02-10-2020, 02:23 PM
(02-10-2020, 01:35 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Need a crisis war before we get a regeneracy.
Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Second Gulf War -- not the first) might qualify as Crisis wars. It may be impossible to initiate the sorts of genocidal wars of conquest as Hitler and Tojo did. The colonial empires that were zones of conflict in Africa, Asia, and the insular Pacific basin are no more. Hitler's racist bigotry against a religion (Hitler's antisemitism was in practice racist) is refuted for its ethical consequences.
The Crisis could be a war that we somehow avoid due to astute conduct of the political leadership. OK, that is clearly lacking now.
What will be a Regeneracy? I am tempted to see a Regeneracy as a recognition of the need for pervasive change in our political, cultural, and economic assumptions. Unless Trump gets re-elected in a landslide (indicating that he has convinced Americans that he has the solutions) he will not bring about any Regeneracy except as a rejection of him.
Someone did bring up a thread, essentially a rehash of the Skowronek cycle, that holds that Donald Trump is the last, tired expression of the last Presidency to shake things up. The flaws of Reagan's vision always were evident, but they had power behind them. Trump, even without serious flaws of character (see also Hoover and Carter) is the last representative of an ideology that either lost its way (Hoover having gone far from the Progressive reforms of Theodore Roosevelt) or has lost its constituency (as FDR's New Deal coalition aged into political irrelevancy). With Trump, the intellectual basis of his time is shaky at best. "Donald Trump thought" is little different from the vicious, vacuous thought of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is apparently dying of late-stage lung cancer, and his material does not go so well as a written word as it goes as broadcast material.
The Skowronek cycle suggests that Donald Trump will be a one-term President. Like Carter he had a weak mandate to push his agenda; like Hoover he has bungled many critical issues. The next President will ride the tide, if not initiate, a liberal path that reshapes American life in many ways. Donald Trump will serve as the political scapegoat.
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.