Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

[Bob Butler]

I never really believed that once America really started getting close to an election that they would shun Biden's economic record and embrace Trump's prejudice, superstition, sexual preying and criminality. The degree the expected rejection has taken over recently seems overwhelming though. How the heck could he turn it around?

I noted a sign at the recent Arizona Harris rally which simply read KAMALA in multiple colors, repeating the official abbreviations of three states. Happy to see Massachusetts made the cut.

[Bob Butler]

I recently tuned into a main stream media political news and opinion program. They were trying to articulate the Harris message, of why everything Trump is trying to throw at it hasn't been sticking. There was mention of "mind your own damn business", "when we fight, we win" and similar recent sayings. But one theme the came back to was that voters were tired of all the strife and conflict and wanted it behind them. Trump has been an icon for the many issues of the culture war. Enough. Put him to bed. Close the door. Optimism and change.

High? After so much focus on the many aspects of the culture war, it is time to close it down and move on? There is a vaccine for Covid. The cops stopped murdering minorities. There is a path to restore women's health care and family planning. They are looking to pass a voting rights bill and apply the same standards to the Supreme Court as the rest of the judiciary. It's over. The progressive positions are being accepted by the voters. Shut the door on the old issues and move on. Let's build infrastructure, space ships and computer chips.

High? At long last the recently dominant boomer generation is aging out of power and their addiction to conflict is ending? Biden, Trump, Pelosi and McConnell are fading to gone? A younger generation is coming of voting age and has had entirely enough of crisis mentality?

If so, it's about time. Four score and seven years. A new birth of freedom.

[Bob Butler]

He hasn’t been in jail and it doesn’t look like he’s going any time soon.

Yah. With Garland's initial delay, I would guess the appeals process will take us at least until spring.

Kamala’s popularity is a media illusion. She polled at maybe 1% in the primaries before Tulsi destroyed her and she dropped out.

That was then. Now is different. We'll see where the Democratic convention takes us. "We're not going back!" "When we fight, we win!" She is not explicitly invoking S&H and talking of going into a high, but she might as well be.

Congrats though for believing we’re on the verge of a golden age ushered in by progressivism.

It is pure S&H. Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die. We'll see.

[guest]

That was then. Now is different.

Right, because this version of her is a media illusion. Anyone can look competent (or at least not drunk) with creative editing.

[Clarkmod]

Congrats though for believing we’re on the verge of a golden age ushered in by progressivism.

It is pure S&H. Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die. We'll see.

LOL!

Let's see you quote Strauss and Howe where they say, "Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die."

Go ahead and quote where Strauss and Howe say this, or anything close to it. Make our day.

That sounds like pure Bob Butler, repeated at least a dozen times. Do you have anything new to say?

[Bob Butler]

Congrats though for believing we’re on the verge of a golden age ushered in by progressivism.

It is pure S&H. Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die. We'll see.

LOL!

Let's see you quote Strauss and Howe where they say, "Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die."

Go ahead and quote where Strauss and Howe say this, or anything close to it. Make our day.

That sounds like pure Bob Butler, repeated at least a dozen times. Do you have anything new to say?

Do you think colonial imperialism, nobility, freedom for the slaves and containing aggression were not flaws? Were they not removed by their respective crises? Did not S&H celebrate the removal? My contribution would be pointing out that these ideas were progressive at the time, as reducing bigotry and superstition is in the current crisis.

The problem is your using censorship rather than openly arguing for bigotry and superstition. I wonder why? It is not as if I am interrupting John of late. He hasn't been weighing in as much. Still, censorship is better than arguing for your true beliefs? Censorship so well meshes with the Founding Fathers values as expressed in the First Amendment? It is proper to argue for the values S&H illustrated by violating them?

[Clarkmod]

It is pure S&H. Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die. We'll see.

LOL!

Let's see you quote Strauss and Howe where they say, "Selected flaws are removed from the culture. New values are introduced to become pervasive. The old habits die."

Go ahead and quote where Strauss and Howe say this, or anything close to it. Make our day.

That sounds like pure Bob Butler, repeated at least a dozen times. Do you have anything new to say?

Do you think colonial imperialism, nobility, freedom for the slaves and containing aggression were not flaws? Were they not removed by their respective crises? Did not S&H celebrate the removal? My contribution would be pointing out that these ideas were progressive at the time, as reducing bigotry and superstition is in the current crisis.

The problem is your using censorship rather than openly arguing for bigotry and superstition. I wonder why? It is not as if I am interrupting John of late. He hasn't been weighing in as much. Still, censorship is better than arguing for your true beliefs? Censorship so well meshes with the Founding Fathers values as expressed in the First Amendment? It is proper to argue for the values S&H illustrated by violating them?

You didn't quote from Strauss and Howe. Again, it is pure Bob Butler. When you can be accountable and actually back your arguments with quotes from Strauss and Howe, then we'll engage.

[Clarkmod]

Here's an example of how to quote from Strauss and Howe, in case you're not sure how to do it.

You had no response to this.

Flaws are constantly being removed. It's called evolution. And we've evolved so rapidly in such a short period of time that a reversion to the mean is inevitable. It means going backwards to traditional values and consolidation of gains. Because humans can only evolve as fast as biology allows and it's already well beyond our ability to cope. Talking about space and aliens is just a coping mechanism for those who think we'll have constant progress without necessary retracement and consolidation of gains. Before ever greater progress it's absolutely necessary and is the lessons learned from history and science.

We are talking about the evolution of cultures more than biological change. The S&H generational rhythms suggest how this change takes place. A crisis period forces the maximum progressive change. S&H suggest a conservative regression and reaction somewhat later, as when the king was restored after Cromwell or the KKK manifested after the Civil War. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened again, but you seem to have the timing a bit off.

But this is a crisis, a progressive time in the end. This is a time when new values manifest. I agree there is a rhythm to change. I expect a regression and long pause before another such time occurs, maybe four score and seven years before the next new birth of freedom. This is just a period when those who resist change have to grin and bear it.

I don’t anticipate aliens getting involved in the process, or if they do how they would influence things. I do anticipate wealth from space, primarily from asteroid mining. I could see more wealth focused on states like Florida and Texas just based on their location. Seeing that wealth shared with other states might be more likely to induce succession than anything else. I could also see companies such as Spacex locating on the equator, in part to make launches more efficiently, in part to evade US taxes and regulations. Still, that is a thing for the next cycle.

This is what Strauss and Howe say:

Think of all the Boomers, 13ers, and Millennials you know (or know
about) today. Picture them ten to thirty years older, pursuing the
archetypal paths of ancestral generations during prior Fourth Turnings.
This will be America's next Crisis constellation, capable of propelling
America into and through the next great gate in history.

Boomers Entering Elderhood: Gray Champions

Boomer evangelicals will join the search for a spiritual old age. Elder
conservative Christians will sharpen their sermonizings about good and
evil, implant God and prayer in public life, and demand more divine
order in civic ritual. They will view as sacrilegious many of the
Unraveling era's new pro-choice life-cycle laws, from genetically
engineered births to nontraditional marriages to assisted suicides. They
will desecularize birth, marriage, and death to reauthenticate the core
transitions of human life.

Boomer-led niche cultures will cease much of their Unraveling-era
quarreling and find new communitarian ground. Ethnocentrics will
reveal new civic virtue in racial essences. The Fatherhood movement
will become patriarchal (and feminism matriarchal), demanding and
enforcing family and community standards. Active members of these
cadres will comprise just a small minority of old Boomers, but like the
hippies and yuppies of the Second and Third Turnings they will
command the attention and set the tone for the Fourth. Those who
dislike them—and there will be many—will be unable to avoid seeing
and hearing their message.

Emerging in this Crisis climax will be a great entropy reversal, that
miracle of human history in which trust is reborn. Through the Fourth
Turning, the old order will die, but only after having produced the seed
containing the new civic order within it. In the moment of maximum
danger, that seed will implant, and a new social contract will take root.
For a brief time, the American firmament will be malleable in ways that
would stagger the today's Un-raveling-era mindset. “Everything is new
and yielding,” enthused Benjamin Rush to his friends at the climax of the
American Revolution. So will everything be again.

The prospect for great civic achievement—or disintegration—will be
high. New secessionist movements could spring from nowhere and
achieve their ends with surprising speed. Even if the nation stays
together, its geography could be fundamentally changed, its party
structure altered, its Constitution and Bill of Rights amended beyond
recognition. History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed
confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is
confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war—
class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or
superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war,
fought until the losing side has been rendered nil—its will broken,
territory taken, and leaders captured. And if there is total war, it is likely
that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed.

With or without war, American society will be transformed into
something different. The emergent society may be something better, a
nation that sustains its Framers' visions with a robust new pride. Or it
may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time
of glory or ruin.

The Crisis resolution will establish the political, economic, and social
institutions with which our children and heirs will live for decades
thereafter. Fresh from the press of history, the new civic order will
rigidify around all the new authorities, rules, boundaries, treaties,
empires, and alliances. The Crisis climax will recede into the public
memory—a heart-pounding memory to all who will recall it personally,
a pivot point for those born in its aftermath, the stuff of myth and legend
for later generations. And, for better or worse, everyone who survives
will be left to live with the outcome.

What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning?

History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly
wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable
plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not
assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the
irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just
temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam,
many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing
in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something
incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our
national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover.
As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history
provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the
map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to
barbarism.

The outcome of the next Fourth Turning will determine the enduring
reputation of the Unraveling era in which we now live. In the 1930s, the
1920s were blamed for everything that had gone wrong. After World
War II was won, however, Americans began to look back more fondly on
those roaring good times. Imagine how the 1920s would have looked in
1950 had the Great Depression never lifted, the Axis prevailed, or both.
Now imagine the pre-Crisis 1990s—all its O. J. Simpsons and Michigan
militias, its Beavises and Buttheads and Crips and Bloods, its low voter
turnouts and anguish over tiny cuts in Medicare's growth—all from the
vantage point of America in the year 2030.

If America plunges into an era of depression or violence which by then
has not lifted, we will likely look back on the 1990s as the decade when
we valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices. If the
Fourth Turning goes well, however, memories of the Unraveling will be
laced with nostalgic fun. More important, a good ending will probably
mean that America has taken individual freedoms that now seem socially
corrosive and embedded them constructively in a new social order. After
the next Fourth Turning has solved the historical problems of our
saeculum, many of today's Unraveling-era social problems will be
recognizable as worsening symptoms of what had to be—and was—
fixed.

In every saeculum, the Awakening gives birth to a variety of
individual and social ideals that are mutually incompatible within the
framework of the old institutional order. In the Unraveling, the tension
between wants and shoulds widens, sours, and polarizes. In the Crisis, a
new social contract reconciles these competing principles on a new and
potentially higher level of civilization. In the following High, this
contract provides the secure platform on which a new social
infrastructure can be hoisted. In the parlance of its time, each of the past
three Crises resolved aggravating values struggles that had been building
up over the prior saeculum. The American Revolution resolved the
eighteenth-century struggle between commerce and citizenship. The
Civil War resolved the early-nineteenth-century struggle between liberty
and equality. The New Deal resolved the industrial-era struggle between
capitalism and socialism.

What present-day tensions will the next Fourth Turning resolve? Most
likely, they will be Culture Wars updates of the perennial struggle
between the individual and the collective—with new labels dating back
to our recent Consciousness Revolution. This time, the individual ideal
goes under the rubric of “choice”: from marketplace choice to lifestyle
choice; from choice about manners, appearance, or association to the
choice of expression and entertainment. The social ideal goes under the
rubric of “community” and points to where all of the various choices
must be curtailed if we wish to preserve strong families, secure borders,
rising living standards, a healthy environment, and all the other building
blocks of a sustainable civilization.

In today's Unraveling, with its mood of pessimism, a reconciliation
between these opposing principles seems (and probably is) impossible.
But come the Fourth Turning, in the white heat of society's ekpyrosis and
rebirth, a grand solution may suddenly snap into place. Once a new
social contract is written and a new civic order established, it could
eradicate (or, at least, narrow) many of the today's seemingly insoluble
contradictions—for example, between no-fault divorce and dependable
families, poverty assistance and the work ethic, or gun control and
personal defense.

[FullMoon]

Thank you for calling Bob on his game. Howe has done a number of good podcast recently and has said clearly that the crisis in each of America's fourth turnings wasn't resolved without a war. It's either internal or external, but war it is.
Bob is correct in saying that many "flaws" have been recognized and rectified. And we're a better country for it. But the crisis continues to escalate and war is clearly staring us straight in the face.

[Bob Butler]

Thank you for calling Bob on his game. Howe has done a number of good podcast recently and has said clearly that the crisis in each of America's fourth turnings wasn't resolved without a war. It's either internal or external, but war it is.
Bob is correct in saying that many "flaws" have been recognized and rectified. And we're a better country for it. But the crisis continues to escalate and war is clearly staring us straight in the face.

Appreciated, but which domestic issues do you see as escalating? There is the election, sure, but Covid, the race riots, cops murdering minorities and the insurrection seem to be past peak. Using the government to force religious doctrines and granting voting rights needs both houses of congress and the White House to resolve permanently. We will have to wait to see if that happens. I have been kind of assuming that with the women's vote it will. Oppression of various minorities such as LBGQ and latino continues. Might be harder to end. No lack of flawed elements to remove, but mostly done already.

Abroad? That's harder. It's not purely our call. Netanyahu's hold on power depends on his keeping the war going. That's a rough one. Biden hasn't been willing to play hardball with him. We may have to see if Kamala will. Putin is struggling both militarily and against sanctions. Can he keep it up indefinitely? Will our election result make any difference? China is the odd one. They need the oil. If they start anything, they are apt to lose it. Xi would have to be pretty desperate to start anything. Still, with his economic troubles he could find himself just that desperate. I don't know about that one. He is very good at making threatening noises, but never seems to do anything,