11-Sep-10 News -- The coming political tsunami and realignment - 11-Sep-2010 - Generational Dynamics

The word "tsunami" is being used a lot these days, as a result of polls that indicate an expected significant Republican win in the midterm elections on November 2. In "Countdown to the coming Republican tsunami" in Time:

A lot of people are trying to figure out the significance of this tsunami, especially as related to the Tea Party movement. I'm not a member of, or participant in, the "tea party" movement, but I identify with much of their anger, and I see them as having adopted MY anger, rather than the other way around

I listened to a podcast/webinar of a discussion by Tea Party supporters, sponsored by Republic Magazine, and found it very interesting as a statement of the expectations of Tea Partiers after November 2.

The comment by Bannon is that Tea Partiers are going to wake up on November 3, after a Republican victory, and they're going to be furious because nothing has changed.

I've been writing for years about the coming political realignment, and how it will be something that neither Democrats nor Republicans will like. You can see it building now.

President Obama was elected when he became a rock star to massive numbers of voters led by Generation-Xers who hate Boomers and would have voted for anyone who represented "un-Bush" and "un-Boomer."

Obama made ridiculously extravagant promises to get elected. I wrote repeatedly that NONE of these promises would be fulfilled, and that's turned out to be true.

Obama was going to heal the world with his mere presence -- cure global warming, provide universal health care, end nuclear proliferation, close Guantanamo, leave Iraq in peace, bring a two-state solution to Palestinians and Israelis, beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, reduce joblessness, restore the stock market bubble, and dismantle President Bush's war against terror. Nothing was beyond his reach. I said repeatedly that he would accomplish NONE of these things, and that has turned out to be true. In particular, I said that the health care bill was a proposal of economic insanity, because it was just like President Nixon's wage-price controls. The disastrous consequences of the health care bill are still unfolding.

Rhetoric aside, the state of the country and the world is little different from what it would be if Bush had had a third term. Both the left and the right are repelled by this concept, but there's little objective evidence, or even speculative evidence, refuting it. Even the huge multi-trillion dollar bailouts and stimulus packages would have occurred anyway, and whoever was in office would be blamed for their failure.

So now that Obama has failed at all of his promises, and the Gen-Xers are fleeing in disarray, we have the Tea Party -- the "Revenge of the Boomers" -- demanding a return to post WW II wisdom.

But post WW II wisdom will not work any better than Obama's insane promises. Cutting spending and/or taxes will only hasten the crisis.

As Bannon said, Tea Partiers will wake up on November 3 and realize that nothing has changed, but that now it's no longer possible to simply blame the Democrats. As the crisis worsens next year, the Republicans will be blamed as much as the Democrats.

With November 2 looking more and more like a Republican tsunami, I'm hearing the same kinds of hopes and dreams for "change you can believe in," without the actual use of that slogan.

One of the most extreme examples of this is Stuart Varney on Fox Business Network, who is insisting that a Republican victory on November 2 will shock the country, improve the economy, and jolt the stock market upward to new highs. This is about as close to Obama-level insanity as anyone could get.

It's anyone's guess as to what will happen next year, as the nation fully grasps the massive failure of both political parties. Those who claim to predict that Republicans will do well or that Democrats will recover don't know what they're talking about. There's no rule book, as the saying goes, and nobody has the vaguest idea what's coming, any more than anyone predicted the Tea Party when Obama won. What we're headed for is a tsunami of a different kind -- one that will scramble everything up in an unpredictable way.

The Tea Party and Glenn Beck

The rock star concept is not unique to President Obama. A rock star is a part of the crisis era experience. As the crisis deepens, a desperate, anxious population turns to someone who they hope will save them.

If I'm to believe what I saw at a recent Washington DC rally, the mantle of rock star status has been transferred from Obama to Glenn Beck, although Beck appears to be more of an evangelist than a politician.

"Glenn Beck’s program at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday focused more on God than government.

The Fox News host followed through on a commitment to avoid wading explicitly into partisan politics. So President Barack Obama’s name did not come up once during a 200-minute program that featured multiple prayers, gospel songs and bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace.”

Choreographing the event so it felt more like an old-fashion religious revival than a tea party-inspired political rally gave Beck just enough cover to credibly position himself as an heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy on the 47th anniversary of the legendary “I have a dream” speech, even as prominent African-American leaders attacked him at a counter-rally for being insensitive to civil rights iconography.

Beck, who first called the timing coincidental and later embraced it as fitting, didn’t respond directly to attacks as he spoke to a massive crowd that extended for a mile all the way back to the Washington Monument.

He instead filled the stage with a racially diverse mix of religious people who sympathize with his social conservatism.

King’s niece, anti-abortion activist Alveda King, told the multitudes that her “Uncle Martin” would commend them for showing up. She said that metaphorical check King wanted cashed in his 1963 speech still hasn't been and only will be when there's prayer in schools and the public square.

Beck also introduced a new "Black-Robed Regiment" of clergy, bringing 240 clergy of various denominations and ethnicities onto the stage. He asserted that thousands more were in the crowd.

“God is the answer,” Beck said."

Beck generates an enormous amount of emotion, both positive and negative, according to an analysis by the LA Times.

Glenn Beck is by far the most loved and the most hated of all the talking heads studied (Source: LA Times)

Obama has faded as a rock star, and as the crisis worsens next year, there will be a new rock star. It might be Glenn Beck, even though he says he has no interest in running. Or it might be someone else that no one's yet ever heard of. That's what happens with rock stars. They come out of nowhere and flame brightly for a while, and then flame out. There are real dangers -- particularly that the new rock star will be someone on the radical left or radical right. The current rise in Islamophobia is particularly worrisome. That's how Hitler got elected.

The one additional comment that I would make about the webinar is that you shouldn't count on hyperinflation. This is just part of the fantasy that says that the stock market bubble will come back. The Weimar Republic example occurred under completely different circumstances that are TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to what's happening today. There are powerful deflationary forces in the world economy that are coming unleashed, and you should expect a fall in the CPI of at least 30%.

Additional links

I've referred to Tea Partiers as wanting to apply "post WW II wisdom" to our problems, but an April poll shows that they're split down the middle along a fault line between two camps. 43% of those polled expressed the distinctly conservative view that government does too much, while also saying that it needs to promote traditional values. An almost identical 42% say that government does too much but should not try to promote any particular set of values — the hallmarks of libertarians. Politico

South Africa and other African countries have been eagerly soliciting investments from China, and China has been happy to comply, in return for Africa's resources. However, China's vast operations in Africa are causing problems. Domestic firms are losing to the cheaper Chinese commodities being dumped in their markets, raising unemployment, and promoting discontent against the Chinese people. China is also criticized for bringing workers from China instead of hiring locals. Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses

Fidel Castro is reported as saying that Cuba's communist economic model no longer works. Associated Press. However, in a later clarification, Castro said that he was "amused" by how his remark was "overplayed" by his opponents. Bloomberg

Drug gang attacks killed 25 people in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, making Friday the deadliest day in more than two years for the city. Nearby, 85 inmates scaled the walls of a prison and escaped in Mexico's biggest jail break in recent memory. Associated Press

Japan will jail that Chinese fishing trawler captain for at least ten days. China reacted by postponing planned diplomatic talks. BBC

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 11-Sep-2010
11-Sep-10 News -- The coming political tsunami and realignment

The coming political tsunami on November 2

The Tea Party and Glenn Beck

Additional links

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 11-Sep-2010 11-Sep-10 News -- The coming political tsunami and realignment

The coming political tsunami on November 2

The Tea Party and Glenn Beck

Additional links

Web Log Pages

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 11-Sep-2010
11-Sep-10 News -- The coming political tsunami and realignment