(11-19-2016, 01:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Let's just call the 2016 election what it is: the degeneracy.
Will there be a regeneracy? If so, it has begun now, in the streets. And it will be the regeneracy only if it continues and bears fruit on election day, with the reversal of the degeneracy of 2016.
Have other 4Ts seen degeneracies? Maybe the years leading up to the civil war, at least in Dixie.
That's now how I have understood or used the word Degeneracy, not that it is an official term in the Howe and Strauss lexicon. I look to the raw end of the 3T in which weak leadership fails to solve problems that it could readily solve if it paid attention to something other than letting elites wax fat, gross neglect of social and political needs during a depraved time leading inevitably to a 4T. But Regeneracy? We had a promising start in January 2009, only to throw it away in the Tea Party episode.
If we get a principled resistance to a President trying to act as a dictator and his efforts to divide America into "winners" and "victims", then we have a Regeneracy. Just imagine a majority of Americans coalescing on the protection of minority rights and the protection of the environment... and perhaps seeking to stop a catastrophic war before it begins.
We may be seeing a spiral of violence more characteristic of the worst part of the Crisis, the beginning of the end stage in which things seem to be going one way and can swing wildly. Think of the Confederate naval assault on Fort Sumter. Four years after Fort Sumter, the Confederate Army was running out of soldiers at the Battle of Petersburg to defend Richmond. Four years after Operation Barbarossa began, Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler were in Hell... and four years after the Japanese attack on what the thugs who ruled Japan deemed the weak and vacillating democracies had most major Japanese leaders who had attacked the United States and the British Commonwealth were incarcerated.
There is no predictable schedule. The President-Elect loves to be unpredictable. We have no idea what tempests he will stir in the teapot known as Planet Earth. He will be easy to mock so long as we do not dread the consequences of imprisonment, personal ruin, or death. We shall see how strong the Constitutional restraints are upon the whims of a leader with despotic tendencies.
If Vladimir Putin chose to support him with methods that got our President-Elect elected, then he could come to rue the Frankenstein monster that he created. "Steady and predictable" is far safer than "capricious and irascible", no matter what the ideology is of a leader facing the most powerful person in a rival, let alone hostile, power.
...The people who have prevented President Barack Obama from exercising the political system to reform the political system in necessary and benign ways will soon enable the worst tendencies of a thoroughly-vile man. Power has now replaced service as the objective of American politics, and I cannot see any other instance of such in any other political order ever working well for that political entity. The best that that political entity can have happen is to get away with criminal deeds that mask the intensification of decay, economic, cultural, and moral, within the polity.
Should America become the Evil Empire, then the best that Americans can hope for is a defeat that makes this daring, revolutionary language relevant again:
Quote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
God Help Us, should We the People end up with a leader as contemptful of liberty as George III.
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.