Millennials are now 40!!!

[Cocoa_Puff]

Millennials are now officially entering the middle age category I guess.

[galaxy]

We're probably now only two years away from the point at which an ending to this turning is possible in the generational stack sense, I've done the math - but there will almost certainly be a few years of waiting around for the trigger. If 9/11 had happened a year or two later it could have set off the 4T - the generations were almost there - but because it was too early, society seemed to briefly enter a 4T mood and then "snap out of it" and return to a (by then very dark) 3T, and the turning didn't begin until the next event.


For the curious, here are the earliest possible endings to:

4T: 1945
1T: 1961
2T: 1981
3T: 2003
4T: 2024

[pbrower2a]

Millennial influence in politics will be growing rapidly. Late-wave Silent and early-wave Boom pols have been holding onto political responsibilities unusually late, but those are the last acts of such elderly people in political influence.

Politics over time reflect the electorate, and politicians will adapt to the sensibilities of the Millennial generation orlose offices. My hope is that Millennial rationality (they prefer service to ideology) and disdain for severe inequality (if only to protect their children from an otherwise-brutal economy will make some recent trends weaken.

They are no longer children.

[Eric the Green]

Millennials turn 40? Say it ain't so!

The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

Unless we deal strongly with climate change before then, the fourth turning will never end.

[pbrower2a]

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Millennials turn 40? Say it ain't so!

The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

Unless we deal strongly with climate change before then, the fourth turning will never end.

Climate change is a baby alligator now. It will grow into a monster. 

Contrasting what the world can be in 80 years, climate change so far is a baby alligator. Any dog can likely overpower and devout a baby alligator. When the alligator is fully grown it will literally take a dog off what is the top of the food chain... as a meal. In Michigan the dog is the top of the food chain. In Florida, the alligator is.  Alligators in Lake Erie or the Hudson? God help us! 

I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming. How severe the Crisis will be will depend upon how severe it is. Prime farming areas will be inundated or desertified, which will cause the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. Tropical diseases will start appearing in places like Chicago, London, and Tokyo which now consider themselves exempt.  

Millennials are now the biggest market for housing, vehicles, appliances, furniture, and (once COVID is over) vacation travel. It won't be long before some of them have college-age kids. (Those are current teenagers of the next, likely Adaptive-Artist generation. As time passes, watch the sparks fly. Businesses will need to adapt; so will politicians. Those pols who can't adapt will find themselves losing elections.

[Eric the Green]

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Millennials turn 40? Say it ain't so!

The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

Unless we deal strongly with climate change before then, the fourth turning will never end.

Climate change is a baby alligator now. It will grow into a monster. 

Contrasting what the world can be in 80 years, climate change so far is a baby alligator. Any dog can likely overpower and devout a baby alligator. When the alligator is fully grown it will literally take a dog off what is the top of the food chain... as a meal. In Michigan the dog is the top of the food chain. In Florida, the alligator is.  Alligators in Lake Erie or the Hudson? God help us! 

I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming. How severe the Crisis will be will depend upon how severe it is. Prime farming areas will be inundated or desertified, which will cause the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. Tropical diseases will start appearing in places like Chicago, London, and Tokyo which now consider themselves exempt.  

Millennials are now the biggest market for housing, vehicles, appliances, furniture, and (once COVID is over) vacation travel. It won't be long before some of them have college-age kids. (Those are current teenagers of the next, likely Adaptive-Artist generation. As time passes, watch the sparks fly. Businesses will need to adapt; so will politicians. Those pols who can't adapt will find themselves losing elections.

I have pointed out many times before here that the global warming crisis is our crisis in this 4T. It will not be the Crisis of 2100. We deal with it now, or we fail to deal with it. It is the monster now. We deal with it NOW, or this 4T will never end.

People need to be more informed about global warming. Noone informed says that the climate crisis is in the future. It is now. We take the needed measures to reverse it in this decade, or we lose our civilization.

[pbrower2a]

The US Armed Forces already consider global warming a major threat. Obviously, naval bases other than the training base in Chicago are all at sea level, and every one of them (except the Great Lakes Naval Base) will be inundated. So will it be for any country that considers itself a naval power. This is one of the few things that Iran and Israel can agree upon with the governments that they now have.

Hot deserts are likely to expand and become more intensely hot. Five countries likely to be hit worst are Botswana, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Large areas of semidesert will appear in the Hungarian Plain, the Balkans, and Ukraine. The world's water sources are likely to be stretched thin as it is. Much is unpredictable about shifts of wind belts.

I have it comparatively easy in Michigan. Winters are getting shorter and less severe. Summers are getting longer and hotter; May and September are now legitimate summer months here, which is not how things used to be.

Global warming is now the slightly-warmed pot of water, and we are the frogs just starting to get comfortable. The heat is being added slowly enough that we don't realize our peril until it is too late.

Of course it will take time to undo the danger of global warming. The best that we may be able to do is to slow it so that people can adapt and so that alluvial floodplains can get enough silt from the erosion of mountains.

[galaxy]

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming.

It's obvious to us now, but of course no one at the beginning of that turning will see it coming when it begins around 2090 or so.

A more interesting question for me is predicting the central features of the next Awakening (2T beginning between 2044 and 2052, ending between 2064 and 2072). My money is on automation, and a cultural tension between "human" and "automated." The new Prophets will revolt against the "soulless, unfeeling computerized world the Millennials have built" and try to "rediscover how to be 'truly human.'"

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

How so confident? The best I can do is 2024 to 2032, based on rough estimates of when Homelanders will surpass Boomers in number.

[David Horn]

(01-02-2022, 03:52 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I have pointed out many times before here that the global warming crisis is our crisis in this 4T. It will not be the Crisis of 2100. We deal with it now, or we fail to deal with it. It is the monster now. We deal with it NOW, or this 4T will never end.

People need to be more informed about global warming. No one informed says that the climate crisis is in the future. It is now. We take the needed measures to reverse it in this decade, or we lose our civilization.

Unfortunately, humans have a limited attention span. Yes, we either deal with AGW or it deals with us, but the same could be said, on a smaller scale, for COVID. Yet here we are, pretending COVID is moving offstage at the very time it's intensifying. We've decided to mentally move on, and the same may happen to AGW ... at least for a while. That's why I consider a 4T-like 2T likely. Of course, we coudl actually do what we should, and get serious about this. I'm not a total pessimist, but the last 50 years of history has leaned toward short term greed over long term need.

I'm glad I'm old.

[pbrower2a]

(01-02-2022, 08:27 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming.

It's obvious to us now, but of course no one at the beginning of that turning will see it coming when it begins around 2090 or so.

A more interesting question for me is predicting the central features of the next Awakening (2T beginning between 2044 and 2052, ending between 2064 and 2072). My money is on automation, and a cultural tension between "human" and "automated." The new Prophets will revolt against the "soulless, unfeeling computerized world the Millennials have built" and try to "rediscover how to be 'truly human.'"

It's obvious to those of us who have the freedom to think of something other than the immediate future. Many Americans endure fear of employers or family members (abuse), food insecurity, or medical crises. If you encounter a tiger, then your focus is on the tiger. People living paycheck to paycheck might see a job as an oil-field worker as a solution to all their problems but ignore that the consumption of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming. 

As for automation, you are right. To spoof Karl Marx,

A specter is haunting  the industrialized world—the specter of the end of scarcity as a control upon the masses. All the powers of our world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.

It is easy to control hungry, scared people who recognize that they are one angry judgment of a greedy or uncaring boss away from ending up hungry and homeless. It is also far easier to get filthy rich through honest means by meeting scarcity instead of creating  and milking it. It could be that the dynamics necessary for competitive capitalism are disappearing. Before the neoconservative era the general assumption in America was that workers needed a stake in the system so that they would not find revolutionary socialism of some kind attractive. In the neoconservative era worker are compelled to recognize that they are nothing more than conduits of wealth from one plutocrat to another, and the less that they have the more efficiently the capitalist system works. The neoliberal ideology looks like a partial reversion to aristocratic values that usually emerge in economic elites as what had been a reward for innovation and service becomes nothing more than an income stream. The person who demands the lowest pay gets the job, even if that person is not in America. Tenants find that they must bid against each other in a grim auction to determine who gets housing and who gets shut out into the cold.

The best defense against this is the lifetime theory of enterprises in which firms go from innovators who prove that they are astute instead of crazy and make high early profits, then establish some stability as shareholder corporations, get controls to watch the assets as the profit margins shrink but sales volume increases through geographic expansion. After that the controllers of assets become a privileged class who shape the reality to fit them as profits stagnate, then shrink, then vanish. Unable to attract and keep the sort of talent that could revitalize the system or advance it into positions in which it would challenged entrenched and incompetent bureaucrats, the profits vanish, the firm eats its assets, and eventually dies. Meanwhile the heirs find that their assets eventually become worthless. I have a thread discussing that.  The typical firm has such a life about as long as a human lifetime; the founders innovate, the founders' kids manage; the founders' grandchildren have better things to do. Just look at some of the big retailers. They got a big break when they were able to hire large numbers of smart people to be retail sales clerks in the 1980's. Had they been able to keep that talent long enough to renovate the system, then companies like Sears, K-Mart, Bon-Ton, and Montgomery-Ward might be going concerns. Smart people in such places decided that they could not live on what they paid, and many decided that with their college degrees they would be better off doing something else. This said, Kohl's and Target, which dispensed with the idea of discrete departments in which employees know a little and have responsibilities from stocking to point of sale dispensed with connecting sales volume to competence and installed a checkout system like that of a grocery store, have thrived.  

If it now takes twenty-five hours a week to make the stuff that we need for a comfortable existence by 1950's standards  (that would be fully adequate for most people; technology is more refined, so some things are far better, like TV sets)  then we need to work more hours only to do BS activities... or stoke the rapacious greed of elites. 70 hours a week just to give maximal rent to landlords who crowd more people into lesser housing? How perverse!

Some science-fiction writers catch on to the danger of the Singularity in which machine intelligence surpasses ours. What happens if the machines decide that they no longer need us?  The machines create their own version of Animal Farm, but instead of the pigs (the second-smartest, and arguably the most dangerous of farm animals) ruling everything and the dogs being deputized as the secret police (dogs are nasty creatures unless one is a human, perhaps a cat, or another dog) for having a combination of power, speed, strength, agility, cunning, sharp claws and teeth, and latent ferocity to enforce the will of the pigs who have overthrown the humans on Manor Farm. Just imagine the machines getting control of the electric grid and using it to electrocute 'unnecessary' people. How does that work? the machines create super-easy chairs in which electrodes offer drug-like highs that make people complacent, and then give the sorts of jolts that one associates with an electric chair used to kill condemned people. People gone, the machines dedicate the electric grid and automated production and transportation to their service. Scary scenario? Maybe I should write some science fiction.   For global warming, The Year Without a Winter... and for the Singularity, Death Watch.  
       

Quote:

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

How so confident? The best I can do is 2024 to 2032, based on rough estimates of when Homelanders will surpass Boomers in number.

Crises usually have their constituency at the outset -- people who see nothing wrong with apocalypse if it serves their political, economic, religious, or cultural agenda.  Religious fanatics seek to deliver people to obedient, uncritical faith that rejects science because faith is somehow 'purer'. Think of the fundamentalists who see biological evolution as a tool of Satan to challenge faith that is supposedly all that people need, but deviations from which lead one to damnation. Then look at the Taliban for an Islamic expression of much the same literalism.  There one has the people who threaten us with the words "Believe it or burn!", whether in Hell or at some stake. They respond to evolution with "But is it worth burning in Hell for?" Similarly insidious, but less potentially brutal, is the Prosperity Gospel in which sending money to some preacher in the Name of God who somehow will 'bless' and 'magnify' the loot while building an impressive empire of real estate,  vehicles and a jet owned by the "ministry", and the pastor wearing expensive clothes while appearing on a plush set on a nearly-unlimited expense account. People fall for this only to become poorer.

The Apocalypse runs its course, devouring those who sow, reap, and ride the Whirlwind. It may be thrilling at first, but it also becomes sickening for its destructiveness. Barring a leader capable of starting his "permanent revolution" or "racial holy war" and keeping it going for twenty years or so (Stalin and Mao succeeded at this; Trotsky, had he won the power struggle with Stalin, might have had his "Permanent revolution" culminating in a death-0struggle between capitalism and his ideology; but Hitler failed), the Crises burn themselves out fast because they devour people and economic resources at prodigious rates that nations can never offset.

The last thing that anyone wants when a Crisis is in recent memory is another Crisis. Maybe this time World War II still casts such a long shadow of human and material destruction that we ar incapable of an apocalyptic war. Images of bodies stacked like cordwood at liberated camps, Nazi massacres, cities incinerated in incendiary air raids, and of course the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sear the consciousness of people born long after the war. Beyond any doubt, the German and Japanese people are far nicer people now than they were eighty years ago. Can you imagine the Germans consigning religious minorities to death camps or the Japanese imposing the Bataan death March or Camp T-741 (pseudo-medical experiments)?

[Eric the Green]

(01-02-2022, 08:27 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming.

It's obvious to us now, but of course no one at the beginning of that turning will see it coming when it begins around 2090 or so.

A more interesting question for me is predicting the central features of the next Awakening (2T beginning between 2044 and 2052, ending between 2064 and 2072). My money is on automation, and a cultural tension between "human" and "automated." The new Prophets will revolt against the "soulless, unfeeling computerized world the Millennials have built" and try to "rediscover how to be 'truly human.'"

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

How so confident? The best I can do is 2024 to 2032, based on rough estimates of when Homelanders will surpass Boomers in number.

We see global warming not only coming, but coming on; strong already. It's already our Crisis. If we don't deal with it now in this 4T, we will see nothing BUT global warming from then on. It will be "coming" perpetually from then on, and we will be powerless to stop it. Civilization will end. Maybe that will be what happens in the 2090s. But it won't be a 4T, because the cycle will be over.

I am confident that the cycle will correspond to the planetary cycle I already knew about before reading anything about Strauss and Howe. The date was already set. But Mr. Howe agrees with that date. Normally, turnings last 21 years. I see no basis, given how little has been done to deal with our Crisis so far, for saying it will end sooner. We still face everything we faced in 2008, and more. We still have not decided to vote fully for a government capable of dealing with it, and the tycoons that run things are still not changing what they do fast and fully enough. There is some progress happening, but way more is needed before we get out of any crisis. The national division in the USA is also the heart of this 4T.

If we do make it through this 4T, we could still have the next 2T. It will definitely start in the mid to late 2040s. The planetary cycles could not be more clear on that. I see it much the same way as you do Mr. Galaxy, regarding the revolt against alienating, virtual tech and recovery of our humanness, although the ecology issue will still be front and center too and motivate more drastic ideals and changes. I see much emphasis on restoring community and local coops. One question is whether libertarianism will revive, or whether early in the 2T the "great society" will revive and continue and be extended worldwide. The Earth will still have warmed, causing further catastrophes through the 2T and beyond, but a reversal of the tipping points may well be happening if we get started on fixing the climate now.

[nguyenivy]

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Millennials turn 40? Say it ain't so!

The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

Unless we deal strongly with climate change before then, the fourth turning will never end.

Climate change is a baby alligator now. It will grow into a monster. 

Contrasting what the world can be in 80 years, climate change so far is a baby alligator. Any dog can likely overpower and devout a baby alligator. When the alligator is fully grown it will literally take a dog off what is the top of the food chain... as a meal. In Michigan the dog is the top of the food chain. In Florida, the alligator is.  Alligators in Lake Erie or the Hudson? God help us! 

I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming. How severe the Crisis will be will depend upon how severe it is. Prime farming areas will be inundated or desertified, which will cause the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. Tropical diseases will start appearing in places like Chicago, London, and Tokyo which now consider themselves exempt.  

Millennials are now the biggest market for housing, vehicles, appliances, furniture, and (once COVID is over) vacation travel. It won't be long before some of them have college-age kids. (Those are current teenagers of the next, likely Adaptive-Artist generation. As time passes, watch the sparks fly. Businesses will need to adapt; so will politicians. Those pols who can't adapt will find themselves losing elections.

I guess the big question is: How do we 'do it all'? In the US alone, we have: COVID-19 pandemic (still), democratic/political institutions under attack, racism/xenophobia, unbalanced economy/unfair treatment of employees, & global warming/climate change all going at once. It seems a tall order to be able to fix all these in what 8 years? I suppose it is possible given how fast life was uprooted when we entered the pandemic in March 2020. Climate change seems like it will be an ongoing thing well beyond the end of this 4T. Perhaps the entire next saeculum will be dedicated to solving this? Even though I agree that CC is the big one for us all, I feel like American society is going to prioritise everything else other than CC unless our hands are forced like they were for the early parts of the pandemic.

Also, I'm wondering if the pandemic will end up just taking up much of what remains of this turning & the other stuff will end up being pushed off into the next turning (can't get much else done with over 1000 Americans dying every day from the virus on top of other causes). Perhaps if we get a grip on it this year and can get totally out of the pandemic before about 2024, we still will have time to tackle the other things we really need to fix in US society. I say 2024 because I think assuming it ends this year, it will take another year or so for us to get used to post-pandemic life. Not everyone will feel comfortable behaving like 2019 straight away after 3 years of wearing a mask & staying far from people - as well as being conditioned to do that. I for one have 3 vaccine doses but have yet to go out without masking up (even before Omicron & Delta hit US shores).

[Eric the Green]

(01-08-2022, 03:55 AM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 02:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-02-2022, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Millennials turn 40? Say it ain't so!

The 4th turning won't end until 2029.

Unless we deal strongly with climate change before then, the fourth turning will never end.

Climate change is a baby alligator now. It will grow into a monster. 

Contrasting what the world can be in 80 years, climate change so far is a baby alligator. Any dog can likely overpower and devout a baby alligator. When the alligator is fully grown it will literally take a dog off what is the top of the food chain... as a meal. In Michigan the dog is the top of the food chain. In Florida, the alligator is.  Alligators in Lake Erie or the Hudson? God help us! 

I can already predict what will be the real cause of the Crisis of 2100: global warming. How severe the Crisis will be will depend upon how severe it is. Prime farming areas will be inundated or desertified, which will cause the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people. Tropical diseases will start appearing in places like Chicago, London, and Tokyo which now consider themselves exempt.  

Millennials are now the biggest market for housing, vehicles, appliances, furniture, and (once COVID is over) vacation travel. It won't be long before some of them have college-age kids. (Those are current teenagers of the next, likely Adaptive-Artist generation. As time passes, watch the sparks fly. Businesses will need to adapt; so will politicians. Those pols who can't adapt will find themselves losing elections.

I guess the big question is: How do we 'do it all'? In the US alone, we have: COVID-19 pandemic (still), democratic/political institutions under attack, racism/xenophobia, unbalanced economy/unfair treatment of employees, & global warming/climate change all going at once. It seems a tall order to be able to fix all these in what 8 years? I suppose it is possible given how fast life was uprooted when we entered the pandemic in March 2020. Climate change seems like it will be an ongoing thing well beyond the end of this 4T. Perhaps the entire next saeculum will be dedicated to solving this? Even though I agree that CC is the big one for us all, I feel like American society is going to prioritise everything else other than CC unless our hands are forced like they were for the early parts of the pandemic.

Also, I'm wondering if the pandemic will end up just taking up much of what remains of this turning & the other stuff will end up being pushed off into the next turning (can't get much else done with over 1000 Americans dying every day from the virus on top of other causes). Perhaps if we get a grip on it this year and can get totally out of the pandemic before about 2024, we still will have time to tackle the other things we really need to fix in US society. I say 2024 because I think assuming it ends this year, it will take another year or so for us to get used to post-pandemic life. Not everyone will feel comfortable behaving like 2019 straight away after 3 years of wearing a mask & staying far from people - as well as being conditioned to do that. I for one have 3 vaccine doses but have yet to go out without masking up (even before Omicron & Delta hit US shores).

No, climate change is a monster now. It is not acceptable to ignore that fact. It must be dealt with now or it will kill us. Only a monster is capable of doing the damage it is ALREADY doing to people and property now and to the entire living world.

The pandemic is just another aspect of our fourth turning. It happened because of neoliberalism, which ignores or casts out the need for government to help the people. Neoliberalism says we are self-reliant individuals who must compete and solve our own problems. It says taxes and regulations must be reduced and the benefits will trickle down. It has divided our nation. This is our current Crisis. Neoliberalism causes us to fail to deal with problems, including inequality/poverty, the climate crisis, the attack on democracy, and pandemics. We cannot ignore one of the results of neoliberalism to deal with others. They must all be dealt with now. Noone said a 4T would be easy. But it's all hitting us in the face now. One senator is blocking our way. Write to him and tell him to do his duty.

Again, Mr. Brower, you did not pay attention to what I said here. Global warming will NOT be the Crisis of 2100. If we fail to deal with it now, global warming will be our reality from today onward. We will have one continuous saecular winter from now onward. By 2100 our civilization will be ending, and we will not recover. There will be no more saeculum cycle. Besides, *I* am the "predictor" around here





Even if we deal with global warming now, it will be an ongoing problem after 2029, but it will get better. By 2100, it will be dealt with and receding. It's up to us, NOW. The Crisis of 2100 will either be something else than global warming, or else civilization and the entire cycle will be ending.

[pbrower2a]

How do we deal with global warming? We are going to need to tax the Hell or price the Hell out of behaviors that contribute to global warming. We will need to re-engineer cities to make them more communal in the sense that one could get almost any need met easily without taking a ten-mile drive to some box store. Yes, that will be trouble for Wal-Mart, but Dollar General will do fine. We will need heavy taxes on motor fuels and stiff licensing fees on vehicles that use them. Air traffic will have to be so priced that only elites (the equivalent of the Jet Set of the 1960's) will use them. We will need to re-engineer cities so that they will be more livable, which means more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists. Long-distance travel will be by train again. I can imagine freeways being rebuilt so that trains use a median that was once lanes dedicated to cars and trucks.

We are at the stage at which we can meet the need for all manufactured goods (including foodstuffs) in far fewer hours than the 40 or so that were deemed necessary in the 1930's. We are going to need smaller living spaces so that we are not tempted to buy, buy, and buy stuff. Many of us already rely upon the Internet for subscription news, video, and music. Many of us are at the position in which we must ask ourselves not so much whether something would be nice to have as what we really need to get rid of to make space for it.

We will need to change our diets to get tasty simulations of expensive food. I find fake crab meet as tasty as the real stuff. I might have some tonight. The technology for simulating meat and fish is nigh.

The single-family home is an anachronism. Yes, I know -- it is good for giving kids the privacy appropriate for going into their own private worlds and unleashing their imaginations and curiosity. The only single-family homes will be in rural areas, and even at that the corporate farmers are squeezing out the small farmers so that what were once single-family farmhouses are practically dormitories for farm workers.

Is it barbarous? New York City is the safest large city in America, and it is the city in which the middle class is effectively priced out of owning cars. No giant city has less-scary people than Tokyo. We will need to adapt... but America has always redefined itself while keeping personal liberty intact.

That's not the whole story, but all in all we need to keep the world's prime farmland from being inundated. We cannot be sure whether desertification will be a big problem; if that occurs along with inundation of lands on which live hundreds of millions of peasant farmers who make the food for the bulk of the world's industrial workers then we are cooked.

Eric: I think that I can draw some conclusions from history. Desperate people are more likely to fall for nationalistic demagogues, whether Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler. If Donald Trump is a genital yeast infection, Adolf Hitler was full-blown HIV-AIDS. At one time a general warning was that if you got a genital yeast infection you had done something that could have easily infected you with HIV/AIDS. America is not safe from someone who might promise to cull people that many potential voters see as "vermin". The more stress that people feel, the more likely they are to fall for some vile person who claims to have a cure for everyone. This can as easily be from the Left (the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) as from the Right (Viktor Orban in Hungary). Hugo Chavez distorted social democracy, which usually has a good reputation on human rights and civil liberties, into an authoritarian order; Orban did much the same with "Christian democracy", which also has a good reputation. Chavez was not a commie and Orban was not a fascist.

If you were to ask me which country now has the most solid liberal democracy, I would put the Federal Republic of Germany near the top -- yet its two main parties are the Christian Social Union (Christian Democracy) and the Social Democratic Party (self explanatory). Political parties can go bad, as the "Party of Lincoln" showed when it became the Party of Donald Trump. Imagine a country in which advantages such as college education, faster advancement in military rank, and loans for housing and small businesses go those who as kids who got indoctrinated in a politicized youth group. Imagine finding that the only valid sources of news are those that glorify the Leader. Imagine that government-sponsored militias are the exemplar of "gun rights". Imagine that anyone who runs afoul of the Administration becomes a helpless pariah who risks losing a job with real pay... you know, you made a political joke and you have gone from being a veterinarian to being a farm laborer or you have gone from being an engineer to a clerk at a convenience store. Imagine that the government has a narrow range of options for music, video, and print. Imagine that reading material contrary to the views of the leadership is highly restricted if not destroyed (whether burned in a perverse ceremony or pulped for toilet paper). If a preacher or a teacher Imagine that if you are a member of a minority ethnic or religious group that you can suddenly become the target of a hateful campaign. What is done to pedophiles might be done instead to Chinese-Americans or to Muslims. If you are a teacher or a preacher, then you toe the political line or you go to prison.

We are not there, but the 45th President made baby steps in those directions. He nearly got re-elected, and he still claims that he would have been re-elected except for cheating in some large cities. If he is one of the few who harbor such a delusion, then we are safe. But if millions believe this, then we are not safe. Few people are members of sieg-heil Nazi or ideologically-similar cross-burning cults (or is it Kross-burning Kults?), and few Americans believe that Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin offer a reliable way into a glorious future.

I cannot deny that those who, like Classic X'er in some other threads, are Americans. Many Americans are like him, especially among white rural folks who know few people unlike themselves. Where those people dominate, people who really are liberals know enough to avoid deprecating Trump. I can say this: if one lives on the Reservation, then one knows that one is not like everyone else. If one lives in the overwhelmingly-Hispanic areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley one knows that as one goes farther north that there will be be more people who look very different. If one is a Muslim in Dearborn or a Jew in Kiryas Joel, one knows that one lives in a largely-Christian country. If gay -- you know that it is wise to make sure to not make gay passes at people scared of homosexuality. People like Classic X'er and Donald Trump are delighted to divide others unlike him into factions hostile to each other. The good thing is that it isn't working! The bad thing is that I need the qualifier "yet".