The Panic of 1857/The Panic of 2022

[Victorian Jim Dandy]

Both major causes of civil war in the United States?

[Anthony '58]

Actually the panic happened in 2020 - not 2022: In April of 2020, unemployment soared to 14.7%, America's highest jobless rate since 1939.

So you could cleverly call it "The Pan(dem)ic of 2020."

[nguyenivy]

2020 lines up better with the dates considering where we may be as a country at the end of 2024. It was exactly 4 years from Panic of 1857 to the start of the Civil War, right?

[Eric the Green]

The Dred Scott Decision happened on March 6, 1857. Uranus was at 21°35 Taurus, Neptune at 19°56 Pisces. What may become known as Dobbs versus Jackson (and now already referred to just as "Dobbs"), the decision overturning Roe v Wade, happened on June 24, 2022. Uranus was at 17°27 Taurus, Neptune at 25°26 Pisces (actually more like 23 degrees, considering the effect of the position of the Earth relative to the Sun in June as opposed to March). Similar positions in the great planetary cycles, the cosmic clock of history and its rhymes and generations. The forthright assertions of Justice Taney in Dred Scott putting down blacks and those of Alito in Dobbs v Jackson dismissing the claims of women are eerily similar. So are the beliefs of both that these arrogant decisions would settle the divisions in the country. As Stephen Colbert calls it, kaboombaya. Dred Scott helped foment the Civil War 3-4 years later. What will Dobbs v Jackson do in that time?

The primary rationale for the Court's ruling in Dred Scott was Justice Taney's assertion that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political landscape. I quote Taney from wikipedia:
We think ... that [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them....They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

The decision on June 24, 2022 has no well known name yet, but I think it's Dobbs versus Jackson according to Politico https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02...n-00029473

I quote here from npr: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/110230587...n-overturn
In a historic and far-reaching decision, the U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade on Friday, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe "must be overruled" because they were "egregiously wrong," the arguments "exceptionally weak" and so "damaging" that they amounted to "an abuse of judicial authority."... "We hold," he wrote, that "the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion."

Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama. They said that the court decision means that "young women today will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers." Indeed, they said the court's opinion means that "from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term even at the steepest personal and familial costs."
Responding to the dissent, Alito wrote “The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a constitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a ‘deeply rooted’ one, in this Nation’s history and tradition." https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/politics/...index.html

[pbrower2a]

My interpretation: this is but the first salvo of assaults on liberal legislation and USSC decisions from environmental protection to voting rights for people not in ownership of property to workers' rights to organize and strike to contraception. Trump's three grossly-unqualified, politically charged judicial stooges seem connected to a political cult that holds that the only rightful basis of political power is economic power. To put it crudely, it holds that "he who owns the gold makes the rules"... which is reasonable enough when one is using someone else's money in an effort to establish a profitable business, but if it is simply a pretext for plutocracy, then it is the dehumanizing principle behind feudalism, chattel slavery, and fascism.

Plutocratic rule assumes that the only people capable of creating prosperity are the ones who already have it, and that anything necessary for anything more than bare survival by workers is pointless. This also fits well with the ideology characteristic of MBA educations lacking as a rule in humanistic values and preparations, let alone with any ethical contemplation. We did well enough without plutocratic ideology beginning with the New Deal, and when we started to make steps in the plutocratic direction we got nothing but more disparity between the haves and have-nots.

To say that America did better in creating prosperity when the executives had some experience on the shop floor, teller row, switchboard, loading dock, or the mail room and had some idea of how things were for people stuck there is no exaggeration. Cracking the metaphoric whip harder and squeezing more out of people with more fear of job loss while pay is stagnant creates as much distress as it does to create wealth that will mostly be frittered away in the sybaritic excess of economic elites.

Need I also tell you that back in the old days the executives were generally people with long service to their employers, people who had shown their loyalty over years, and people too old to live the Good Life that MBA grads expect to enjoy by age 35. The old-time, GI-generation executives that I knew typically were married to their high-school or college sweetheart after nearly 30 years; they wore the sorts of suits that one would expect working people to wear to church on Sunday (yes, they were men, as it was still a male-chauvinist time, one aspect that I do not expect to see revert in the forthcoming Saeculum). Sports cars? They were too old for those. Weekend trips to the ski lodge or a week in Europe? Out of the question, and not only because travel was much slower in those days.

Here is my fear: the economic elites of America want super-cheap labor, captive markets, no welfare, heavier depletion of natural resources for quick profits, and exorbitant rent. After an abortion ban comes a ban on contraceptives. If the world goes to Hell in the next Crisis Era, then so what? That's the Crisis of 2010, and I can see that as consequences of overpopulation, resource depletion, and diminishing food supplies. Those elites are inordinately selfish and myopic.

Global warming will inundate many of the places that now feed a couple billion people and may cause desertification of much land that is now just moist enough to grow wheat. In the middle latitudes. wheat is the last crop on the moist side of a divide between semi-desert and barely-humid climates Examples include the Canadian Prairie Provinces, the eastern parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; and in Europe most of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, and Ukraine.

There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).

If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.

I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!

[Eric the Green]

"If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific."

Yes, and much of the horror will unfold during the years following our own failed turning. The horror will climax during the next 4T and beyond.

Right now, it looks like one bought-and-paid-for phony Democrat blocked the needed remedy, and the 2022 midterm voters are likely to punish Biden for what this one senator did, and that will make failure in this turning much more likely. And if Biden is unable to run and win in 2024, then the chance for turning our turning around will vanish, since it appears no other Democrat is willing or able to step forward and win, and we can depend on a Republican president and congress to continue the decline into horror.

[pbrower2a]

(06-27-2022, 12:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

Quote:"If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific."

Yes, and much of the horror will unfold during the years following our own failed turning. The horror will climax during the next 4T and beyond.

Right now, it looks like one bought-and-paid-for phony Democrat blocked the needed remedy, and the 2022 midterm voters are likely to punish Biden for what this one senator did, and that will make failure in this turning much more likely. And if Biden is unable to run and win in 2024, then the chance for turning our turning around will vanish, since it appears no other Democrat is willing or able to step forward and win, and we can depend on a Republican president and congress to continue the decline into horror.

The recent Congressional hearings on the Capitol Putsch and the scheme to replace valid slates of electors with false ones looks worse every report -- for Republicans.  Good things are that 

(1) the GOP is splintering, with the guilty side purging out the few who put the rule of law over power
(2) inflation seems to be stalling
(3) this may be my observation -- but I see fewer Trump banners and signs
(4) much of the political dissent is against a Supreme Court ruling for which Democratic politicians are held harmless

At this point it looks as if the "Three Trump Stooges" Court can still do much legal mischief, and not only on abortion. One area is voting rights, and I can imagine some state legislatures deciding that only those who own property have the right to vote in state and federal elections with the concurrence of the Three Trump Stooges.

Donald Trump and the current GOP represent plutocracy with a fundamentalist flair. ...With the defeat of  Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election I had thought that we had gone from perhaps as few as ten years from a proletarian revolution to at least sixty. We may have gone to twenty.

[pbrower2a]

No two Crises are quite alike. The contests for who prevails and who fails is never the same. Obviously we are not in a shooting war with Germany, Italy, and Japan this time,. we do not have a struggle to establish whether chattel slavery. would survive or die, or a struggle for independence from a despotic king.

The mass death this time so far comes from an infectious disease of the type that advanced industrial countries either do not get any more or automatically handle quickly and efficiently. Except that Donald J. Trump, hardly a model of prompt, effective, and competent responses to a crisis, fumbled his role worse than a running back enduring certain illegal tackles. We also have a Constitutional Crisis whose full measure of deceit and danger looks all the worse after some Congressional hearings. Some people believe in the Rule of Law and some don't. It is best when practically everyone in high office respects the rule of law. Democracy depends to no small extent upon participants in the electoral process recognizing their clear losses.

For all its flaws, liberal democracy that we Americans have known under both Democrats and Republicans has far better solved more of the problems that government can solve than any other sort of government. I wouldn't vote for any politician who claims that he can win a war, create new prosperity, or create a more wholesome culture if only we leave everything (including civil liberties that we abandon) at the expense of essential liberties. All grand projects can go terribly wrong, as the most optimistic such program ever  (Marxism-Leninism) became a grave nightmare.

If we must choose between losing some colonies or near-colonies or keeping or gaining our freedom, then we must choose freedom and divest ourselves of the bad habit of lording it over people who would rather govern themselves. If we must abandon some ethnic, sectarian, or class privileges to save our liberties, then we must free ourselves of privileges unworthy of the cost. A "secret plan for economic growth" usually implies making things great for an elite while making everyone else miserable.

Maybe the difference between the Crash of 1930 (the real crash was in 1930, as 1929 was only a heady peak)  and the Crash of 2008  is that we Americans got out of the Crash of 2008 too cheaply -- with too few political reforms to strengthen democracy and too few political reforms to prevent a similar economic collapse. I predict that if we get an economic meltdown in the next two years the result will be a right-wing Presidency that, even if not as hollow and perverse as that of Trump, will load great suffering onto anyone not still rich and institutionalize such with political "reforms" that entrench a New Peonage indefinitely -- one possibly enforced with torture chambers, labor camps, and sites of mass killings of dissidents or pariahs. That is, until some environmental disaster or a political debacle.  Corporate America wants to be through with health and safety regulations, bans on scams, progressive taxes, labor unions, and college professors offering any political values other than absolute plutocracy.

The Marxists are right in that the class struggle is real. Maybe in better times a political system mitigates it through social reforms and means of contesting the will of the Master Class... but in times in which the Master Class gets unconstrained power... and its morality is harsh judgment with neither charity, caution, nor conscience, things can go very bad and stay so.

Extremists of both the Right and the Left  seek to make things very bad very fast so that they can either take everything possible (economic elitists on the Right) or make thins so horrible that a proletarian revolution is inevitable. So things went in Russia during the political calamity of World War I and the inevitable civil war between Reds and Whites. Bad as Lenin's Commies were, I have no cause to believe that the Whites would have been any better -- if my reading of Doctor Zhivago. suggests the reality of both sides.

[nguyenivy]

(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: My interpretation: this is but the first salvo of assaults on liberal  legislation and USSC decisions from environmental protection to voting rights for people not in ownership of property to workers' rights to organize and strike to contraception. Trump's three grossly-unqualified, politically charged judicial stooges seem connected to a political cult that holds that the only rightful basis of political power is economic power. To put it crudely, it holds that "he who owns the gold makes the rules"... which is reasonable enough when one is using someone else's money in an effort to establish a profitable business, but if it is simply a pretext for plutocracy, then it is the dehumanizing principle behind feudalism, chattel slavery, and fascism.

Plutocratic rule assumes that the only people capable of creating prosperity are the ones who already have it, and that anything necessary for anything more than bare survival by workers is pointless. This also fits well with the ideology characteristic of MBA educations lacking as a rule in humanistic values and preparations, let alone with any ethical contemplation.  We did well enough without plutocratic ideology beginning with the New Deal, and when we started to make steps in the plutocratic direction we got nothing but more disparity between the haves and have-nots.

To say that America did better in creating prosperity when the executives had some experience on the shop floor, teller row, switchboard, loading dock, or the mail room and had some idea of how things were for people stuck there is no exaggeration. Cracking the metaphoric whip harder and squeezing more out of people with more fear of job loss while pay is stagnant creates as much distress as it does to create wealth that will mostly be frittered away in the sybaritic excess of economic elites.

Need I also tell you that back in the old days the executives were generally people with long service to their employers, people who had shown their loyalty over years, and people too old to live the Good Life that MBA grads expect to enjoy by age 35. The old-time, GI-generation executives that I knew typically were married to their high-school or college sweetheart after nearly 30 years; they wore the sorts of suits that one would expect working people to wear to church on Sunday (yes, they were men, as it was still a male-chauvinist time, one aspect that I do not expect to see revert in the forthcoming Saeculum). Sports cars? They were too old for those. Weekend trips to the ski lodge or a week in Europe? Out of the question, and not only because travel was much slower in those days.

Here is my fear: the economic elites of America want super-cheap labor, captive markets, no welfare, heavier depletion of natural resources for quick profits, and exorbitant rent. After an abortion ban comes a ban on contraceptives. If the world goes to Hell in the next Crisis Era, then so what? That's the Crisis of 2010, and I can see that as consequences of overpopulation, resource depletion, and diminishing food supplies. Those elites are inordinately selfish and myopic.

Global warming will inundate many of the places that now feed a couple billion people and may cause desertification of much land that is now just moist enough to grow wheat. In the middle latitudes. wheat is the last crop on the moist side of a divide between semi-desert and barely-humid climates  Examples include the Canadian Prairie Provinces, the eastern parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; and in Europe most of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, and Ukraine.

There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).

If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.

I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!

You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right?  I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change.  If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end.  Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?

[David Horn]

(06-28-2022, 02:01 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).

If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.

I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!

You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right?  I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change.  If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end.  Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?

If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now.  I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.

[nguyenivy]

(06-28-2022, 05:04 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-28-2022, 02:01 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).

If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.

I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!

You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right?  I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change.  If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end.  Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?

If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now.  I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.

Would that mean the 1T in between will be more like a 2nd 3T and not a real 1T? What if we're in another saeculum anomaly again, like S&H claimed about the 1800s missing a turning? I can't imagine yet another 20+ years of trickle-down economics (!) with no changes.

[pbrower2a]

(06-28-2022, 05:04 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-28-2022, 02:01 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(06-27-2022, 10:50 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ... There's no technological fix for hunger, and hungry people upset with flagrant displays of conspicuous consumption by people devoid of conscience are exactly the ones to fall for Marxist rhetoric. Marxist ideology among its intelligentsia may be abstruse, but Marxist propaganda directed at semi-literate masses (and the optimum level of learning for a nasty social order such as a plutocratic nightmare is marginal literacy).

If we handle this Crisis Era badly, either solving nothing or -- worse -- regressing to an economic order that serves only elites while squeezing, bleeding, and brutalizing everyone else, then the next one will be a horror that will make World War II look gentle. The wars will be more destructive and the genocide more horrific.

I repeat -- global warming and overpopulation (and the two are connected) are crimes against humanity!

You mean Crisis of 2100 (78 years from now), right?  I believe given humanity's current behaviour, we aren't fully ready to deal with what will likely be the showcase event of that time: full impacts of climate change.  If things really do play out in the ways the theory claims (the 1T & 3T after Crisis nothing major happens), we will have totally missed our shot by decade end.  Are 2Ts usually a time to fix issues that affect the world as a whole or more localised/national issues?

If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now.  I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.

The next 2T would be an Awakening Era, and if America has stagnated culturally and politically to an extreme extent, then we can expect a monster of an Awakening Era. The oddity may be that the Millennial generation finds itself in a situation in which it has no hubris -- no legacy of saving the Outer World from a calamity. The worst that I can imagine is the Trump agenda being largely enshrined and entrenched without input from the Millennial generation. The time would be objectionable not only for its cultural staleness (just listen to the record collections that most GI's bequeathed to their families if they were not the cultural elite  -- no, don't!) but also for moral failures of economics such as cronyism and economic disparity as well as corruption built into the system to ensure that "he who owns the gold makes the rules" with no room for dissent. (OK, if one is investing other people's money, then one has responsibilities to one's lender or sugar daddy. If it is a movie or a construction project, then there is a reasonable assumption that the funds go  into making the movie and not across gaming tables, up one's nose (cocaine), or into the vaginas of high-cost whores. If politics... then that means that the tycoons, executives, and big landowners decide that government of THE people, by THE people, and for THE people shall not be challenged even if the arrangement creates mass suffering, ravages the environment and depletes resources, or initiate wars for profit that turn out badly).

Should life be grim -- and it would be if the economic elites could restore the social relationships of the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties -- then even some healthy demands for hedonism would constitute a significant part of the Awakening.

[David Horn]

(06-28-2022, 09:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(06-28-2022, 05:04 PM)David Horn Wrote: If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now.  I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.

Would that mean the 1T in between will be more like a 2nd 3T and not a real 1T? What if we're in another saeculum anomaly again, like S&H claimed about the 1800s missing a turning? I can't imagine yet another 20+ years of trickle-down economics (!) with no changes.

We haven't been in this position as a nation before -- not even as a cluster of colonies.  This 4T is both obvious and not compelling.  Why?  Because we're being lead by the geriatric remains of both parties -- especiall the Democrats.  It's nigh unto impossible to progress if the people making the decisions of how to go about it have little future themselves.  If that changes, my opinion may also.

For a quick overview of 1Ts and 2Ts following failed 4Ts, look to the nations that lost WW-II.  The Finns did very well, but they were mainly enemies of the USSR, not allies of the Nazis.  The Italians flailed around looking for the next thing to do, and are finally back on track.  Both the Germans and Japanese went hyper pacifist, and the Japanese are just now emerging from that.  Those are guideposts with little guidance.  How would we handle it?  Good question.

[pbrower2a]

(06-30-2022, 11:59 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-28-2022, 09:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(06-28-2022, 05:04 PM)David Horn Wrote: If this 4T dies on the vine, and that's looking more and more likely at this point, then the 2T will be the crisis response we're lacking now.  I fear it may be a kinda-war of autocrats and anarchists -- not quite real-world dungeons and dragons, but close.

Would that mean the 1T in between will be more like a 2nd 3T and not a real 1T? What if we're in another saeculum anomaly again, like S&H claimed about the 1800s missing a turning? I can't imagine yet another 20+ years of trickle-down economics (!) with no changes.

We haven't been in this position as a nation before -- not even as a cluster of colonies.  This 4T is both obvious and not compelling.  Why?  Because we're being lead by the geriatric remains of both parties -- especially the Democrats.  It's nigh unto impossible to progress if the people making the decisions of how to go about it have little future themselves.  If that changes, my opinion may also.

For a quick overview of 1Ts and 2Ts following failed 4Ts, look to the nations that lost WW-II.  The Finns did very well, but they were mainly enemies of the USSR, not allies of the Nazis.  The Italians flailed around looking for the next thing to do, and are finally back on track.  Both the Germans and Japanese went hyper pacifist, and the Japanese are just now emerging from that.  Those are guideposts with little guidance.  How would we handle it?  Good question.

Mussolini, a young demagogue with few set ideas in 1922 but a bloated ego, castigated the "senile" Italian politicians of his day who seemed to not fit the temper of his time and of recent WWI vets who were even younger than he. "Young" for the American presidency typically means in one's mid-40's (Obama, Kennedy, TR, Grant as Presidents: Dewey as a candidate. 

The fault with Mussolini wasn't that he was a fogy as a young leader; the problem was with the ideas that he had. Mussolini was an Idealist-reactive cusp, and he reflected Idealist vices (selfishness, ruthlessness, and arrogance) with little pragmatism -- unlike FDR or Obama who were born in the last year of an Idealist generation or the first year of a reactive generation.   

We get old nominees because people at least among the vocational elites are living into advanced age  (thank the GI's for setting a pattern of remaining active intellectually and physically into advanced age, a pattern that elite Silent and Boomers have followed, and as first-wave X approach elderhood (Obama turns 61 in August) they seem likely to follow that pattern. If something remains in practice over four successive generations, then it has become part of the national character. A hint about Obama in his sixties: Abraham Lincoln was considered an old man when president, and Obama is five years older than Lincoln ever got, and only two years younger than FDR was when FDR died.

The benefit of the elderly as politicians is that they have Seen It All. If they are really wise they remember and apply lessons that they learned from elderly people while children. I am satisfied that there never really were any unqualified Good Old Days. Maybe real estate was cheaper, so people who worked at the waterfront could live nearby in apartments with waterfront views. Other than that, there were more diseases to kill people because there were then no antibiotics. Horse-droppings are just as much pollution as are vehicle exhausts today (especially since leaded fuels are no longer available). people do not smoke as much as they used to (that habit likely peaked among the Lost and has since been sliding until there are now old people like me who have never smoked a cigarette in their lives. No, I am not a Mormon, but I am glad to have "Mormon lungs". Alcohol consumption has also taken a slide (more "quality and not quantity"), especially for those like me who can no longer hold their liquor.  People are no longer working to exhaustion on substandard food as they used to. Maybe the entertainment is broader than it used to be, but one must look deeper and be more selective.

(Cheap swipe: if you are tempted to see Jurassic World: Dominion... don't.  The special effects are stale, the writing is rich in tired cliché, and the story ends with a sappy ending in which dinosaurs coexist with giants of our time such as horses, whales, and elephants. The human behavior is simply beastly (face it: much of the animal world would be perfectly happy if we humans were to go extinct and take our brutal dogs and monstrous cats with us) as it involves a sleazy high-tech corporation and the horrific world of animal trafficking. This flick probably kills the franchise. The story lines have likely been worked out like a mine whose profitable seams are no more). I do not make a point of watching bad movies because such is a waste of time and money. 

People can learn throughout their lives until they go senile; the relevant question is whether they get the right lessons and draw the right conclusions. Not only are the wise living longer; so are the scatterbrains who see an attractive slogan such as "Make America Great Again" and ask too few questions. people who can connect to someone simultaneously immature, intellectually rigid and lazy, and senile can vote for someone as hideous as Donald Trump.