The next 40 years, the high tide of Progessive politics?

Odin2005

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Sun May-03-09 07:42 PM
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The next 40 years, the high tide of Progessive politics?

Here is a fascinating discussion I ran into at a history & current events message board I frequent:

Political Archetypes

The OP takes this ideological chart:

...and plots the current American ideological alignment on it:

Since political attitudes will shift over time, and generally in reaction to previous generations, the relative weighting of the various political archetypes should change over time. The question is, in what way? (We already know the answer to the question of how long these shifts take -- this is after all the Fourth Turning website.)

It is my contention that, in order to maintain cohesion, a society will only conflict along a single axis at a time. Along a different axis, 90 degrees to that of the conflict, there will be a strong bias toward one side. For example, if the main conflicts are lower left versus upper right, then there will be a bias toward either the upper left or lower right with the remaining position being relegated to the political fringe. Sometimes the conflict axis could be orthogonal to the chart and sometimes diagonal.

Thus, at any given moment there is an "arc of respectability" among political opinions that stretches from one end of the chart to the other with a bend that curves toward the bias (and that bias defines the political center). This arc also has recently corresponded to what people generally mean when they talk about "left" versus "right."

Below is the chart as I think it has been oriented from the end of the last awakening <60s and 70s> to the present:

The arc of respectability stretches from the "radical" types that Mitchell identified to "theoconservatives" on the true right with a "communitarian" center. Libertarian types of various sorts are either eccentric liberals, curmudgeony conservatives or just plain fringe.

It is my contention that the arc rotates 45 degrees clockwise every social moment. (This would hard to prove, but I'll throw it out there nonetheless.) If so, here is the chart from the end of the Depression Crisis until the start of the last Awakening:

This certainly explains the left-right axis of the political compass. It corresponds to the main conflict axis at the resolution of the last crisis.

And here is the chart as it will be at the end of the present Crisis:

You'll note that I also consider this Crisis politically similar to the Glorious Revolution Crisis, a not uncommon assertion of various "grand cycle" theories that have cropped up here from time to time.

Basically, according to the poster's hypothesis the political center takes a 45-degree clockwise shift every 40 years. The last shift occurred during the 60s and 70s, and a new shift is starting now that will make our side the political center over the next 20 years with DLCers and Neocons to one side of us and the Naderites, Left-Libertarians, and Anarchists on the other, the Paleo-conservatives like ol' Pat Buchanan will be marginalized as "fringe" while the Religious Right will be relegated to the status of curmudgeony relics.

My historical analysis:

The Puritans were not unlike the Boomers in many ways. They were fierce critics of the legitimacy of "authority", with the authority being that of the Monarchy and the Church of England. The Glorious Generation brought this to completion with the Glorious Revolution and the supremacy of Parliament.

with the legitimacy of Authority vanquished the Great Awakening Generation (Ben Franklin's and Sam Adam's generation) brought the necessity of the Old Rules and the "stogy" elders defending them into question (Ben Franklin famously called Cotton Mather a "bore"). Many, inspired by Newtonian physics, religious motivations, or both declared that society operated too by "natural laws", that people could rule themselves without complex rules. The Republican Generation (Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison) brought this to completion in the American Revolution.

The Transcendentals (Lincoln's, Emerson's, and Thoreau's Generation), disoriented by the lack of rules to guide them, searched for some authority or principle to guide them. For many it was a Personal God (in contrast to the Deist God of the Enlightenment), for others it was The Nation as expressed in the deification of the Founders. For a growing number of secular urban elites and middle class it was the novel faith of Science, Technology, and Progress. The Gilded Generation (Grant, McKinley, Twain) brought this to completion during the Civil War and the Gilded Age.

The Missionary Generation (of William Jennings Bryan and FDR) faith in these Authorities and Principles lead them to create a complex system of rules around these Authorities and Principles to channel society towards Utopia. The contrast to the Awakeners is stark. The GIs brought this to completion during the Depression and WW2 as the generation that thought one could build one's way to Utopia.

The Boomers, like the Puritans before them, attacked the legitimacy of Authority, in this case it was Science, Technology, Progress, Organized Religion, and Nationalism. The Millennials will bring this to completion

If this hypothesis is correct then the GOP may die over the next 20 years and the Democratic party will split into 2 parties.