01-09-2017, 12:40 AM
(01-08-2017, 06:23 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(01-06-2017, 04:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Remember, I did say that he doesn't have to be a good president in order to be a transformational one. Once that order is gone, hey, it's gone, and the 1T would just be picking up the pieces in its wake. Which was one of the outcomes outlined in T4T.
Presidents who come in after triggers are transformational--a 4T is beginning--Hoover was transformational. The hand he was dealt sucked so bad it was virtually unplayable and so he and his party lost. The problem is that unless there is a catastrophe, elites will not perceive that they have a problem and so have no incentive to cooperate in a fix But if there is a catastrophe on your watch then you are fucked, as Hoover was. It's a Catch 22.[/quote]
To be technical, Hoover became President about six months before the economy tanked, and had only inappropriate solutions for the triggering event for the worst economic meltdown that any living American (and that is now a very old American) can remember. FDR became President after the politicians of the 3T were largely discredited and the economic elites were stripped of much of the economic power that they might have otherwise used to buy political influence as things got a little better.
Obama is the President truly caught in a Catch-22: he had to back the financial industry to prevent an economic meltdown already at the same stage of destructiveness as in the late winter of 1931 from making him the "new Hoover" -- but in rescuing those elites he also rescued their potential to buy political influence until by now those elites have enough power to i9mpose a pure plutocracy, a nightmarish order in which about 2% of Americans will be able to get away with enforcing any suffering necessary for the enrichment and pampering of those elites. Maybe we will have been better off to have had a full slide into the economic distress of the 1930s that smashed the narcissism of elites and gutted their economic power, in which case Barack Obama would be entering his second term as President as transformative as FDR instead of someone seemingly intent on stabbing the common man in the back on behalf of people who have no constraints upon their greed and cruelty.
We are in for the worst four years of American politics since the prelude to the American Civil War, and we may get out of it only with political reforms that transform the American political system as profoundly as the Constitutional Convention of 1787. That best happens in 2021 (proportional representation, laws that separate economic power from political power, relegation of the Electoral College to a backup system, uniform standards of voting, perhaps even a parliamentary system), tolerably for people not yet old in 2025.... and if not then, prhaps in the wake of a military defeat analogous to that which Germany, Italy, and Japan experienced at the end of the last Crisis.
If not by 2029, then the transformation will not happen until the nasty order becomes unsustainable in an Awakening Era -- after the generations culpable in the establishment of a tyrannical order are off the scene and retribution is not possible for them. That will be around 2050 or so, when the Silent, practically all Boomers, and the vast majority of the Lost are off the scene. Why so long? That's how long it took for Franco's brutal and numbing regime took to become absurdly indefensible -- and roughly the time in which Commie regimes in central and Balkan Europe (the Commie regime in China almost fell in 1989, by the way) took to prove unsustainable through sheer censorship and police brutality. Those who have blood on their hands in the seizure and consolidation of power dare not dismount the tiger of tyranny that defends corrupt, cruel, inequitable, extremist rulers.
Quote:The guy who comes in as part of a regeneracy inherits a serious problem (for elites) that did not happen on his watch. Even if he fails to solve it like FDR in his first term or Obama in his, he can still gain re-election.[/quote]
Obama got re-elected, but he lost his House majority in 2010; he lost the Senate majority in 2014. America becomes a single-Party state on January 20. I now wish I had married that Irish woman when I had a chance. so that I could be a safe distance from tyranny. I am not sure that I will survive the next four years
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.