http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showpost.php?p=286164&postcount=225http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=286161I am trying to leave my generational impulses aside and focus on Obama's results. Those of you who read History Unfolding know that I have been struggling hard with this issue myself. I can accept the idea that Obama is getting us the best available health reform bill, although I think it will be a huge disappointment of limited political benefit. My real fear is that the economic crisis is really much worse than Larry Summers thinks it is, and that Obama has become convinced that we have done enough to solve it. If he turns out to be wrong he could be the new Herbert Hoover.
So I hope this guy is, in fact, wrong.
As for Millennials--I think there is entirely too much idealism about them flying around here. We cannot count on young-adult Millennials to save the world. GIs saved it in the 1930s-40s with the right Prophet leadership; without it they would have been helpless and would not have learned what idealism they had. It is quite true, however, that Obama very much needs to do something that will benefit them directly.
I simply cannot agree with this, David. Once again, we see the difficulties the Prophet archetype has understanding the Hero.
Take a look at one major GI-driven phenomenon of the last Crisis, the unionization of industry. The "leaders" of this movement were indeed Missionaries, especially the irascible John L. Lewis of the CIO, but real change happened only when the GI rank and file took the bit in their teeth and ran ahead of Lewis, who scrambled to catch up with them. It was not Lewis or the others in the CIO leadership (still less the AFL, who were seriously anachronistic) who initiated the sit-down strikes that forced the steel industry to recognize the unions. It was the workers, the union members, almost all of them GIs, who banded together and organized themselves in classic Hero fashion and proved a force the union leadership could not control, and management could not resist.
We can see the same thing in politics. Much as Millennials are doing now with Obama, the GIs got behind Roosevelt in 1932, but not uncritically. When his first wave of reforms proved disappointingly pro-capitalist, they began putting support behind third-party movements such as those of Upton Sinclair, Norman Thomas, and above all Huey Long. Roosevelt responded by moving sharply to the left towards the end of his first term, and won reelection resoundingly, following which he implemented the second New Deal. But he was not leading the GIs in the sense you mean. They were pushing him, and very successfully.In foreign policy, Roosevelt wanted to take an active role in thwarting the Nazis, but GIs were by and large uninterested. They formed a powerful anti-war movement that kept FDR from entering the war until the Japanese changed their minds in December 1941. Here, unlike on the economy, I have to say that Roosevelt was right and the GIs were wrong, but here too they were hardly blind followers of elder leadership.
A Hero generation is not a generation of robots or puppets. That is a complete misunderstanding of the archetype on the part of Strauss and Howe, one that apparently you share to some degree.
I admit I didn't expect Obama to pull a Roosevelt to the extent he has done, with his compromising, cautious reforms, and his attempt to straddle the fence. But probably I should have expected it, since not only Roosevelt but also Lincoln did the same thing. However, I have been expecting thunder to sound on the left, mainly in Millennial tones, since it became obvious that that's what he's done. And now we are hearing that thunder. The next step is for Obama, who is clearly no political fool, to respond to it as Roosevelt did. But perhaps it needs to get a little bit louder first.
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