
This said, 2020 is bringing Americans mass death on the scale of a Crisis War. We have had about three months in which death rates are higher than those for Americans in WWII. Does the length of the mass death matter that much? The enemy this time isn't Hitler and Tojo -- it is an insidious little virus. We are changing our ways, and many of us are showing our tolerance for economic, if not political, regimentation. We may be at the end of the neo-con era in American politics. Donald Trump has taken it to a sordid conclusion, and we may get a full repudiation of the Reagan-Bush-Trump era of barely-constrained corporate power in an election.
The differences between this Crisis and the last one are huge. For one, Obama may have wanted to be the "new FDR"... but if the "economic royalists" of FDR's time lacked the means for buying the political process and had to buy into the New Deal, the "economic royalists" of this time were able to buy the political system, install people who believe firmly that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it turns, indulges, or enforces a profit, and ultimately wait out Obama.
Trump is a catastrophic failure as President. It took five years for Americans to find that out about Dubya, but two years fewer to discover that about Trump. If I am to use a black hole as an analogy for political defeat, then the possibilities for a Trump re-election have have gone from this
(162) range of electoral-vote results for Trump (353)
/ * \
0 40 80 120 160 200 240 250 260 -^+ 280 320 360 400 440 480 520 537
(the negative sign is for 268 and the barest possible loss, the caret for 269 at which the Presidency is decided in the House, and 270 at which point he wins the Electoral College...
...a reasonable range of possible results after Trump got elected, figuring that Democrats would successfully run up vote totals in New York and California but struggle in swing states
(124) range with little chance (274)
/ * \
0 40 80 120 160 200 240 250 260 -^+ 280 320 360 400 440 480 520 537
...(Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, keeps his other wins, but picks up New Hampshire) That is where Trump was until a couple of months ago.
(110) black hole of sure defeat (260)
/ * \
0 40 80 120 160 200 240 250 260 -^+ 280 320 360 400 440 480 520 537
...(Trump loses Michigan, Pennsylvania, and either Arizona or Wisconsin)
Anything fully outside the event horizon of a black hole has some chance of escape if it moves fast enough, but it will be a wild ride. Anything crossing over the event horizon is doomed.
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.