Because the Republicans and Democrats are the problem. I mean really, if your hypothesis rests on the regeneracy, both 2001 and 2008 are out as possible crisis dates. We're outside the realm of a traditionally defined point for regeneracy. Now, if you look at it from the idea that the regeneracy occurs within the people, but that institutions don't necessarily have to respond (and why would they always have to? Back in the day they were made up purely of Elites, and over throwing them was sometimes the only way to effect change). In 2006 you saw a major trend in voting change. That doesn't mean it will ever get results, but it does signal a change in mentality.

Now you may say that the regeneracy has to effectively make life different for people, but I'd argue that that is a narrative fallacy. It's the hippie effect. Most people will fly the hippie flag from the 3T on, but most people, even most Boomers weren't hippies in the 2T. People will talk about alphabet soup programs during the depression, but unemployment was only 25%. Most people didn't go through one of these programs.

Today there's a push for a bill to go for some fairly significant reforms on data collection. Snowden has been major news for the past couple years. I don't think, when the government is the problem, you can point to what the government is doing as your measure of the crisis.

Out of curiosity, Kepi, what constitutes a failure state for your hypothesis? What sorts of events would lead you to believe that you are mistaken?

Originally Posted by Kepi

I mean really, if your hypothesis rests on the regeneracy, both 2001 and 2008 are out as possible crisis dates. We're outside the realm of a traditionally defined point for regeneracy.

We are? I can see a 4T that began in 1569 with the regeneracy (start of the Armada war) in 1585. And then there is the ten year spacing from 1675 to the regeneracy (death of Charles II) 1685. Dating is meaningless with the Civil War 4T since it was anomalously short.

Now you may say that the regeneracy has to effectively make life different for people....

If it doesn't have any effect what's the point?

Today there's a push for a bill to go for some fairly significant reforms on data collection. Snowden has been major news for the past couple years.

Seems like pretty thin evidence to rest your case on.

I don't think, when the government is the problem, you can point to what the government is doing as your measure of the crisis.

Hmm. So the government wasn't the problem in the Glorious Revolution---when they overthrew it?
The government wasn't the problem in the next crisis when they decided to have a revolution?
The government wasn't a problem for the American South, so they decided to secede for giggles?
Economically conservative policymakers who decided to pursue austerity instead of even trying to address the worst economic catastrophe in American history weren't a problem? Americans just decided on a lark to banish them into political oblivion for 48 years?

Seems to me government policy is almost always the problem.

Originally Posted by Kepi

Because the Republicans and Democrats are the problem.

The Republicans are THE PROBLEM.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

The Republicans are THE PROBLEM.

Close, but not quite there, Eric. The real problem is people who vote for reactionary idiots who support [War on drugs, NSA, have no respect for the constitution, no respect for privacy, are economic illiterates, whores for Corporate America, and whores for the MIC]. While , it's true there's a lot of crossover, that's not the real problem. There are DINOS, etc. I live in Oklahoma, remember? I can probably write a novel on political idiots. Here's an example to contemplate. It's a case of denial. Oklahoma has one of the largest populations of Native Americans [not full blooded mind you, but pretty well mixed in.] OK, reality check time. Native Americans and you can check the stats for the reservations here have the following [highest rate of diabetes, elevated blood pressure, alcohol issues, poverty.] The denial comes in disregarding parts of one's ancestry to the point of putting one's heath in peril. That's one ethnic group down. If you take Anglos, you get another denial issue. Crap wages are just fine as long as "family values are brought up." And So forth.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Out of curiosity, Kepi, what constitutes a failure state for your hypothesis? What sorts of events would lead you to believe that you are mistaken?

It will have to be in the 1T, when you start to get the stories about history collected. If the general narrative of the history of the 4T is "everything was going great, then boom, 2008." Then I'm wrong. I don't think the theory is a cyclical phenomenon based upon raw factual data, I think it's a phenomenon based the way we tell stories to ourselves. It's a cycle of narrative consensus. Where Mike sees the possibility for random history and says "if history is random, then there is no cycle", I say "history is probably random, but the human drive to explain it will make a cycle." So I'm waiting for the 1T to break, the narratives to get tossed to the masses, and for those narratives to pass collective muster. See what stories get passed on and which ones really don't matter.

It will have to be in the 1T, when you start to get the stories about history collected. If the general narrative of the history of the 4T is "everything was going great, then boom, 2008." Then I'm wrong. I don't think the theory is a cyclical phenomenon based upon raw factual data, I think it's a phenomenon based the way we tell stories to ourselves. It's a cycle of narrative consensus. Where Mike sees the possibility for random history and says "if history is random, then there is no cycle", I say "history is probably random, but the human drive to explain it will make a cycle." So I'm waiting for the 1T to break, the narratives to get tossed to the masses, and for those narratives to pass collective muster. See what stories get passed on and which ones really don't matter.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree with your conclusions (actually I disagree with most of them), but I do get the importance of narrative in this and I am glad that there is at least a failure mode to your speculations.

Here is a summary of an empirical characterization of empirical turnings from 1435 down to 2008. The details data can be found here.

Parameter	Period type	Value	Period type	Value	Confidence
N-Spirit	2T	1.56	1T, 3T & 4T	0.72	95%
N-Unrest	2T & 4T	1.24	1T & 3T	0.73	99.6%
C-events	2T & 4T	0.43	1T & 3T	0.54	96%
L-events	2T & 4T	0.77	1T & 3T	0.25	99.97%
%Progress Party	2T & 3T	36%	4T & 1T	71%	99.3%
Paradigm	2T & 3T	Freedom	4T & 1T	Progress	NA

The political results only apply to the period since the Revolution as does the paradigm.

This analysis suggests that that are real differences between periods of history that can be labeled as the four turnings. The 2T and 4T are social moments, that is times of rapid change and one would expect if this were so then levels of unrest would be higher and they are. As times of change there should be be more examples of political change events. Such events I call liberal events.* Social moments are have higher levels of liberal events and lower levels of conservative events.

The 2T is called a spiritual awakening and so it ought to show high levels of religious or spiritual turmoil, and they do.

Finally turnings can be classified in terms of their paradigm. Unlike social moments, turnings that feature on paradigm or the other are adjacent. So you have a Freedom paradigm in 2T and 3Ts and a Progress paradigm in 4T and 1Ts. The kind of paradigm tends to show up in the political success of the party associated with a paradigm. The progress party tends to be dominant during 4T and 1T periods, while the Freedom party is during 2T and 3Ts. This tendency is also statistically significant.

Paradigms are more than just a characterization of periods. They also drive the cycle since the 1820's. The paradigm is an external representation of the internal attributes individualism (Freedom) and communitarian (Progress). History creates generations by through these attributes. For example in a 4T the Heroes coming of age will tend to favor the communitarian over the individualist way of making sense of the world. When they come to power in the next 2T their will express this paradigm as policy. This is how generations create history. The nation flip-lops between Freedom and Progress Paradigms. During social moments things are fucked up. In the last 2T you had black Americans having to fight in order the gain the constitutional rights they were supposed have had for a 100 years. You had the government forcing young men to go halfway around the world to risk their lives in order to kill yellow men who hadn't done shit to us. How fucked up is that? These policies involved an US (anti-communist white folks) against THEM (everyone else) group-think that is an expression of a Progress paradigm by Heroes and Artists having the communitarian attribute. Reacting against the fucked up adult world, those coming of age were more likely to favor an individualist way of knowing. That is, is the Prophet generation adopts the individualist attribute in Sean's typology, or as I put it. the Prophet generation who, when they come to power four decades later, produces policy consistent with a Freedom paradigm.

As a result we get a financial crisis that causes a bunch of financial pain. People are unhappy and the austerity approach advocated by Western elites today is what was actually done last 4T resulting in 25% unemployment. How fucked up is that? The policy makers who did this back then were mostly Prophets or Nomads, both of which are associated with the individualist attribute expressed as a Freedom paradigm. The Heroes coming of age in the last 4T adopted a Progress paradigm which fucked things up in the next 2T. This in turn gave up a new set of prophets who are now fucking things up in ways similar to last 4T.

This mechanism explains the alternating social moment turnings and non-social moment turnings in terms of movement on one of the two attribute axes. Not explained is movement on the other axis the subjective-objective or introvert-extrovert. That the social moments alternate between two kinds is shown by the spirituality parameter in the table above. It also indirectly shows up in the different kinds of paradigms. Is there some sort of paradigm that operates in the realm of culture? Can we talk about cultural moments in the 1T and 3T that correspond to social moments for the other axis.? Are Nomads and Artists dominant generations in the arena of culture, just as Prophets and Heroes are dominant in the arena of the political economy?

Or maybe Prophets are fundamentally different than Heroes even before they come of age and pick up their paradigm. That is, could differences in collective parental nurture of Heroes versus Prophets make Heroes already biased in ways that makes their response to the bad times of the 4T fundamentally objective making the 4T a secular crisis, while the response of the Prophets to the bad times of the 2T is fundamentally subjective making the 2T a spiritual crisis.

This idea has considerable promise* for dealing with the saeculum before 1820 before the paradigms operated. But I see problems with the post-1820 saeculum. If Heroes are already prone to an objective, external viewpoint which makes then respond to the 4T by becoming a secular-orientated dominant generation, then if they fail to gell as Heroes (as S&H propose in their Civil War Anomaly) then they should default of a secular-orientated recessive generation, that is the Progressive generation would be Nomads not Artists. Why would they adopt the adopt the subjective attribute of Prophets who had fucked everything up?

*In the pre-paradigm saeculum turnings/generations are close to the length of biological generations. Thus each generation parents the next. Prophets have Artist parents who raise them in such a way as to not suppress their subjective feelings. When they face tough times their response is subjective and the zeitgeist of the era is subjective. The tough times are caused by an exogenous factor. The intersection of tough times with subjective zeitgeist gives an Awakening.

The Prophets raise their Nomad children to also be subjective seekers. Nomads come of age knowing Why, but not How. They are poorly prepared for making their mark in the secular world. They eventually learn through the school of hard knocks how to build a life for themselves and their families. So they take care to instruct their Hero children in the practical skills that will serve them well in adulthood. Heroes come of age knowing How and Why. When they face tough times their response will be pragmatic and focused on secular objectives. They have no use for Why and do not imbue their offspring with it.

When the Artists offspring grow up they are well-prepared for secular success, but spiritually deficit. The Artists know How but not Why? They easily make their way in the secular world but then have to ask is this all? And so for them, the quest for meaning is necessary, and they cultivate the subjective side. And the cycle is complete.

Dude, "yellow men" is not the preferred nomenclature. "People of yellow color", please.

I was thinking of the Springsteen song.

Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62

Close, but not quite there, Eric. The real problem is people who vote for reactionary idiots who support [War on drugs, NSA, have no respect for the constitution, no respect for privacy, are economic illiterates, whores for Corporate America, and whores for the MIC].

IOW, Republicans.

While , it's true there's a lot of crossover, that's not the real problem. There are DINOS, etc. I live in Oklahoma, remember?

Many Democrats in Oklahoma are DINOs. Many vote Republican in national elections.

I can probably write a novel on political idiots. Here's an example to contemplate. It's a case of denial. Oklahoma has one of the largest populations of Native Americans [not full blooded mind you, but pretty well mixed in.] OK, reality check time. Native Americans and you can check the stats for the reservations here have the following [highest rate of diabetes, elevated blood pressure, alcohol issues, poverty.] The denial comes in disregarding parts of one's ancestry to the point of putting one's health in peril. That's one ethnic group down. If you take Anglos, you get another denial issue. Crap wages are just fine as long as "family values are brought up." And So forth.

Yes.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

You considered an alternative history if McCain had been elected. You did not consider the saecular consequences of that alternate. A McCain victory means 911 is the 4T trigger, not 2008. See below.

The 4T start according to the stock cycle was 2000 and according the long wave it was 2008. If McCain had won in 2008, that would give 3 straight for the GOP and 2000 would be a critical election. The average of the three dates is 2002.7. The closest big event to this is 911, hence 911 would be the start of the 4T. The start of the active period in the PE cycle would be 2004. This is the arithmetical interpretation.

A 911 4T trigger makes the war on terror a central issue. Electing McCain would mean the electorate has placed a higher priority on the WoT as opposed to the economic crisis, which is consistent with the WoT being front and center. Electing the guy who sang bomb bomb Iran means America chose war with Iran. Having a Silent military man as commander in chief means we take the war seriously (no Bush-style "war lite"). Taxes are raised and a draft is discussed. Republicans have no probem with passage of stimulus twice the size of Obama's which combines increases in defense spending increase with lots of spending for defense-critical infrastructure such as alternate energy, electric grid, and information network upgrades, nomially to to secure them against terrorist attack. A side effect of all this spending would be the economy gets stimulated out of recession, just like in WW II (ensuring that McCain gets re-elected). Remember all this would be in the absence of any Tea party because no Obama, no TP.

Illegal immigrants could be given amnesty because the country would not afford to have a potentially disaffected population that could be employed as a fifth column by the enemy. Some sort of universal health care scheme could be enacted since McCain ran on this. If done, these things would serve to continue the Bush innovation of compassionate conservativism, which was a long-term strategy to get minority populations to realize that the GOP can represent them too--if they first support the GOP. If it worked it would solve the long-term demographic problem the GOP faces. 2000 would end up being like 1896, the start of another period of GOP dominance after a period of balance between the two parties. Karl Rove thought of 2000 as akin to 1896. This is the political interpretation.

This is how I thought it might play out after the 2004 election. I thought the fall from plateaus was in progress; my reduced price method simply no longer had the power to visulaized the K-cycle, just as raw prices stopped showing up as ordinary price cycles after 1933. I was wrong. I hadn't seen the fall from plateau on my reduced price indicator because it hadn't happened yet, not because reduced price no longer worked. You see it had to have happened already if Rove's 2000=1896 notion was going to come true. In other words the the 4T had to have begun if McCain was going to win because winning would confirm 2000 as a critical election and make Rove right. That is, it would allow the maverick Republican McCain as a wartime CIC (who commands obedience form his party) to make the sort of policy changes that could lock in Republican dominance for a second run.

But it hadn't happened yet. It happened in 2008. It was perfectly visualized on the reduced price graph, so that tool still works. There also was a panic (something I thought was a thing of the past). And because it happened McCain lost, 2000 was not a critical election and Rove's dream went up in smoke. Repubicans now have no strategy with which to deal with the demographic disaster lumbering down the road towards them and they have begun to act irrationally in response. This is the experiential interpretation as my preconceived notions were shattered by events after 2004.

All of this because of a single event. For want of a shoe....

This is what makes an event a trigger.

I think you have me confused with someone else, since I didn't think I was arguing the point you responded to.

I'm also not sure what point you are making with respect to the "single event" and the "trigger."

What we are calling the "Fourth Turning" started in 2008.

I don't know what this does to your analysis of the stock market and stock cycles.

I was just trying to say that only a portion of the New Deal was unraveled, so we are in an admixture of Gilded Age and New Deal now.

I think that the limited unraveling here has more to do with the underlying trend toward less rural and greater urban living, which was what I was trying to say with "political-social" issues.

Originally Posted by JonLaw

I think you have me confused with someone else, since I didn't think I was arguing the point you responded to.

I wasn't responding to you. Did I click on the wrong post? My bad. My post was supposed to be a response to Kepi's contention that the 4T began with 911. He has since clarified his view. He doesn't think the saeculum exists as a empirical phenomenon (as I do), its more of a story we tell after the fact. I think Dave McGuiness used to refer to this as mythopoetical. He wrote about that in the Material Cause thread in Beyond America section at the old T4T site. I didn't really understand it, but it seemed he had two views of S&H's cycle ideas, a real aspect (hence the thread title Material Cause) but also a mythopoetical component that I think might be related to S&H's use of archetypes (this I got this idea from Chas). It appears that for Kepi the mythopoetical aspect is the only aspect.

So for him the S&H theory is not a history of America's future, that is random, but simply the story we tell about it. Or something like that.

For me this stuff is supposed to have utility. For example, in Stock Cycles I expressed the opinion that the secular bear market that I believed was beginning in 2000 would end around 2010-2014. After I developed the notion that the 4T and K-cycle were aligned I now thought the secular bear market would last until the end of the 4T around 2020 (this assumed 911 as the 4T start). See the June 23, 2002 review on Amazon where a reviewer is complaining that I changed my mind. He's right, I did. And now the 4T start is 2008 and I don't know what to think.

Mike - thanks for the link to the old site. I would be interested in what today's posters think of what it was like here 15 years ago.

Pax,

Dave Krein '42

Originally Posted by David Krein

Mike - thanks for the link to the old site. I would be interested in what today's posters think of what it was like here 15 years ago.

Pax,

Dave Krein '42

You're welcome . I sometimes go and look at those old posts. Some of those discussions were very interesting.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Some of you may remember Sean Love (Zarathustra). Sean came up with a system that provided an explanation for how the generation model worked given the fact that generations were longer and lifespans shorter during the early saecula. He started this thread to discuss his multi-modal saeculum model. Recently I have located a free webpage hosting that has no advertising and have put up my saeculum stuff on it, all much revised and (I hope) better thought out:

http://mikebert.neocities.org/home.htm

The first four articles describe long cycles in generation. The American historical cycles article is a general overview of long cycles. The population article describes the evidence for a population-related long cycle and presents a model for it. The war model talks about Quincy Wright’s war cycle and tries to fit this into the Strauss and Howe cycle system. These three articles do not assume a through grounding in the Strauss and Howe cycle theory. The fourth article assumes some knowledge of Strauss and Howe. It makes use of what I have gleaned from Sean’s ideas.

Ten years ago I could not wrap my brain around the multimodal saeculum, went right over my head. More recently after digesting the stuff Chas posted about archetypes I looked at Sean’s multimodal saeculum. He had sent be a document describing his ideas in more detail. I came up with some graphical ways to represent the multimodal saeculum and wrote them up in the Generational model article. The key graphic is this one:



Sean describes each generation in terms of a pair of attributes, each of which can take one of two values, giving four combinations. In the graph the independent/communitarian pair is plotted on the vertical axis and the objective/subjective pair is plotted on the horizontal. Each of the four pairs correspond to one of the four quadrants in the graph and to a particular generation. These four quadrants also correspond to Ken Wilber’s concept of four quadrants or for ways to characterize/study natural or social things that he calls holons. Based this idea Sean assumed that human being, as holons, had four fundamental perspectives which must be considered to obtain an understanding of the thing being studies. Thus, people come in four fundamental “flavors” or archetypes that correspond to the Wilberian quadrants. Archetypes are a given.

This was key for me. It only became clear to me because of the material Chas has provided over the last year where he looked at Shakespeare’s plays as a way to interpret history in saecular terms. Since the characters in plays fall into archetype, so do the players on the world stage. Just because people can fall into archetypes doesn’t explain generations since we know like-aged people with different archetypes and people of different ages with the same archetype. But Sean’s relating of archetypes to Wilber’s quadrants let me create that graph. I could then see the archetype-generating mechanism in terms of two oscillators (2-stroke cycles) 90 degrees out of phase with each other.

I constructed a model consisting of a pair of two-stroke cycles of period 2L, out of alignment by L. It created the four generations in the correct order. Not explained is where L comes from. That is easy, L comes straight out of the other models I presented. The population model creates a two stroke cycle of feast (good times) and famine (bad times). The war model creates times of prosperity (good) and depression (bad). Both cycles are equal in length to a Kondratiev cycle, which averages about 53 years length. Thus 2L is 53, and so L is about 26 or 27 years, which is exactly as long as the old turnings. This gives L for Sean’s model . Sean says this, but he did not spell out exactly how it all worked. I think I understand now.

Now for the post-1820 period the model I came up with was the paradigm model. The paradigm model uses generations to describe how periodic crises in politics and the economy happen (we are in one now). These periods are defined by the PE cycle which is really an empirical saeculum*. The paradigms of the model directly correspond to Sean’s attributes. Individualist-Communitarian attributes map into Freedom-Progress paradigms. They are internal and external viewpoints of the same thing. Similarly the subjective-objective attributes map into less protective-more protective parent nurture in S&H’s nurture cycle, and also into spiritual-secular paradigms.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*It’s what the Strauss and Howe turnings look like if you just focus on external events (history) and not take generational biographies into account. Strauss and Howe’s turnings are the same cycle, but viewed from the perspective of generational archetypes and personalities by studying biographical material. The big difference between the dating for PE cycle versus S&H is the Missionary awakening. Strauss and How focus on the fact that prophet archetypes were clearly being born in the 1860’s and 1870’s and that by 1890 it was clearly Nomads being born. The 1886-1908 S&H dating for this awakening reflects this. On the other hand, awakenings are social moments and as such they are periods of sociopolitical change. The progressive era is one such period and the 1896-1919 dating in the PE cycle reflects this. Both are equally valid, they simply reflect different ways of looking at the same thing.

It's always nice to see ideas come together like this!

Originally Posted by Mikebert

You considered an alternative history if McCain had been elected. You did not consider the saecular consequences of that alternate. A McCain victory means 911 is the 4T trigger, not 2008. See below.

The 4T start according to the stock cycle was 2000 and according the long wave it was 2008. If McCain had won in 2008, that would give 3 straight for the GOP and 2000 would be a critical election. The average of the three dates is 2002.7. The closest big event to this is 911, hence 911 would be the start of the 4T. The start of the active period in the PE cycle would be 2004. This is the arithmetical interpretation.

A 911 4T trigger makes the war on terror a central issue. Electing McCain would mean the electorate has placed a higher priority on the WoT as opposed to the economic crisis, which is consistent with the WoT being front and center. Electing the guy who sang bomb bomb Iran means America chose war with Iran. Having a Silent military man as commander in chief means we take the war seriously (no Bush-style "war lite"). Taxes are raised and a draft is discussed. Republicans have no probem with passage of stimulus twice the size of Obama's which combines increases in defense spending increase with lots of spending for defense-critical infrastructure such as alternate energy, electric grid, and information network upgrades, nomially to to secure them against terrorist attack. A side effect of all this spending would be the economy gets stimulated out of recession, just like in WW II (ensuring that McCain gets re-elected). Remember all this would be in the absence of any Tea party because no Obama, no TP.

Illegal immigrants could be given amnesty because the country would not afford to have a potentially disaffected population that could be employed as a fifth column by the enemy. Some sort of universal health care scheme could be enacted since McCain ran on this. If done, these things would serve to continue the Bush innovation of compassionate conservativism, which was a long-term strategy to get minority populations to realize that the GOP can represent them too--if they first support the GOP. If it worked it would solve the long-term demographic problem the GOP faces. 2000 would end up being like 1896, the start of another period of GOP dominance after a period of balance between the two parties. Karl Rove thought of 2000 as akin to 1896. This is the political interpretation.

This is how I thought it might play out after the 2004 election. I thought the fall from plateaus was in progress; my reduced price method simply no longer had the power to visulaized the K-cycle, just as raw prices stopped showing up as ordinary price cycles after 1933. I was wrong. I hadn't seen the fall from plateau on my reduced price indicator because it hadn't happened yet, not because reduced price no longer worked. You see it had to have happened already if Rove's 2000=1896 notion was going to come true. In other words the the 4T had to have begun if McCain was going to win because winning would confirm 2000 as a critical election and make Rove right. That is, it would allow the maverick Republican McCain as a wartime CIC (who commands obedience form his party) to make the sort of policy changes that could lock in Republican dominance for a second run.

But it hadn't happened yet. It happened in 2008. It was perfectly visualized on the reduced price graph, so that tool still works. There also was a panic (something I thought was a thing of the past). And because it happened McCain lost, 2000 was not a critical election and Rove's dream went up in smoke. Repubicans now have no strategy with which to deal with the demographic disaster lumbering down the road towards them and they have begun to act irrationally in response. This is the experiential interpretation as my preconceived notions were shattered by events after 2004.

All of this because of a single event. For want of a shoe....

This is what makes an event a trigger.

This is a really good analysis, Mike!

Also, I think economics is not the only issue of the crisis, IMO the political polarization and the cultural polarization behind it is also a HUGE issue. Blue America has won the culture war, but Red America is refusing to go down without fighting to the bitter end. The economic problems cannot be solved until the political polarization is dealt with.

Originally Posted by Odin

This is a really good analysis, Mike!

Also, I think economics is not the only issue of the crisis, IMO the political polarization and the cultural polarization behind it is also a HUGE issue. Blue America has won the culture war, but Red America is refusing to go down without fighting to the bitter end. The economic problems cannot be solved until the political polarization is dealt with.

If Blue America won the culture war, Red America is still winning the economic one. From my perspective, controlling the economy is the more powerful of the two. We have an inherently conservative Federal Constitution, and most states follow suit. Adding the power of money to the natural imbalance between doing things, requiring majorities everywhere, and not doing things, requiring a single blocking majority somewhere, makes change extremely hard. Look at the blame game on the jobs front or the ACA. The GOP has blocked every attempt to do better, and the blame falls on BHO. This is not a game the Blue team can play in reverse. The Reds prefer to do less, not more.