It looks like Trump is setting the mood for the 1T.

[Odin]

Brower, you need to calm down, people were doing the same kind of catastrophizing when Bush was elected in 2000.

In fact, I don't think I ever remember a time when the losing side of the presidential election DIDN'T thought it was the end of the world. I remember as a kid all the right-wingers ranting about Bill Clinton's "communist UN black helicopters".

[pbrower2a]

Maybe. Enough has gone wrong with my life, and I see Donald Trump unlikely to do any good. I see no quick recovery in life, and I can see myself at the point of the ultimate surrender. Leave the world to those who can truly enjoy it, unlike me. All in all, this has so far been a grim, dreary, and largely-joyless world that I would not miss if I ended up in one of the gentler circles of Dante's Inferno.  Learning physics from Albert Einstein and getting painting lessons from Hokusai? I am ready now! That sounds far better than some insipid paradise for dullards that Fundamentalist Protestantism has to offer.

I know of people who will be perfectly happy working more hours for the indulgence of the Master Class because they are satisfied that God so wills. I have no such faith. I can never see unforced suffering as the Will of God; indeed, if it is the Will of God that someone have Parkinsonism or senile dementia as I saw in my parents to the exclusion of all else in life for much of five years then God is to be resisted.   

I did not fly off the handle as much with Dubya because he did not stoop to the same level of rancor against out-groups. So far as I know, the marital life of George W. Bush is completely unobjectionable. I never heard him brag about grabbing women by their crotches. Dubya was an orthodox conservative, and even if his inadequacies would be known, he at least would not be a classic sociopath. Dubya did not make the contradictory promises of a demagogue. The biggest joke about Donald Trump is that he calls himself "Christian".

I dread a Trump Presidency, especially when there are few checks upon him. I question whether I have much will to live in the event that I have some medical crisis in which the will to live is essential to survival.

[pbrower2a]

(11-14-2016, 11:22 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-12-2016, 08:48 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have a chance of a revolution to topple the fascist regime of Donald Judas Trump. A Red revolution.

Red as in hammer-and-sickle motifs.

If we have a revolution I think it would be more like a hybrid of Communitarianism and the ideas laid out by Gary Hart in "Restoration of the Republic."

At some point I want to get some more in depth discussions going about that book / PhD thesis.

Communitarianism looks likely to become a form of tribalism under Trump. I think that people will become even more connected to identity politics. But tribalism is inevitable in a political order that divides people into 'good' and 'bad' based upon ethnicity, religion, class, and the like. Let's just hope that the 'white' tribe splinters, as it might if the demands of the Trump Administration become inhuman.

...Liberalism goes into hibernation except at the local level (a city like Ann Arbor) and the state (like New York) level. It goes into hibernation in most states  for the next year and a half (when governors like Walker, Scott, and Snyder are up for re-election or must give way to open-seat elections). There will be plenty of nastiness to defend by any Reactionary Governor seeking a third term or any Republican running to follow in the open seat. Where I live (a very right-wing community in a midwestern state) I will be tempted to go on protests in some cities 80 to 120 miles away. Nice excuse to see a city and get away from this soul-crushing peasant village.

[pbrower2a]

(11-14-2016, 02:24 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 05:48 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 01:10 AM)taramarie Wrote: what would be your ideal career, Pbrower?

I'm not sure. With Asperger's, it is likely either academic or creative. The clumsiness that goes with 'my' Asperger's precludes science. I am high-functioning enough to teach. I should have gone in that direction in the 1970s, but everyone told me that new teachers weren;t being hired -- so you might as well go into business as a clerk.

Retail sales clerk with a college degree. I once got a raise only because my existing pay would have been below the minimum wage. I thought that by showing some loyalty I might show a desirable trait for something better.

Not knowing that I had Asperger's made me unaware of what a bad fit I was for allegedly easy jobs that 'anyone could do'.

What is stopping you from pursuing an academic or creative career now?

Six-zero.

[Odin]

(11-14-2016, 11:36 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 07:58 AM)Odin Wrote: Brower, you need to calm down, people were doing the same kind of catastrophizing when Bush was elected in 2000.

In fact, I don't think I ever remember a time when the losing side of the presidential election DIDN'T thought it was the end of the world. I remember as a kid all the right-wingers ranting about Bill Clinton's "communist UN black helicopters".

This is different.

Bush was a main stream Republican. I know that many hard core Leftists lump everyone on the Right together, but that is wrong headed.

Trump is Alt-Right / NBP / Red-Brown. We have never had someone this radical as PotUS. The camel's nose is now inside the tent.

All I'm saying is that it is too early to start freaking out. It's still too early to know yet if it is going to be Bannon, Priebus, or Pence who is the driving force in Trump's White House. He might shock us all and be a reasonable, sane moderate for all we know.

[pbrower2a]

The working out of the Crisis is simply the most dangerous part of the 4T. This will likely be a time of great civil unrest, economic distress, and even political instability. America has never had a despotic ruler, and it is questionable whether Americans will take well to a leader who imposes great suffering on behalf of economic elites. I see ethnic groups becoming veritable tribes... and regional divisions becoming dangerous. Add to this an unsteady hand in foreign policy, and the international scene can go very bad very fast.

Transformation of America into a social order with plantation-style inequality will not be easy. I would expect terrorism to flourish in a resistance against economic elites. I can imagine kidnappings... and massacres.

This 4T probably ends with an America very different from what Donald Trump wants. It could end in climactic violence that forces Americans to decide whether they want to split into separate communities with a map very different from anything that we now know except for locations of cities and bodies of water. Even the 50-state pattern could become a thing of the past. Names of the sundry successor states are mostly beyond current imagination.

We could see independent city states in seas of rural areas, with areas just beyond the urban fringe being as different from the nearby cities as ... well, choose your analogy. Rural America and urban America are now very different countries.

About all that might be left would be easy travel between the independent political entities and a customs union. That may be all that anyone wants.

The 4T will end when people quit seeking to kill each other over differences. That might not be enough to save America. We could end up with a map of Germany around 1700. Of course there was no Germany except as a linguistic zone.

People will wonder how so impressive a political order as the USA could shatter -- and the explanations will be:

1. People gaming and perverting the political order perhaps even into tyranny.
2. Polarization of America along regional, religious, and ethnic lines.
3. People demanding the subjection of others and those called to subject themselves refusing to do so.
4. Atrocities.

As the political reality stabilizes and violence abates, the 1T will be underway. Population exchanges will supplant massacres. people How things are in an area around Indianapolis could be very different from areas only 40 miles away from the city limits, and much more similar to a city so far away as Seattle. I see no possibility of any homogenization of the rural-urban dispute.

We are not in the climax yet. We aren't even near it, most likely about six years from now.

[pbrower2a]

(11-14-2016, 09:02 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 08:11 PM)taramarie Wrote: "People will wonder how so impressive a political order as the USA could shatter "
I do not know if Americans have noticed this but many around the world are not impressed with America at all. Instead they shake their heads at what they hear goes on. May be painful to hear for some proud Americans but it is the truth.

This is what you get when what started out as a maritime (and therefore, reasonably globally connected and worldly) former British colony expands into a continental power. The vast interior turns into Slobovistan. An insular, inward looking people evolves in such zones. But, those who people the coasts* remain globally connected and worldly. Rancor arises, as the coastal people look down on the inlanders and vice versa. The supposed "Alanticist" vs "Eurasianist" style of conflict comes into our own sphere as a domestic conflict. Wish us luck!

* About the Gulf Coast and Southern Atlantic Coast. Somehow those areas did not retain the maritime connection with Europe. It's understandable, given the gazillion islands in the Gulf and Caribbean. It has its own type of insularity.

With America the divide is cultural, low-brow vs. high-brow. Donald Trump is an economic elitist playing the undereducated  white people against minorities of all classes and the middle class of all ethnicities on behalf of people who think much like feudal lords: that people exist at the privilege of the lord, abandoning all hopes and desires to that lord in return for survival at the lord's terms... and that if one refuses to accept the feudal lord as the unqualified leader one is to be killed.

What does the low-brow culture offer? NASCAR racing, Ultimate Fighting, tabloid media, country music, FoX News... I certainly belong in a different country.

This will go badly.  I fear the community in which I live because the other side gloats with anger about its victory. It is my fault that I cannot be a cultural simpleton willing to take a menial job for starvation pay.

So why do I not belong there? I think, therefore I am a traitor.

Donald Trump could be the Slobodan Milosevic of America even to the point of stoking anti-Muslim sentiments. I could never convert to Islam, but at the least I can recognize its virtues just by contrasting heavily-Muslim Dearborn against godless Southwest Detroit. Addicts, drunks, whores, and pimps are busted if they venture  into family-friendly Dearborn. Of course one need not be a Muslim to like things that way. Many Christians and Jews have no problem with such.

[pbrower2a]

So maybe I have my own idea of how a 1T can be: diverse in opportunities based upon talent but without oppression; accepting of cultural and religious diversity; respectful of formal learning; family-friendly because such gives security to the people who most need it; giving plenty of room for small business; accepting of divergences that do no harm (can I compare Asperger's syndrome to homosexuality? Both are harmless to the overall society, and nobody would ever choose either. They can make pariahs out of people who might otherwise make worthy contributions).

And surely contemptuous of Donald Trump for being its antithesis!

[Warren Dew]

Diversity and acceptance of diversity sound nice, but unfortunately the whole point of a first turning is convergence of culture and elimination of diversity.

[Warren Dew]

"Suppression", then.

[tg63]

I guess the big variable is what form that suppression takes; on one hand there might be social discomfort as some people are more likely to voice their biases; on the other hand there's organized action - potentially government sanctioned - strategically intended to disadvantage/detain/incarcerate specific groups.

Regardless, equality of opportunity is something that should be strived for in all turnings. There may be less appetite for it in the 1T, but that's all the more reason it needs supporting.

[Eric the Green]

(11-17-2016, 12:58 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-17-2016, 11:55 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Diversity and acceptance of diversity sound nice, but unfortunately the whole point of a first turning is convergence of culture and elimination of diversity.

If that were true, places like North Beach and the North End would have been made milquetoast during the 1950s. Harlem would have been turned into "black in appearance only." Chinatowns nation wide would have been peopled by "bananas."

Oh wait. Didn't happen that way.

Sooooo  .... maybe .... "elimination" is an exaggeration, no?

Warren has it pretty well correct on this, as I see it, but toward the end of the 1T, the 2T impulses begin to show themselves, at least on the fringes of society as in North Beach SF.

Just as much of the 2T revival of culture gets more and more relegated to the fringes as the 3T goes on.

[Warren Dew]

(11-17-2016, 01:42 PM)tg63 Wrote: I guess the big variable is what form that suppression takes; on one hand there might be social discomfort as some people are more likely to voice their biases; on the other hand there's organized action - potentially government sanctioned - strategically intended to disadvantage/detain/incarcerate specific groups.

Regardless, equality of opportunity is something that should be strived for in all turnings.  There may be less appetite for it in the 1T, but that's all the more reason it needs supporting.

The way to do that is to abandon alternatives like the Democrats' equality of result or like the alt right's implicit or explicit racial superiority, and focus on getting race blind equality of opportunity into the dominant first turning culture.  I think there's still time in the fourth turning

[pbrower2a]

If this is the wave of the 1T, then all that we can do is to suffer for economic elites who have us completely at their mercy. Welcome an America as politically and economically nasty as the old Soviet Union and its satellites in which "free enterprise" simply that "enterprise is free to do horrible things to people".

If such is so, then I hate life and would welcome death, as there will be nothing to live for.

[Warren Dew]

(11-17-2016, 04:21 PM)taramarie Wrote: When I was a child I wished to go to America. Now I know life is far better in NZ for quality of life (the quality that I enjoy personally). The more I learn about America the more I wonder why I thought it was an ideal place to go live in.

Half the benefits of moving to a more cosmopolitan place you can now get over the internet instead.

[tg63]

(11-17-2016, 04:21 PM)taramarie Wrote: When I was a child I wished to go to America. Now I know life is far better in NZ for quality of life (the quality that I enjoy personally). The more I learn about America the more I wonder why I thought it was an ideal place to go live in.

hey, I still love visiting America.

[Mikebert]

I don't understand this thread title. Most assume the 4T started in 2008, so we are 8 years in. The nominal length for turnings is 22 years and the last one lasted 24, so lets use 22. This forecasts the start of the 1T around 2030. Isn't a little early to be talking about the 1T?

[Warren Dew]

(11-18-2016, 12:42 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I don't understand this thread title.  Most assume the 4T started in 2008, so we are 8 years in.  The nominal length for turnings is 22 years and the last one lasted 24, so lets use 22.  This forecasts the start of the 1T around 2030.  Isn't a little early to be talking about the 1T?

The mood for the first turning is set in the preceding fourth turning.  By the time the first turning rolls around, it's too late for it to change.  Thus, discussion now is apropos.

[Eric the Green]

The problem is Warren that no-one is sure how the 4T is going to turn out until it is about over. The victory has not been won; the defeat has not been suffered. In the New Deal, some direction was set; but that was an anomaly. Although the authors said the civil war was the anomaly, it now appears that the Depression era was. It created more agreement than usually occurs during 4th turnings. But then WWII happened, and the outcome of that was in doubt for a while. So, we don't know how the 1T will turn out, or what the consensus will be, until it's almost time for it to arrive. I agree with mikebert in this case.

Right now, the mood appeared to be getting set by Obama and Clinton. Now it appears to be getting set by Trump. It could happen, in which case we will be enjoying the sunny society of a banana republic. But the battle may have just begun. A lot of us are set to resist the orange menace and all he stands for, including your libertarian economics.

It usually doesn't fare too well in 4Ts and 1Ts. So if it does this time, it's an onimous sign of a precipitous national decline.

In 4Ts and 1Ts, a national consensus of people interested in the national interest and purpose is supposed to gather strength and prevail. In the 4T, it's a battle over what that consensus will look like. In the 1T it is taken for granted.

[Odin]

(11-18-2016, 01:25 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-18-2016, 12:42 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I don't understand this thread title.  Most assume the 4T started in 2008, so we are 8 years in.  The nominal length for turnings is 22 years and the last one lasted 24, so lets use 22.  This forecasts the start of the 1T around 2030.  Isn't a little early to be talking about the 1T?

It's way early.

Part of this meme is gloating by the Trumpistas. They think foolishly that DT is equivalent to FDR (a supposedly Right Wing version) and that the Regeneracy is upon us. Very foolish. It's like unbuckling and walking around the cabin after hitting some light chop only to get head slammed into the cabin ceiling when the real turbulence hits.

The Dems under Obama done goofed and failed to read the growing anti-globalization and anti-technocratic mood of the country, so now the electorate are giving the GOP a shot. Hopefully the Dems can get their shit together and craft a message that matches that mood rather than fighting a losing battle in defense of neoliberalism.