Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> No, that was anti-communism. The neo-conservatives may now see
> "radical Islam" as the sort of enemy that Communism once was, but
> such does not recognize the difference between a political order
> based largely upon its economic ideology and one based upon
> religious values.

It was anti-communism, and it was anti Naziism. And it had a core
underlying principle that was based on the widespread (but erroneous)
belief that if Hitler had been killed in 1935, then there would have
been no WW II: That it's better to spend a small amount of money and
blood to resolve a problem quickly than to wait until it leads to a
world war. That's why we went to war in Korea and Vietnam and to save
Kuwait, and that's why Kennedy said, "Ask not ...."

I would characterize your remarks about "radical Islam" to be fatuous,
given Obama's humiliating flip-flop over the al-Assad's use of Sarin
gas. But as I've written several times, every president since Truman
followed the Truman Doctrine, up to Obama, who is the first president
to repudiate the Truman Doctrine, with possibly disastrous
consequences.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> Neither the Loony Left nor the Loony Right will unite with the
> rest of America to achieve anything.

I'm always astonished that someone can spend years in the Fourth
Turning Forum without agreeing with any of the core principles of the
Fourth Turning theory. I recall that Mike Alexander quite
forthrightly stated that he is in this category, but I can't recall
whether you are. But you must be, to make a remarkable statement like
this.

The word "regeneracy" was chosen by S&H to refer to events that
regenerate civic unity for the first time since the climax of the
previous generational crisis war. And I feel pretty certain that when
the first Chinese nuclear missile strikes an American city, it will
create a "regeneracy" in the S&H sense. And I feel pretty certain
that it will unify the left and the right, almost all of whom on both
sides are currently polarized, or as I would prefer to say, loony.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> Quality will matter.

Maybe, but the selection will be based on ideology not quality, and
ideology will be irrelevant since ideologies will unify after the
regeneracy.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

It was anti-communism, and it was anti Naziism. And it had a core
underlying principle that was based on the widespread (but erroneous)
belief that if Hitler had been killed in 1935, then there would have
been no WW II: That it's better to spend a small amount of money and
blood to resolve a problem quickly than to wait until it leads to a
world war. That's why we went to war in Korea and Vietnam and to save
Kuwait, and that's why Kennedy said, "Ask not ...."

It may be paradoxical, but the most immediate political effect of the Commie consolidation of rule in Indochina was that the "Socialist" world rifted. But even before the Commie takeover of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia the CIA had calculated a high probability of a nuclear war between China and the Soviet Union, a war from which the United States was in no position to gain anything.

Stopping the Commie invasion of South Korea proves to have been wise. Liberating Kuwait may have kept fascist Iraq from becoming a dangerous superpower. Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) has proved an unmitigated disaster.

I would characterize your remarks about "radical Islam" to be fatuous,
given Obama's humiliating flip-flop over the al-Assad's use of Sarin
gas. But as I've written several times, every president since Truman
followed the Truman Doctrine, up to Obama, who is the first president
to repudiate the Truman Doctrine, with possibly disastrous
consequences.

For this I blame Dubya. Was it the obscene photos of prisoner abuse? Or was it all the uncertainty about who the bad guys are in Syria?

How do we know that some form of "radical Islam" might be an improvement over some thug rule in the Islamic world? Was Saddam Hussein truly 'radical'?

I'm always astonished that someone can spend years in the Fourth
Turning Forum without agreeing with any of the core principles of the
Fourth Turning theory. I recall that Mike Alexander quite
forthrightly stated that he is in this category, but I can't recall
whether you are. But you must be, to make a remarkable statement like
this.

I have my own interpretation. One is that the latter part of a 3T is an era of bad politics, bad mass culture, and bad business that I suggested in a discussion with Neil Howe as the Degeneracy that leads to the certainty of a Crisis. I see the bad Presidents that made the Civil War an inevitability; I see Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover leading to the Great Depression and (worst of all) the rise of Antichrist Hitler. Howe and Strauss could not have predicted how aful Dubya would be -- but telescope Harding corruption, Coolidge complacency, and the inept stewardship of economics of Hoover into eight years instead of twelve and throw in a bungled military enterprise in the increasingly-destructive time of the late 3T... and you have the most destructive President in American history.

Few expected America to follow the sort-of-OK Bill Clinton with the horrid Dubya... but in view of the loss of collective memory in a society after about eighty years, the same destructive temptations that America fell for in the 1920s became possible in the Double-Zero decade. Even Enron has unsettling parallels to the Teapot Dome scandal. The novel Babbitt, which fits the 1920s well and explained them to some extent in the 1930s, but seemed incoherent from the late 1930s until about 2000.

Need I pull out the chart that shows a parallel between economic meltdowns beginning in late 2007 and late 1929?

The word "regeneracy" was chosen by S&H to refer to events that
regenerate civic unity for the first time since the climax of the
previous generational crisis war. And I feel pretty certain that when
the first Chinese nuclear missile strikes an American city, it will
create a "regeneracy" in the S&H sense. And I feel pretty certain
that it will unify the left and the right, almost all of whom on both
sides are currently polarized, or as I would prefer to say, loony.

The Chinese are not going to nuke their best customers. We do not know what the Regeneracy could be. It could be a landslide election by people who want a Christian and Corporate State. It could be a military coup after which the new leadership culls out people who don't cooperate fast enough (like before the coup). It could be a Socialist insurrection.

Hitler offered his version of a Regeneracy in Germany; FDR offered his in the United States. Heck, Obama offered one as a response to the economic meltdown -- but it didn't last. The people that he rescued turned on him and sponsored an ideology nearly the diametric opposite of what President Obama got.

The Regeneracy could lead to a high-tech version of the Gilded Age, one in which the equivalents of Pinkerton spies are a secret police that brutalizes people unwilling to suffer enough for people who believe that their tennis elbow is a far greater tragedy than some working family's missing child. Take an order as repressive and anti-egalitarian as Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile and give it the tools of internal espionage of the old German Democratic Republic except with greater sophistication of technology, and we could endure an Orwellian 1984 around 2019.

The Regeneracy could also be almost entirely benign, with Americans united to make a better world starting with their own country -- a better world for practically everyone, and not a nightmare for people who suddenly become pariahs who have no idea of what they did wrong.

Maybe, but the selection will be based on ideology not quality, and
ideology will be irrelevant since ideologies will unify after the
regeneracy.

As shown in the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, ideology typically decides who gets pampered -- and who dies. I cannot be certain that American democracy will survive this Crisis. Our economic elites are as vile as those of any prior time in American history. This time the Bad Guys could be Americans -- Americans who will debase the images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt (both of them!) by using them as icons of tyranny.

We are not exempt from the consequences of the demons in our national reality. We deal with those demons lest we compel other countries to deal with those just to preserve what they cherish.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Or will never happen? Did such a corrective ever happen before?

Sure, every secular cycle it happens to some extent. Its just that in agrarian societies the common people do not play any political role. Consider the Plantagenet cycle 1066-1485. During the first phase the population expands and people move out into lands not yet settled. A monastery is then founded, led by members of the upper class who assume lordship over the people who then support the monastery. The people accepted this for two reasons. One was religious. The second was pragmatic. Those settlements that did not get a lord were vulnerable to being killing by intra-elite conflict. Think of life under ISIS for people who are not accepting of jihadist beliefs. By having a lord present they belonged to an elite, and so would not fall victim to this sort of violence.

These times were good for common people. There was enough land, the tithes they paid were like the rent and taxes were pay. The obedience and deference they showed to their superiors was like that that we show to our employers.

Once the land filled up, life got harder. Elite numbers continue to grow and the exactions became large. That is economic inequality (measured by inverse real wage) rose. The surplus product after that needed for peasant sustenance and elite maintenance shrank leaving less and less for the state. Real wages eventually fell to a level unable to maintain the population and about 10% died in the Great Famine 1315-17. The government broke down, there were rebellions if parts of the country and Edward II was deposed and executed. His son Edward III produced a temporary solution to the problem by invading France, which turned out to be quite profitable. The Black Plague solve the economic problem by culling the population by a third. Further rounds of plague further culled the population and civil wars over 1401-8 and 1455-85 helped reduce elite numbers resulting in a doubling of real wages. By 1485 the last Plantagenet had been killed off, Henry Tudor took control and implemented policies that made another War of the Roses unlikely. And a new cycle began. In the next cycle only a little reduction in inequality occurred in the mid-17th century. Inequality then began to rise again afterward. But improvements in agricultural technology and then industrialization resulting in rising incomes for people on the bottom (those at the top just rose faster) but there was no longer any population reduction due to starvation, Although there were bread riots at the next inequality peak around 1800. Inequality reduction in England after 1800 reflected the rise of industrial elites, who eclipsed the old agrarian elites, and the increase in jobs available to commoners, who could leave the farm and join the industrial economy.

In the US the pattern was different. We did not have a vast landed aristocracy left over from a feudal past. Thus inequality here in 1800 was much lower than in Britain. Industrialization created a plantation elite in the South (powered by soaring demand for cotton by the burgeoning textile industry). The end of the slave trade resulting in a rising value of slaves, where were assets like stocks or bonds, making Southerners richer.
There was also a rising commercial and industrial Northern elite, also powered by the Industrial Revolution.

From the 1820's for about a century, inequality rose due to these forces, with a major, but short-term decline after the Civil War cause by the stripping of slave wealth from Southern elites. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this economic hit, it would be like stripping $5-6 trillion dollars of wealth from about 40% of the population. Total US wealth is about $83 trillion. Within 20 years of the Civil War inequality was again rising strongly until the peak in the first third of the 20th century.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> The Chinese are not going to nuke their best customers.

Yeah, people tell me this all the time. We can't have a war
because it's bad for business. If that were true, there would
never be any wars.

Actually, the complete opposite is true. Business makes war MORE
likely because trade issues heighten xenophobia. The US uses economic
sanctions as a weapon all the time. In any business relationship, one
side has an economic advantage, and that advantage just becomes one
more weapon of war. We saw this two years ago when the Chinese people
started smashing Japanese businesses, and boycotting Japanese
products. The Chinese believe that they have us by the balls
economically, and they'll use that weapon when they're ready to launch
their war.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> The Regeneracy could also be almost entirely benign, with
> Americans united to make a better world starting with their own
> country -- a better world for practically everyone, and not a
> nightmare for people who suddenly become pariahs who have no idea
> of what they did wrong.

Utter fantasy. The Regeneracy and the subsequent generational
Crisis war will be unimaginably bloody and violent.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

> For this I blame Dubya. Was it the obscene photos of prisoner
> abuse? Or was it all the uncertainty about who the bad guys are in
> Syria?

Fatuous political nonsense.

Boomer Globalists won't be satisfied until every country in the world is under a "democratic" globalist bureaucrat government. Never mind that boomer ideals are largely contrary to human nature.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Yeah, people tell me this all the time. We can't have a war
because it's bad for business. If that were true, there would
never be any wars. ...

War is bad for business? (Well, maybe some businesses, but that's certainly not the case now for the multitudes that get to contract with the government for a myriad of services and goods.)