Is President Biden too old and dated, or is he the gray champion

[David Horn]

(09-14-2022, 01:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: So far, he and the Democrats have governed more like tyrants than Americans so to speak. I assume that you are a partisan Democrat or Democratic go along like most everyone else here. So, you may not be able to see or managed to avoid the unpleasantries often experienced by those associated with the American right. So, where would  you fit during a war between today's Left and the American right?

I might ask the questions in reverse. Where is the tyrany? Where is the war? What is your fascination with autocrats like Trump and Putin?

You seem to be financially successful. Why is it an afront to you that others might like the same?

[pbrower2a]

(09-14-2022, 01:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-08-2022, 06:09 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I think that Biden's generational archetype clearly shows - he is an Artist, Silent gen, he's a basically nice guy who just wants a fair world for everyone, and yeah, too old to be the Grey Champion. I believe that he is sincere in his statements and don't understand how he gets portrayed in such a negative light by his opponents. It's laughable that the right tries to portray him as a tyrant (same as they did for Obama, who was a reserved, cautious technocrat suited for the 1T.) But I also think it's amusing that the Internet has basically tried to transform Biden's archetype with the "Dark Brandon" meme. It's like the demand was there so the Internet just digitally mastered a Grey Champion out of available materials.

(image snipped)

So far, he and the Democrats have governed more like tyrants than Americans so to speak. I assume that you are a partisan Democrat or Democratic go along like most everyone else here. So, you may not be able to see or managed to avoid the unpleasantries often experienced by those associated with the American right. So, where would  you fit during a war between today's Left and the American right?

What causes you to think of Barack Obama as a tyrant?

Wikipedia gives an overview of what makes a political boss a tyrant:

Quote:A tyrant (from Ancient Greek τύραννος ([i]túrannos)[/i] 'absolute ruler'), in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means.[1][2] The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right,[3] yet the word had a neutral connotation during the Archaic and early Classical periods.[4] However, Greek philosopher Plato saw tyrannos as a negative word, and on account of the decisive influence of philosophy on politics,[citation needed] its negative connotations only increased, continuing into the Hellenistic period.


The philosophers Plato and Aristotle defined a tyrant as a person who rules without law, using extreme and cruel methods against both his own people and others.[5][6] The Encyclopédie defined the term as a usurper of sovereign power who makes "his subjects the victims of his passions and unjust desires, which he substitutes for laws".[7] In the late fifth and fourth centuries BC, a new kind of tyrant, one who had the support of the military, arose – specifically in Sicily.

One can apply accusations of tyranny to a variety of types of government:

• to government by one individual (in an autocracy)
  
  
• to government by a minority (in an oligarchy, tyranny of the minority)
  
  
• to government by a majority (in a democracy, tyranny of the majority)
  
  

OK, let's name names. 


As of 2006


Omar al-Bashir (Sudan)
Kim Jong-il (North Korea)
Than Shwe (Burma)
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
Hu Jintao (China)
King Abdullah (Saudi Arabia)
Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenistan)
Mswati III (Swaziland)
Teodoro Obiang Nguema (Equatorial Guinea)
Muammar al-Qaddafi (Libya)
Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan)
Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)
Bashar al-Assad (Syria)
Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia)
Paul Biya (Cameroon)
Choummaly Sayasone (Laos)

This is a diverse lot in origins and ideology. It does not include the recent addition to Hell (Idi A-murderin') or a man who would go to Hell on December 30 (Satan Hussein) that year, arguably two tyrants even worse than those on that list. Id did not include the defanged tyrants, the commie Haile Mengistu of Ethiopia and the anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet who believed firmly that those who own the gold make the rules for everyone else -- suffer under the thrall of that gold and its owners. Haile Mengistu has more blood on his hands than any other living person. 

So the pattern is the same, whether the tyrant is an absolute monarch such as Nero, Caligula or Commodus in ancient Rome or a more recent absolute ruler like Ivan the Terrible, an overt fascist like (insert plenty of names) or an overt Commie (insert plenty of names), or someone who believes only in himself. Life under any of those tyrants is helpless horror with no compensation other than survival at the dehumanizing level of livestock. 

Mercifully this is all un-American because we have generally turned away from the siren call of collective rage and had no military figure who thought that he could solve everything through the repudiation of humanistic values. Before one has the arrogance to say that the West is free from the threat, we have had Franco in Spain, Papadoupoulos in Greece... and don't forget all the Latin-American figures including Castro, Pinochet, and Maduro... Latin America is now the cultural core of the West. 

Let's start with the obvious: to be an America does not believe that one believes in an ideology similar to yours. Thank God -- or more precisely our Founding Fathers and others who have supplemented democracy for white, property-owning males with votes for women, removal of property qualifications for voting, and of course the consolidation of voting rights for blacks. Those supplements have made democracy more inclusive without debasing it. Freedom only for like-minded people? Tyrants have typically given much leeway to those who figuratively kiss their @$$es and more literally do their dirty work. Such a pretense of freedom is but a sham, one that requires mass suffering of helpless people.  Property rights can be taken away at the whim of a ruler. A career can vanish, especially if one does not have an international career (think of Greek liberals Melina Mercouri and the recently-deceased Irene Pappas in Greece who could at least act and sing outside of Greece).

Considering that the USA has great diversity in ethnicity and religion, it is best that no group of people gets to decide what it means to be an American. I have good cause to believe that neither the New England WASP nor hick German-Americans can impose their norms upon others who have different traditions. (My philosophical, political, and cultural values ill fit the New England WASP way or to hick German-Americans who comprise the vast majority of my ancestry, but that is a different story, and I would want neither of those to dominate America. In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a significant number of people associated with Mexican settlement became American in voting rights and formal equality to other Americans. Some hold tight to those traditions, and people can be proud of those. Their traditions are as valid and viable as mine. Let's not ignore the small but significant Jewish population which has had subtle but pervasive (and almost entirely favorable) influence upon American life far out of proportion to its numbers. Let's not forget the blacks who to the extent that they cannot hide their origins in the dehumanizing horror of slavery have created a way of life that, however artificial (they have no cultural heritage from Africa -- only genes), has proved distinctive and creative. 

I'm sure that you consider Barack Obama a tyrant because he does not fully satisfy your dreams of making life especially rewarding for you and your kind at the expense of everyone else. Obama may be the rarity of an American who is the son of an African immigrant and a white* American supposedly of old white American stock, but he recognizes (as I do) the validity of traditions other than mine. Recognition of the validity and worthiness of traditions neither dominant nor one's own is obviously inconsistent with tyranny. Obama is close to the political tradition essential to democracy in which give-and-take is the norm if one is to accomplish anything. A dominant clique getting everything at the expense of others is far closer to the norms of tyranny, as was so for non-whites under Apartheid in South Africa.  He did nothing to prevent Republican majorities to form first in the House and then in the Senate, with a Republican replacing him as President. You can call that weak leadership in contrast to what someone like Fidel Castro did, ensuring that he had a reliable majority in an obedient legislature full of ideological myrmidons. Maybe Obama could never achieve his full agenda.  Donald Trump won in what we must all accept is a free and honest election even if we have some question of secretive manipulation. 

If Obama had decided in January 2017 that he would thwart a lawful transfer of the Presidency to Trump with the aid of a delusional mass movement and had succeeded, then you would be right to call him a tyrant. I have no idea of what Trump would be like in a second term, but we got a foretaste in his adoption of deeds consistent with tyrants of other places and times. The Republican Party, whose ideology is identical with that of the  insane John Birch Society, would surely acquiesce in establishing an order in which those who own the gold make the rules for us all, and those rules include the obligation to all but worship the figurative gold and its owners or retainers of those owners. Suffer with a smile! I have known that all too well in your supposedly-glorious capitalism. Plutocracy looks like Plato called the tyranny of a minority. Think also of Apartheid in South Africa. 

Common with tyranny is a Cult of Personality. If Dubya took kitten-like steps in that direction, Trump took a leopard-like charge.  You tell me. The general assessment of President Obama is close to that of Dwight Eisenhower,  arguably the best analogue to Obama in conduct, temperament, and in effectiveness as President (somebody has to be most similar to Obama), and even having an electoral maps more analogous to each other than Obama's maps of victory were to any prior Democrat.      

Trump's ideology sounds like "We the Elite take everything desirable, and you peons or proles get the beatings". He ordered violence toward protesters. He cultivated support from the violent Three Percenters and Proud Boys. A hint about the Proud Boys: forget about taking any trip to Canada or New Zealand, where you will be turned away as a member of an organization designated as terrorist. Add to this the Qult known as QAnon. Oh, so Obama hurt your feelings! A real tyrant can hurt far more than your feelings. 

Much as I despise him, Donald Trump is still an American. I must of course recognize that the serial killer BTK is still an American. 


*in fact Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother, has been shown to be 1/16 of sub-Saharan African origin through a slave ancestor, but she did not know that for much of her life; by the one-drop rule, was black).      

[pbrower2a]

So what is the difference between tyranny and freedom? In a working democracy (freedom) nobody gets everything that he wants (especially for those at the very top the certainty of winning the next election if there are elections), everybody gets something, and anyone capable is expected of making a contribution. Human life is valuable to the extent that even if there is war, the citizens of a democracy are not cannon fodder to be sacrificed cheaply as the norm for tyrannical regimes like the demonic Third Reich, fascist Italy, thug Japan, the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Satan Hussein's Iraq. Democracies ultimately win wars by winning the peace, which means that they ensure people whose regime must be defeated that a military loss has no personal consequence. The three most warlike Axis powers (well, at least the western part of Germany until 1989) haven't made any trouble -- not that I would want to mess with either of them. The worst battlefronts have been those between totalitarian regimes -- Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union and Iran against Iraq; whoever wins, the People of both sides lose, and oh, do they lose in lives and welfare. It is telling that what scared the CIA most was a war between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic.  They starve so that their regime can feed the cannon fodder just enough to sacrifice the cannon fodder.

Democracy works. It works well enough that what may be the most totalitarian of all states, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK] (the official designation of that horrid regime is four lies in five words:  the DPRK is no democracy; it in no way serves the people of northern Korea; it is for all practical purposes a hereditary and absolute monarchy; the people of the South have no cause to want incorporation into it, has horrors comparable to Nazi Germany even to the point of the Nazi doctrine of Sippenhaft -- that if the enemy of the state gets away or dies before the State gets a chance to punish the fellow adequately, family members get punished.  It looks as if the word "of" isn't a blatant lie, as it is a mere preposition that would not even appear in some languages that have a genitive case such as Latin, Greek, Finnish, or German.

Human life is also something to foster through high-quality education (democracy requires a solid basis in education; if a people is to be ignorant it cannot remain free. It is not enough to have education teach only bare literacy and some minimal technical skills. To be most effective people need to be wise enough to read between the lines, something that tyrannical regimes find too hazardous. People well educated can be more effective at complex tasks and enrich life through creativity from which our souls prosper. I doubt that you have ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four, an easy book to find and not particularly difficult reading. The "socialist" state is a dog-eat-dog plutocracy; people cannot think or create, so life is gloomy; prosperity is a farce. Wars are frequent and bloody. Worst of all, everything that the government says is a lie, the sort of lie in which words are completely stripped of all meaning so that people are unable to express any feeling. Critics have faulted Orwell for having no sizzle in the Romance between Winston and Julia, but that is deliberate: unable to express love in words, Winston and Julia can't express love, so they can at most feel an animalistic attraction. Complex language is a key factor in making us fully human; take that away and we might as well be frogs or snakes. 

Human nature at its best complicated enough to make it interesting even to smart people. We have dogs, cats, and some smart birds (cockatoos, parakeets, and the like) as pets, and those critters are themselves complex; tropical fish are really decorations. Really-smart people read complicated fiction as by Goethe, Dostoevsky, Hugo, and Faulkner and get excited by excellent poetry. You can tell that Eric is brilliant due to his love for the music of J S Bach. Bach is not for dullards. People who know their art, music and literature are rich in ways that dimwits who cannot see the word luxury as a commercial hustle are poor even if they get some expensive stuff. Even great cinema melds art, literature, and often music, examples of such manifesting itself in The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain, Cabaret, and Chicago. When overpopulation and conspicuous consumption become incompatible due to global warming (something that smart people understand well because they understand the raw science), the more intellectual life will be the only satisfying life.

Democracies demand that people pay taxes, but those are overt and predictable. Tyrannies have other ways to exact contributions such as unpaid, non-voluntary overtime, requisitions of food from farmers (often sold overseas for weapons), and dubious charities that end up enriching the elites. In 1935 the lowest real wages to be found in Europe were in the Soviet Union (no surprise) and Nazi Germany. Workers had no right to strike and no right even to seek employment elsewhere without consent of one's employers. Nazi Germany was so reactionary that it introduced industrial serfdom. 

OK, so democracy has its faults. Nobody gets everything that he wants except by pure chance. Everybody has a chance at a good life, and people with severe disabilities get sustenance. Children and the elderly get protection from the worst that capitalism can exact. People have genuine consumer choice. People who have the capacity to gain something from education can get it. Overt taxes are all that one pays to a government which for the vast majority gives a net positive between contributions and benefits. The political system ensures that everyone gets something desirable. People get to live in accordance with the dictates of conscience -- and I would rather obey my conscience than a Josef Stalin or even a wannabe dictator such as Donald Trump. Tyranny? Complain and you might be tortured or killed. Who needs a conscience if one must obey someone devoid of any moral constraints?

I am a fundamentalist on humanist democracy. Humanism is the only workable ideology, and democracy is the only way to ensure that the common man gets a decent shake. I have far more in common with an Indian Muslim who supports the Congress Party of India (Indian Muslims connect to the party of Gandhi) than I have with an American fascist even if I look much like the American Ku Kluxer or neo-Nazi. Humanism can accommodate any religious tradition. Democracy can work in any culture. Tyranny is a raw deal anywhere; the state will eventually menace your life under tyranny. 

I prefer law and order (without which civil life and civil liberties are farce), the rule of law (which makes life workable) and elections that my side can lose. Eternal death be upon the murderous tyrants of the past from Nero to Idi Amin. Death to fascism in all forms (including Ku Kluxism), Marxism-Leninism, Apartheid, Ba'athism, Iranian Hezbollah, and ISIS/DAESH!

[JasonBlack]

Quote:You can tell that Eric is brilliant due to his love for the music of J S Bach. Bach is not for dullards. People who know their art, music and literature are rich in ways that dimwits who cannot see the word luxury as a commercial hustle are poor even if they get some expensive stuff. Even great cinema melds art, literature, and often music

I was just listening to some Bach earlier tonight. While I'm here, I'd also like to say that I hope the next 1T brings back the modest elegance common among the GIs (especially the women). The modern notion that sexiness and beauty have to be loud, histrionic and narcissistic is one I think we all hope will die sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, enjoy the beautiful voice of Eula Beal's (1919-2008) rendition of Erbarme Dich (song in English) from Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion. 

[pbrower2a]

(09-16-2022, 09:20 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:You can tell that Eric is brilliant due to his love for the music of J S Bach. Bach is not for dullards. People who know their art, music and literature are rich in ways that dimwits who cannot see the word luxury as a commercial hustle are poor even if they get some expensive stuff. Even great cinema melds art, literature, and often music

I was just listening to some Bach earlier tonight. While I'm here, I'd also like to say that I hope the next 1T brings back the modest elegance common among the GIs (especially the women). The modern notion that sexiness and beauty have to be loud, histrionic and narcissistic is one I think we all hope will die sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, enjoy the beautiful voice of Eula Beal's (1919-2008) rendition of Erbarme Dich (song in English) from Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion. 

In Bach's magisterial choral works one finds the gamut of emotion if the tight counterpoint of his fugal works is not present. See also Gustav Mahler, who once said that his musical education was Beethoven and Wagner. At times Mahler seems to be the successor of Bach as the composer of his Passions and B-Minor Mass. 

The violinist is Yehudi Menuhin and the conductor is Antal Dorati  Menuhin's playing speaks for itself, and Dorati may have been about as pure a musician as a conductor (no showmanship).

[nguyenivy]

(09-08-2022, 02:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-07-2022, 11:36 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-05-2022, 08:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (snip)

I think rather (Biden) is exactly the guy. Biden is a dedicated and capable politician who has a long record of accomplishment. That may not appeal to those who think rebellion consists of not accomplishing anything. For that, Trump is your guy.

His appeal in these speeches is to move us forward, even in spite of the Establishment's resistance. He is saying we CAN accomplish things. Accomplishing things in government is always to challenge the Establishment, because the Establishment wants no change, and no challenge to their ability to fleece the people with low wages, destructive policies and oppression of the working and middle class, and allowing or fostering the growing wealth of the elites to the obscene levels they have reached today. That what Trump offered and delivered to the nation; more of the same of this pampering of elites.

Biden offers instead programs to help the people achieve a prosperous life of some "consequence", despite the efforts of the wealthy economic-libertarian elite to hog all the benefits and opportunities of the last 40 years of Reaganomics, whose success at the ballot box for 40 years had been enhanced by ceaseless appeals to prejudice.

I'm glad we now have our true, truly-gray gray champion!

Your so-called gray champion isn't even going to make it through his first term.

If he doesn't, then we will have Democrats scrambling for that role. Kamala Harris is the obvious successor.

I expect President Biden to be around at the time of Donald Trump's demise. In view of Trump's bad habits, I am surprised that he is still alive. Should he end up with a long prison term that is the usual consequence of stealing and abusing classified information, then his life or death will mean little because he would die in prison. Trump deserves the effective death that the likes of Aldrich Ames and Andrew Hanssen now endure. 

But just as much worth considering: the Skowronek cycle explains clearly why Donald Trump is such a political dud. The political memes that compel so much political change at first (Reagan policies) wear thin over about forty years. The law of diminishing returns applies as much to ideas as to material objects. Reagan's crony-capitalist plutocracy may have been successful in stopping inflation by ensuring that millions of people made contributions to productivity and service while being paid so little that they got priced out of almost anything not a bare necessity, but at some point that becomes terribly ineffective. Trump pushed far harder than Reagan in support of a reactionary agenda that has achieved practically nothing. Pushing harder and getting weak or questionable results is failure, whether political, economic, or cultural. 

The Skowronek cycle explains why Jimmy Carter was so ineffective; he sought to revive the New Deal after it had played out. Carter was a good man, a smart man with none of the vices.   

This ignores the manifold deficiencies of Donald Trump as a person. We had a President who in many ways shows how to be President, and that is Obama. Obama is an arch-conservative in many ways -- all but his economic agenda. A conservative, pro-business version of Barack Obama is exactly what will be how an effective President from the conservative side will be like. It will not be the vindictive, corrupt, hollow, demagogue that is the disaster that we know as Donald Trump.

We are approaching the end of the 4T and approaching the dawn of a 1T. In a 1T, politics becomes a matter of ensuring that everybody gets something and that everyone makes a contribution.

With that cycle in mind, what should Carter have done? So the New Deal was no longer in demand by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What was? (I am a Millennial who does not remember life before the 1990s.) Was what we wound up getting actually in demand or did it fill a vacuum?

[Eric the Green]

(09-20-2022, 05:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: With that cycle in mind, what should Carter have done? So the New Deal was no longer in demand by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What was? (I am a Millennial who does not remember life before the 1990s.) Was what we wound up getting actually in demand or did it fill a vacuum?

Our difference in time perspective is amazing. To me the demise of Carter to Reagan is yesterday. I guess as you millennials get older these days will seem like yesterday 40 years from now.

But we can learn history even if we didn't live through it. But maybe they don't teach that in school anymore. Or what is essential in it. The videos I have posted about neoliberalism/Reaganomics on this essay I wrote about it tell the tale:
http://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html

George Monbiot says in another video (not the one posted on my essay linked above) that intellectual ideologues had been developing neoliberalism/free-market BS for a long time, so it was available off the shelf to fill the vaccum in the 1970s and early 80s when it seemed the Keynesian/New Deal economics model wasn't handling the inflation/resource blackmail/pollution problems of the 1970s and the stagnation of US companies. There was nothing really wrong with the New Deal model, but it had no answer for these resource/pollution issues or runaway inflation partly caused by excess union/strike activism as well as resource blackmail by the Arab/Muslim countries in 1973 and 1979 that caused long gas lines and high gas prices which sparked bad recessions.

But the corporations felt the sting of consumer and environmental regulations that were passed during the Awakening in the 15 years before 1980, and prejudiced people and their preachers were turning against those empowered by the civil rights movement and against the increasing secularism and counter-culture, and they both found a charming actor and former governor of CA who could delude people into voting for him with his image of strength, confidence and optimism and who was a bulwark against these trends. It worked, and so Reaganomics was imposed on the people, and voters were deceived into supporting his neoliberal ideology and prejudice from that day to this, causing steady middle-class decline-- although the Biden presidency, influenced by Bernie Sanders, has recently moved the needle a bit away from neoliberal Reaganomics, and the big spending on the covid rescue plans and infrastructure departed from it as well.

Carter was no match for Reagan as an appealing candidate, and he appeared helpless to deal with the challenges at home and abroad. I don't think there was anything he could have done. American voters choose the candidate that appeals most to them, regardless of what policies are imposed or what problems may exist, or how well the president and his party are dealing with them. Carter just seemed out of his depth. He was an appealing candidate, but Reagan's appeal was superior.

The horoscope score is a good indicator of which kinds of candidates appeal to voters in the USA, and which ones appeal the most. The scores illustrate the fact that unskilled candidates can't be elected USA president, unless both parties nominate unskilled candidates (as happened in the 1910s and 1920s and in the 1880s).
http://philosopherswheel.com/presidentialelections.html

[pbrower2a]

(09-20-2022, 05:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:

(09-08-2022, 02:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-07-2022, 11:36 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-05-2022, 08:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (snip)

I think rather (Biden) is exactly the guy. Biden is a dedicated and capable politician who has a long record of accomplishment. That may not appeal to those who think rebellion consists of not accomplishing anything. For that, Trump is your guy.

His appeal in these speeches is to move us forward, even in spite of the Establishment's resistance. He is saying we CAN accomplish things. Accomplishing things in government is always to challenge the Establishment, because the Establishment wants no change, and no challenge to their ability to fleece the people with low wages, destructive policies and oppression of the working and middle class, and allowing or fostering the growing wealth of the elites to the obscene levels they have reached today. That what Trump offered and delivered to the nation; more of the same of this pampering of elites.

Biden offers instead programs to help the people achieve a prosperous life of some "consequence", despite the efforts of the wealthy economic-libertarian elite to hog all the benefits and opportunities of the last 40 years of Reaganomics, whose success at the ballot box for 40 years had been enhanced by ceaseless appeals to prejudice.

I'm glad we now have our true, truly-gray gray champion!

Your so-called gray champion isn't even going to make it through his first term.

If he doesn't, then we will have Democrats scrambling for that role. Kamala Harris is the obvious successor.

I expect President Biden to be around at the time of Donald Trump's demise. In view of Trump's bad habits, I am surprised that he is still alive. Should he end up with a long prison term that is the usual consequence of stealing and abusing classified information, then his life or death will mean little because he would die in prison. Trump deserves the effective death that the likes of Aldrich Ames and Andrew Hanssen now endure. 

But just as much worth considering: the Skowronek cycle explains clearly why Donald Trump is such a political dud. The political memes that compel so much political change at first (Reagan policies) wear thin over about forty years. The law of diminishing returns applies as much to ideas as to material objects. Reagan's crony-capitalist plutocracy may have been successful in stopping inflation by ensuring that millions of people made contributions to productivity and service while being paid so little that they got priced out of almost anything not a bare necessity, but at some point that becomes terribly ineffective. Trump pushed far harder than Reagan in support of a reactionary agenda that has achieved practically nothing. Pushing harder and getting weak or questionable results is failure, whether political, economic, or cultural. 

The Skowronek cycle explains why Jimmy Carter was so ineffective; he sought to revive the New Deal after it had played out. Carter was a good man, a smart man with none of the vices.   

This ignores the manifold deficiencies of Donald Trump as a person. We had a President who in many ways shows how to be President, and that is Obama. Obama is an arch-conservative in many ways -- all but his economic agenda. A conservative, pro-business version of Barack Obama is exactly what will be how an effective President from the conservative side will be like. It will not be the vindictive, corrupt, hollow, demagogue that is the disaster that we know as Donald Trump.

We are approaching the end of the 4T and approaching the dawn of a 1T. In a 1T, politics becomes a matter of ensuring that everybody gets something and that everyone makes a contribution.

With that cycle in mind, what should Carter have done? So the New Deal was no longer in demand by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What was? (I am a Millennial who does not remember life before the 1990s.) Was what we wound up getting actually in demand or did it fill a vacuum?

He may have been the wrong person for the time. He needed radical reforms to push America into some new directions, and he was just not the person to do it. Reagan had the audacity to do something very different, and however objectionable it may have been in results it worked to some extent. It had its own seeds of failure. It promoted the idea of people working while being paid a travesty of a living, That was good for ensuring plenty of work in fast-food places and shopping malls where people who still had some money could live the American Dream on the cheap. Millions of others were living a nightmare, and many never escaped it. 

Businesses that went into the shopping malls, like Sears, Montgomery-Ward, Mervyn's, Bon-Ton, Radio Shack, Waldenbooks, Music Land/Sam Goody are gone or moribund. K-Mart had its good times; those are now clearly in the past. We have hundreds of disused shopping malls as testaments to a world that could not sustain itself. Cheap labor does not create prosperity, and it never leads to something better unless one gets out of it. 

Maybe people had excessively high expectations, with technology continuing to offer new and more lucrative opportunity. High technology of the time was leaving the zone of high profitability and becoming competitive, with shrinking margins of profit. That young late Boom and early X workers were becoming less competent and reliable as shown in the trends of crime, drug use, alcoholism, and lesser academic achievement played a part. Many late Boom and early X youth were unready to make the necessary contributions to prosperity to allow themselves to prosper.   

Reagan's solution well fit the 'slacker youth' of the time. It hurt others by treating them like the slacker youth who needed harsh management to keep them from drifting into laziness and by creating a climate that held that every worker was a potential thief.