05-31-2018, 07:49 PM
(05-27-2018, 04:13 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I agree. It may take more time than we want or expect. I suspect that Trump may even win re-election, perish the thought. The Democrats may not nominate Landrieu or McAuliffe, in which case they are likely to lose. Bernie would be a crapshoot I could not predict. It might take until 2022 before a progressive sunami wipes out the GOP (in the typical 6th year beating administered to the party in the White House, but even more so), and turns Drump into a virtual puppet or dumps him and Pence out of office. Then that leaves 4 years of full progressive leadership after 2024 (plus the prior 2 years of progressive congressional power) in which the country could change beyond recognition. Or, things may shift sooner. But if not, after 2020 I know that folks like you and David Kaiser and The Nomad here will be confirmed in their opinion, with much justice, that the 4T is over and has failed or never happened, while I will still proclaim that there is more ahead, even then!
I understand your point. It is fairly standard S&H, but as I pointed out above, the constellation model doesn't work. You also use your own methods, so S&H is merely a supplement. My own study of S&H has focused on Generations, their first work, and the only one with any rigor, mostly in terms of their references. Using these references and clues like the concept of dominant and recessive generations that has been mostly dropped in the subsequent books has, I believe, allowed me to reconstruct the path they followed to get what they came up with.
As I see it, dominant/recessive generations, and social moments are key. By the time they wrote T4T they had abandoned this terminology, and presented four turnings and four generations all playing more of less equal roles.
Since I keep the dominant/recessive concept and the idea of social moments I can see how these things are closely related to similar ideas advanced by other workers (all of which are referenced by S&H--so they had read them). This means the S&H system contains all these other workers ideas, and one has to familiarize oneself with all of them to understand where S&H are coming from.
I have done that, but since I am working 25 years later I have access to ideas that came out AFTER they developed their ideas that have really helped make sense of this. One such idea is generational imprinting models for political behavior. This is an alternate mechanism S&H hinted at (because they had read Mannheim) but did not develop further. Having the mechanism demonstrated by real data makes the concept a lot more likely to be relevant than other ideas for which their is no evidence. But S&H could not make use of this because it came out years later. And then there is Stephen Skowronek's political time model, which is a version of the saeculum (although not immediately apparent unless, like me, you are familiar with many systems like it). Again this is too late for S&H to take advantage of.
So I can modify what S&H came up with to take into account this new information. By doing this one finds that it is very unlikely the 4T will stretch to around 2030 (although that would only be a "standard" 22-year turning length after the 4T start in 2008). So I do not believe we have another decade plus. On the other hand, I do not believe it is ending now, as a 2001 4T (consistent with the 18-year generation model I once favored) implies. I think we have more time, around 5 years, rather than 10.