Wheels within wheels.

[Eric the Green]

(12-10-2018, 02:12 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-09-2018, 05:47 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am increasingly of the opinion that the S&H theory is probably wrong. 27 years ago they wrote in Generations about the test of the theory. They said that the next few years or a decade would tell little, but in thirty years we should know.  In the time I have been at one of the T4T sites several dates for a 4T start have been floated, 2001, 2005, 2008, and I will now add 2016. I spent a long time identifying a handful of markers for progress though the cycle. Based on these markers I eliminated 2001 as a candidate in 2012, when Obama won a second term.  

One of the things that happens in a social moment turning is a critical election that signals a shift towards one or another party. In 2001 there was an opportunity to establish Republican ascendency for the next generation. Initial it looked like this was happening. Republicans passed a tax cut, started a war and won the 2002 election (which is unusual). They then did the same thing again, passing another tax cut, starting another war and winning the 2004 election. They were riding high, and then they gave all their gains back in 2006 and 2008. After Obamas victory in 2012 that ended any chance for Bush's  victory in 2000 to have started anything.

Now it was Democrats turn. After winning big in 2006 and 2008, Democratic were crushed in 2010 losing the House. They won the 2012 election but then lost the Senate in 2014. Finally, they lost in 2016 against an inferior candidate. Just as the final nail in the coffin for a 4T start under Bush came with Obama's reelection, the same will be true for Democrats if Trump wins in 2020.

This pushes the next most likely 4T start to 2016, 32 years after the 3T start in 1984. This essentially invalidates the theory.

Consider, it has been ten years since 2008 and 17 years past 2001. In all three American 4Ts it was crystal-clear than there had been huge, radical changes 10 (and especially 17) years into the 4T. This alone makes anything other than a 2016 start sketchy, and that date invalidates the theory by the too-long 3T.

I'm not completely convinced that we understand the modern political paradigm.  If we look worldwide, we see a rise in authoritarianism that's both widespread and deepening.  Yet, we also see a rising progressivism in urban areas that's likewise widespread and deepening, and appears to be outside politics, or parallel to it at the very least.  If reactive forces are marshalling political forces to forestall societal changes unwelcome to more traditional folks, how do we evaluate that using T4T tools?  You may be right, and it's simply impossible -- yet it's happening nonetheless.  Worse, almost all political systems have a conservative bias that's amplified by a rural (geographically diverse?) bias as well.

So playing this out to its logical end, how do we address AGW if it's taboo to in the conservative/reactionary sphere?  Likewise, can big business form an alliance of convenience with the religious and social right, and use it to stymie economic egalitarianism -- as they have up to this point?  Assuming that we fail to address either, when do those twin crises emerge in earnest, and how do they get resolved?  My guess: the 2050-2060 time frame, and resolution won't be pretty in either case.

It may be that one political party does not establish dominance in this 4T. But I still think that may very well happen. The Republicans have gone so far off the deep edge that it is destined to fall into impotence and maybe even disappear in the next decade. Again, since the 1850s were part of the civil war 4T, one would have thought the Democrats had not been dislodged over 2/3 of the way through the turning. You might have said then, oh well, the generations theory (sans anomaly) is in error. The same is true with the Republicans today, who represent the same folks that the Democrats represented in 1854, and who have been dominant throughout the 2010s, with the Democrats holding none or at most only one branch of the federal government and very few of the states.

It is certainly not true that authoritarianism is diminishing during a 4T, if you look at fascist and Nazi ascendancy late into the previous one, and the Dred Scott decision far into the civil war 4T, and the power of the Dixie aristocracy then and its dominance of politics right up to Lincoln's election, with similar authoritarian rule in Europe, and King George III's reign in the USA up until 1781. The 4T is not a condition of unity, with reformers in power; it is a condition of battle between two sides or factions, which in previous anglo-american 4Ts has eventually been won by the more-progressive side near the end.

We're right on schedule. The takeover of the USA by such an unqualified, destructive, incompetent, authoritarian fool is itself enough to label our times as a crisis. Our nation as we knew it is under severe threat today just from that.

My cosmic crystal ball says the 2050s will be a relaxed, energetic and optimistic period, with lots of innovation and advances in communication. It will be an awakening era following a revolutionary time in which people will be enjoying the liberation which it achieved. That of course will depend on a positive outcome to this 4T, in which progressive folks must overcome and transform the built-in advantages for stagnant conservative rule in the USA by 2028-29. There will be no awakening in the USA if a positive outcome to this 4T is not achieved. Such an awakening will happen elsewhere instead in that case. Instead we will be a banana republic, in a condition akin to that of Dixie in the 1890s, with increasing oppression and poverty, without any northern half of ourselves to power us into an eventual partial recovery after the 1960s. Come to think of it, a declining USA may be better for the climate, as other nations take the needed steps to address the issue and the declining USA produces less CO2 because of its stagnant economy.