S&H theory and Steve Bannon

[GeekyCynic]

Do you think Strauss & Howe and their theory on generational cycles are now tainted by their association with an ultra-right racist like Steve Bannon? Should Howe be doing more to distance his ideas from Bannon and the toxic worldview he represents?

[Eric the Green]

Yes, we had a discussion of this somewhere on here. I agree he certainly should renounce any such association. He certainly is toxic.

[Kinser79]

(12-02-2017, 03:52 PM)GeekyCynic Wrote: Do you think Strauss & Howe and their theory on generational cycles are now tainted by their association with an ultra-right racist like Steve Bannon? Should Howe be doing more to distance his ideas from Bannon and the toxic worldview he represents?

I would challenge the labling of Steven Bannon as being ultra-rightist or racist.  Unless of course your idea of ultra-rightist is anyone slightly to the right of Mao Zedong it simply doesn't apply.  As for being racist, do you actually have proof that he is one, or are you merely making that determination on the basis of his rather pasty coloration?

[pbrower2a]

(12-02-2017, 03:52 PM)GeekyCynic Wrote: Do you think Strauss & Howe and their theory on generational cycles are now tainted by their association with an ultra-right racist like Steve Bannon? Should Howe be doing more to distance his ideas from Bannon and the toxic worldview he represents?

Practically everyone has some agenda, myself included. I can still see many ways in which this Crisis can culminate and possible results, many of which are abominable (such as thermonuclear war). I'd like to see America become a social-market society with broadened opportunity for everyone. I would like to see poverty disappear as a threat except to the grossly wicked and improvident. I would like to see liberal democracy much more solid than it is now. But I do not have the ultimate choice.

I have tried to apply the Howe and Strauss theory to other countries, and one analogue that I do not want is the Spanish civil war. This one has an eerie fit to America in view of the political and regional polarization of contemporary life in America. This Crisis ends in America, I believe, when people either find a wholesome or vital cause to unify them in purpose, or that one side completely obliterates the power of the other side and is able to force people to either comply or die. I prefer a humane and patriotic consensus.

Nothing in Howe and Strauss suggests any acquiescence with racism or religious bigotry. In  the last Crisis, the great struggle between Good and Evil ended up favoring Good (FDR and Churchill) over evil (Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini) because Good had more to offer than Evil  -- even to the common people whose wartime leadership lost the war.

[linus]

I wonder if he ever read or posted at the original forum or this one.

[David Horn]

(02-26-2018, 04:47 PM)linus Wrote: I wonder if he ever read or posted at the original forum or this one.

Close friend of William Strauss and prolific poster David Kaiser got unwittingly sucked into Bannon's movie "Generation Zero".  If I remember correctly, one of the authors knew Bannon at the time, though it may well have been Neil Howe.  That's about the limit of my memory on this ... but there was a link of some sort.

[linus]

(02-27-2018, 11:37 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-26-2018, 04:47 PM)linus Wrote: I wonder if he ever read or posted at the original forum or this one.

Close friend of William Strauss and prolific poster David Kaiser got unwittingly sucked into Bannon's movie "Generation Zero".  If I remember correctly, one of the authors knew Bannon at the time, though it may well have been Neil Howe.  That's about the limit of my memory on this ... but there was a link of some sort.

Yeah. I remember reading something about that movie.

[pbrower2a]

Steve Bannon has his agenda, one grossly illiberal. This Crisis could have culminated in the establishment of pure plutocracy with an authoritarian personality cult that leads to America becoming an Evil Empire in the sense that the Soviet Union was.

Donald Trump imploded politically for no cause other than demographic change itself connected to the generational cycle. In essence, Civic/Hero generations do not fall for the concept that "he who owns the gold owns everyone else". The GOP fell for Trump accepting his right-wing populism as a great new innovation capable of entrenching itself indefinitely. Within four years new, younger voters about 20% more D than R replaced voters about 5% more R than D before the political hacks cold 'fix' the system to ensure that they never lose an election that challengers their power. In the meantime Democrats took on old conservative virtues or at least modernized them to fit modern realities.

[JasonBlack]

Tbh, if people distance themselves from the theory because one person likes it, that's kinda ridiculous. Like, I'm not going to stop wiping my ass with toilet paper just because Mussolini did it.

[pbrower2a]

If anyone is still paying attention:

Howe-Strauss theory is intended to explain things. It is non-partisan, non-sectarian, and apolitical. It expresses the causal links between demographics, mass behavior, child attitudes that eventually morph onto adult values, mass culture, and economic reality. Part of history is the catching-on of historical trends,and part is their eventual muting. Someone looking at Howe-Strauss theory to assume that Obama or Trump is the inevitable force behind history (like Bannon with Trump) gets it all wrong. Someone who uses it to support the 'inevitability' of proletarian revolution with a Crisis era as the most likely time.

I am tempted to believe that Obama will have a longer-lasting influence upon American history as a conservative force. Yes, Obama is on the cultural Left on feminism and LGBT rights... but both are going mainstream, and nothing becomes so conservative so quickly as revolutionary trends that entrench themselves as obvious. Nothing is inevitable until it happens, and only then do all the preceding trends seem to deny all alternative courses of events.