Thoughts on the 2016 Election and the Regeneracy of the Fourth Turning

On June 5, 2009, I posted a blog entry here entitled: Of an Ominous Financial Crash, An Ordinary National Election, A Trivial Tea Party. That entry celebrated how I found a book I had been looking for, Strauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. I wrote:

As the strange and apparently ominous events of the past half-year have been accruing, I have wanted to re-read The Fourth Turning, but all my rooting in the accessible boxes in the garage came up wanting. So I was anxiously on the lookout for the book as I began the task of making my library as planned in the Chem Geek Princess's old room (now the Guest Room/Library). Thus I was amazed when finally, I found the book and read the page that fell open, and that last, pregnant sentence:

" . . . the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, as trivial as a Tea Party."

The context Strauss and Howe were referring to is the spark that sets off the transition into the Fourth Turning, the Crisis period of our time.

In the summer of 2014, while writing my Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam Paper, I checked in on the Fourth Turning Discussion Groups that I have been a part of since 2002. There, I saw a link to a Neil Howe blog post (blog.saeculumresearch.com) in which he stated that he and Strauss had decided that the Fourth Turning of our era, the Millennial Saeculum, had likely begun with the Global Financial Crash in the fall of 2008. I believe that this timing may well prove to be right. The ages of the generations was right, with the Millennials fully occupying young adulthood, Generation X fully in mid-life, the Boomers fully occupying elderhood, and the very elder GIs leaving the planet. The generational archetypes were also aligned: the Prophets in elderhood, the Nomads in middle-age, the Heroes in young adulthood, and the young Artists arriving as children.

Recently, I have noticed that people are beginning to talk about the dire nature of the current election. I have also heard forebodings about another economic shock to the system from people I am talking to for my dissertation research and from those involved in other projects with me. These premonitions of dire events to come are not directly a part of my research, but the Strauss and Howe theory may explain some of what I am finding. This was unexpected.

 I have also been anxious and upset about this election, and I have had to take a short break from Facebook in order to keep my focus on my dissertation work. I have been thinking about the election as part of a linear trend toward some totalitarian future, a fascist or socialist dystopia. So I pulled out The Fourth Turning and read it again, paying attention to the cyclical nature of Awakenings and Crises it describes. This gave me hope for the future despite the stresses to the current system that seem to be reaching a saecular maximum.

In the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory, a saeculum is a cycle in time that "spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years. Each cycle is comprised of four Turnings which are eras that come in the same order, saeculum after saeculum since the end of the Middle Ages. Strauss and Howe define the turnings as:

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
•  The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when an old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 3)

In my re-reading, I noticed that some of what I remembered from the book was not quite right. I had expected the Fourth Turning Crisis to erupt as the-end-of-the world-as-we-know-it (TEOTWAWKI). But the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory posits a Crisis as a "great gate in history" when civic order reaches its nadir and is rebuilt based on values developed during the Second Turning Awakening. The conclusion of the Crisis and the change in the social mood that follows, marks the beginning of the First Turning High of a new saeculum. Strauss and Howe state that a Crisis begins with some random event that causes a sudden change of the social mood. This happens when the generational archetypes are aligned in a certain order, as I noted above. At that point, members of a society stop drifting along and begin to take responsibility for problems they had ignored during the 3rd Turning Unraveling. The order of the generational archetypes is important, because each one has a particular character marked by their age and place in history.

In the Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe looked at other Crises in the Anglo-American Saecular history. They identified patterns common to each Fourth Turning, even though the particulars of each were different in their timing and events. They wrote that a Crisis has an identifiable morphology. From the Fourth Turning:

Fourth Turnings have provided the great pivot points of the Anglo-American legacy. dating back to the fifteenth century, there have been six. Each produced its own Crisis and its own facsimile of the halcyon spirit today's World War II veterans remember so vividly. From the similarities of these eras, a morphology can be constructed:

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst--a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy--a new counterentropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax--a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and the birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution--a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big, public questions, and establishes the new order. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 256). 

According to Strauss and Howe, the regeneracy is a process. It's beginning is marked by the nadir of social order that has been decaying through the Unraveling and into the crisis. The regeneration is complete when "out of the debris of the Unraveling, a new civic ethos arises. One set of post-Awakening ideals prevails over the others" (p. 257). At this point, people use the new synergy to strengthen their communities and instruct their government officials on how to reinforce it.


Before a Crisis begins, say Strauss and Howe, people can foresee the fault lines along which a spark may ignite, but they cannot predict its regeneracy, climax or resolution. However, they say that a regeneracy can be expected 1-5 years into a Crisis. But not all Fourth Turnings are the same. If Strauss and Howe are right about the beginning of this Crisis, we are more than seven years into it, and still the fragmentation from the Unraveling continues. We can see the splintering of our politics continuing among and within the major political parties, and most of the people have not yet united around a particular vision of civic order. In his blog posts on the topic, Howe also stated that the regeneracy is bumped into being by a spark or series of sparks that are more serious than the initial catalyst for the Fourth Turning. However, from the Crash of 2008 until now, the Great Recession has continued, with no marked repair and no sudden change. Although the Obama administration calls it a "recovery," many Americans point out bitterly that it is a "jobless recovery," if a recovery it is.


But this year, people are facing a presidential election that is unique in American history. There is no incumbent candidate. Obama is term-limited out. His party controls the executive branch, but does not control the Congress. The Court is divided, and could lean toward constitutional anarchy with the appointment of the president's nominee. Garland is opposed to the Second Amendment, causing Second Amendment groups and gun-owners to consider their response should the Court try to violate their right to keep and bear arms.

One major party, the Democrats, is running a corrupt criminal who may yet be indicted for mishandling government property. She is also responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, and yet cannot remember that any people were "lost" there under her watch. Their only other declared candidate is an aging "democratic" socialist who promises to continue the trend of taxation and deficit spending that has thus far enslaved our grandchildren to unprecedented debt.

The other major party has gone against the wishes of its conservative base over the course of the last three elections. The Republican front-runner is a Boomer, an inside trader who calls himself an outsider, and he cannot articulate a single policy. But he is popular among true-believers because they think he can, with his pen and phone, make the budding executive branch tyranny stop. But he has unfavorable polls approaching 70% and he is unlikely to be able to win the election. His only serious challenger is a Gen-X outsider, a constitutionalist, who is hated by the party establishment. In fact, the Republican establishment wonks have proposed inserting their own preferred insiders into the process through a brokered convention, which is not the same as a contested convention in which the existing candidates duke it out for the nomination. This would be unique in history. Many observers think this would destroy the credibility of the Republican Party, causing its voters to stay home or vote third party in unprecedented numbers.

The largest "third party," the Libertarian Party, will likely run a popular former governor of New Mexico, who has considerable executive experience and was known for his promotion of individuals rights and liberty, and his use of veto power to keep the budget balanced and stop the state government from violating the liberty of the people. Some Republican wonks are threatening to try to take over the Libertarian Party, should an unwanted candidate be nominated in their own party. Although the threat is unlikely to be successful, because the Libertarian Party National Convention will take place in May, which is before the Republicans have finished their primaries, it is an indicator of the instability within the GOP.

When faced with such an election, many people I know personally or on social media resort to bitter humor, anger, and a sense of impending doom. That sense of doom is only increased by the predictions of further shocks to the economy that may occur as early as this summer. Some economists say that it could result in The Great Devaluation of the American dollar. This would render our money worthless and stop commerce.

These are things that I have had nightmares about.
However, if these are the things of which a regeneracy may be made, so that the old, decaying civic habits are replaced with something new--a new economy, a new political outlook, a new liberty--then the nightmares might be worth it. After the Great Depression and World War II, some people thought that the piper of the old order would still have to be paid, and that the Depression would re-establish itself. Instead, as Americans worked through the war, they developed a new economy, new industry, and a new social ethos. When the war was over, people moved on. They did not go back. They had reset their systems, remitted their debts and established the beginning of new social habits through the regeneracy of that Great Power Crisis.

I posit that this year and this election will mark the regeneracy of the Millennial Crisis. The faults in the old order that the election and the economy are revealing are similar to other saecula. They are also directly related to the values changes precipitated in the 2nd Turning Awkaening and the problems revealed in the 3rd Turning Unraveling. We still cannot foresee what great and perilous events will mark the climax of our passage through this "great gate" in history, and what future will be built out of its resolution. However, we can know that the Fourth Turning is proceeding in a familiar pattern, and that we are not stuck in some nightmare Crisis without end.

My re-reading has given me hope. A good outcome is not a sure thing. Of the ten crises that the Anglo-American generations have passed through, some have had the best possible resolution, some have had good resolutions, and some have had mixed results. However, none so far have ended the civilization that sustains these cycles, and TEOTWAWKI has not happened. It could happen. But I think it is more likely that if we stay the course, fight for our values, restore the power of the civil society and take control of our government, we will see a good resolution to this Fourth Turning. If we work for it, the generations now living can become "repairers of the breech."

OK. Now I can go back to my dissertation with some equanimity.
And yes, I am back to blogging. In late 2013, I had my own crisis, which caused me to reorder my priorities, write and defend my Comps (November 2014), form a dissertation committee, write and successfully defend my dissertation proposal (November 2015). I am now in the "valley of confusion" that is part and parcel of qualitative research. Yes, it is fun! Yes, I will tell you all about it in another post.

De Nile Ain't Just A River in Egypt

I just read an excellent blog entry over at Consent of the Governed called 2010: Brace for Impact. In it, blogger Judy Aron discusses the scheme of Quantitative Easing, a way in which federal reserve notes (I refuse to call it 'money') being printed in unprecedented quantity over the coming year in order to keep up with federal spending, will be released onto the marketplace. The Fed is doing this hoping to pump enough money into the banks to get them to lend money instead of buying treasuries. The problem is that by making the prime rate 0 -0.25% (the prime discount rate is the rate at which banks lend to other banks--which they are not doing much of at the moment) the Fed has left itself nowhere to go if Quantitative Easing does not work and flooding the market with dollars cannot be turned on a dime. In this case, the dollar crashes, which means that the currency becomes worthless to those holding dollars, and then as Marketplace.org's Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains, it will leave "everybody badly needing a drink."

What is interesting is that, despite the fact that anyone who can do elementary math can see that it remains physically impossible to continue consuming far more than one produces for very long, such magical thinking is still engaged in by everyone from senior Senators in the halls of the Capitol to my neighbors.

The Engineering Geek and I had the pleasure of having dinner with another East Mountain couple recently. We are not well acquainted with them, although they had come to our Passover Seder once or twice. During an excellent dessert with wonderful coffee, the wife asked me about Common Sense, Inc., my consulting business that runs Retake Congress. I began by explaining the four points to the contract that our candidates sign. But I never got to finish, because when I got to the economic point, our hosts began to argue and object to the idea that the United States economy could be badly impacted by the fact that the federal government is spending money like water and then borrowing more to spend just as profligately.

We were told that a currency crash and hyper-inflation simply cannot happen here because:

• the United States is a superpower
• Obama is the messiah (not said in so many words, but implied)
• China will keep lending us money because we'll keep buying their goods
• times have changed and human beings have never before had technology and a worldwide marketplace
• the laws of nature do not apply to economics

Although there was a moment when the Engineering Geek's explanation of the fall of Weimar in Germany due to hyper-inflation began to dawn on the wife, the husband quickly pointed out that Germany was not operating in a world market. (Oy, the abyssimal failure of our public schools to teach history!)

Finally, I attempted to draw an analogy using the energy exchanges in ecosystem ecology. At this point, the husband simply said that he did not believe me because economics is not a natural thing, it is human made and therefore not subject to natural laws. Therefore he said, it is not impossible for people to continue indefinitely consuming more than they produce.

I was absolutely floored at first, not understanding how a smart and successful director of a major Albuquerque employer could possibly not understand this simple concept. (The EG said I was getting frustrated). Then I realized. My neighbors are in denial. They simply cannot imagine that a system that they depend upon, one that allows them to live the rather extravagant lifestyle they enjoy, could possibly fail. Like many of the passengers on the Titanic, they tell themselves the story that the good ship U.S. Economy is unsinkable.

According to researchers who study the psychology of disasters, many people freeze in the first minutes of a disaster because they simply cannot believe that their reality has altered so suddenly. These people are the least likely to take positive action in the first moments of the disaster, and are therefore less likely to survive. (See, for example, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why by Amanda Ripley). Those who survive are often those who have thought about and planned for the unthinkable.

As a child growing up, I spent a lot of time reading science fiction, and a fair number of those short stories and books placed characters in the unthinkable situations of disasters ranging from nuclear war (Alas, Babylon) to an astroid impact (Lucifer's Hammer). Such books do get one thinking about the possibilities of disaster. But the book that made me realize just how quickly a situation can deteriorate from normalcy to surreal horror was John Hersey's The Wall, a novel that portrayed the history of the Warsaw ghetto. In the beginning one of the female characters is returning from the bakery in her Warsaw neighborhood, her basket full of bread. Within the first third of the novel, that same character is hungry and scrambling for food in the ghetto. By the second half of the novel, she is making her way through the sewers filled with barbed-wire in order to escape. The time portrayed in the novel, about six years, is telescoped to the main events, but for an impressionable freshman in high school, the idea that one's world can change dramatically in a short time became real to me with this book because it was about real events.

For some time, as I have watched the country I inhabited before September 2008 change before my very eyes, I have been aware of how fast something wicked this way comes. (Yes, Ray Bradbury borrowed one of his sci-fi fantasy title's from Shakespeare). Not quite believing it could get bad, I nevertheless began thinking about what we would need in case of, say a bank failure, or even civil unrest. That thinking became planning and purchasing as I watched our purported leaders scramble all over each other to deny reality through insinuation and outright lies. The more outrageous their behavior, the more planning and purchasing I did. Now, working with others, we are planning for various contigencies.

I have been called a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, a person wedded to doom and gloom, and the other night, unpatriotic. That's okay. Call me all of those things. Because when I get called those names, I remember the Donner Party. They ignored all the signs, did not heed the warnings, took an untried "short cut" that led to a long delay, and ended up in the High Sierra completely unprepared for winter. And most of the members of that group from Illinois came to a horrific end. So call me all the names you want, but also call me "Scout" because my motto is still Be Prepared. In winter, for example, I carry an emergency kit in the car. (Such a kit should at least contain candles, water, high-energy snacks, a sleeping bag, a shovel and kitty litter).

If one is unprepared for even a mild disaster, one's chances of injury and death are increased. In the face of a serious disaster, being able to accept the unthinkable and being prepared for many challenging situations makes one's chances of surviving and even thriving much greater.

The sunshine patriot and the summer soldier will not be prepared to weather hard times. Winter soldiers are prepared for more than one kind of hard time.

Denial of reality can lead to serious consequences. So now, in order to "brace for impact", the Engineering Geek is working with others who think logistically on contingencies for a group of us, so that we can provide ourselves with the mutual aid and comfort of community in the coming hard times. Because hard times are predictable. When enough people in power in a society evade reality, hard times become inevitable as that same reality comes back to bite us in the butt.

Denial. It ain't just a river in Egypt.

The Place Where I am Standing (Beginning a Sabbatical)

"Summer's going fast, nights growing colder,

Children growing up, old friends growing older . . ."

-- N. Peart, Time Stand Still

The mornings are dawning cool and spectacular; moments of cloud, and soft sunrise, though the days are hot.

Time for school to start.
The Boychick started last Friday.
He returned to school filled with new purpose--he wants to study guitar in college.

But I realized something. I worked an intense summer job the summer of 2008.
And I worked the writing studio as well as coursework over the fall and the subsequent spring. And with no break at all, I worked an intense summer job that just finished. And it was a difficult year, a year of changes.

Further, this fall many things will happen. I will be in Illinois for two weeks this fall and for Thanksgiving. Then there's the Chem Geek Princess wedding in December.
Small. Just family. At their new home they bought this summer.
But I want to enjoy the planning. And the wedding.
I do not want papers and finals hanging over my head.



On Friday night, as we enjoyed a Shabbat sing with friends, the first full Shabbat and weekend in ten weeks for me, I thought about the Rush song, Time Stand Still.

"Freeze this moment a little bit longer . . ."

Of course I am powerless to do so. But the moment was so present to me and I to it. Relaxing. Singing with friends.

And in my head I heard the words of Jacob at Beth El: "Surely the presence of the Eternal is in this place, and I, I did not know it. This is the House of G-d and the Gate of Heaven."

For Jews, it is time, not space, that is holy. And I want this time. The Boychick will be driving next spring, and he will accelerate his journey out of our lives and into his own. And my firsborn, my baby, soon a wife!

So I decided to start the month of Elul by making arrangements to take a semester off. I need a Sabbatical.

I thought I would have second thoughts, but I do not.

As we walked the dogs the past few evenings, the sky has been perfectly clear. The remnants of the Perseids streak through the Milky Way, arching across the sky at zenith at midnight.

Ah, the beauty of it.

Time will not stand still for me. But I can take the time to stand still in this holy place as the nexxus points of my life, and the generational saeculum whirl and converge around me.

"Experience slips away. . ."

Picture credits: The first two pictures above are mine. The Perseid meteor against the Milky Way is by Mila, from Wikki Commons, shared under the GNU Free Copy License. (My view of our Galaxy these past evenings is more spectacular than any picture, but Mila's is close).

Of An Ominous Financial Crash, An Ordinary National Election, A Trivial Tea Party

One of the great pleasures of finally setting up my library (after more than ten years of rooting in boxes), is the pleasure of re-reading old books that I own, after a long absence. One of the most intellectually delightful and challenging aspects of this rediscovery is reading with fresh eyes, from a different perspective in space and time, as well as experience and knowledge. Thus, ideas come together in new and interesting ways, keeping the mind active, and providing much welcome new understandings that can blunt the worry and concerns of our times.

So it is that a book that I had been thinking about came into my hand once again, out of the depth of a box labeled simply: Books (4/06)--Under-stair closet. Most of the books in these boxes had first been packed in the summer of 2000, when the kids and I moved from our rental house in Rio Rancho, to the first house I had ever owned; the one that I thought I would live in for a long time. Never unpacked for the nearly two years we lived in that house, they were moved again in early summer 2002, when the Engineering Geek and I married, and we moved into a house in the Far Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. Three years ago in April 2006, in the process of moving once again to this house in Sedillo, we unpacked boxes of his-and-hers books that had come to reside under the stairs in the walk-out basement, in order to give away about one third of them and move the rest. They were shuffled and re-packed, and I remember seeing this particular book, but neither of us had the leisure to actually read any of them.

So this book came to my hands again last Tuesday, a book that I had thought about quite a bit over the past half-year because of the events that are overtaking our country. The book is called The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendevous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe. I stood there, among the half-emptied boxes, haphazardly piled books awaiting some semblance of order, feeling a sense of familiar excitement, as the book fell open in my hands. It opened to a chapter toward the end of the book, "A Fourth Turning Prophecy", and as I glanced down the page, I read:

"Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America
will enter the Fourth Turning . . . A spark will ignite a new mood. Today, the
same spark would flame briefly but then extinguish, its last flicker merely
confirming and deepening the Unraveling-era mind-set. This time, though it
will catalyze a Crisis. In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a
financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party."
(Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 272).

That last sentence, in particular, jumped out at me, demanded my attention, and sent a chill of recognition through me. "Wow," I thought. "This is an American Prophecy--not in the sense of reading the tea leaves, but in the more traditional sense of those who stand on the tracks and see the train coming from a long way off."

The authors, Strauss and Howe, published their first book together in 1991. It was called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.In it, they present a history of the United States and a possible vision of the future drawn in broad strokes, told as the story of generations, each four of which has a particular archetypical "personality." From this Strauss and Howe have developed a theory that the lifecycle placement of these generations (childhood, young adulthood, middle-age, elder) influences the mood of all of them, and further, creates a seasonal cycle lasting 80 - 90 years, that they call the saeculum. This consists of an exuberant High "spring", a turbulent, fertile Awakening "summer", an unraveling social fabric "fall", and a Crisis "winter." They detect just such a cycle operating in Anglo-American history since the Reformation. In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe go on to predict the coming of the new crisis, as the Boomers take their place as elders and the Millenial generation enters young adulthood.

I read The Fourth Turning in 1998, as a Strauss and Howe Unraveling Turning was approaching its end. They describe an Unraveling Turning as "a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order (created during the High) idecays and the new values regime (created during the Awakening) implants." (p. 3). When I read the book, I certainly identified with and recognized the Unraveling mood they were describing, and I had been walking through my life at that time with the strong notion that "this can't last." Therefore, I was receptive to the predictions they were making about a coming Crisis period, and I was interested to see how predictive their theory of the saeculum would be. Thus when 9-11 happened, I thought it might be that "spark", but later thought it was more likely an early warning of a still distant but approaching storm.

As the strange and apparently ominous events of the past half-year have been accruing, I have wanted to re-read The Fourth Turning, but all my rooting in the accessible boxes in the garage came up wanting. So I was anxiously on the lookout for the book as I began the task of making my library as planned in the Chem Geek Princess's old room (now the Guest Room/Library). Thus I was amazed when finally, I found the book and read the page that fell open, and that last, pregnant sentence:

" . . . the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, as trivial as a Tea Party."

When they were writing the book in the mid-90's, Strauss and Howe used these events as examples of the catalyzing spark because they were indeed the sparks that catalyzed the Crisis mood during the Fourth Turnings of one each of the last three Saecula: They identified the Boston Tea Party (1773) as the spark for the Revolutionary War Crisis, the election of 1860 as the catalyst for the Civil War Crisis, and the Crash of '29 as the spark that began the Great Depression-WWII Crisis that ended what they call The Great Power Saeculum.

But from the perspective of this past half-year, it seems that we are entering the Millenial Crisis via sparks pulled from all of these past catalysts. Since September of last year we have experienced a financial crash, a regular but divisive national election (the last of three such thus far), and this spring, tax-protest Tea Parties, the names of which were inspired by that of 1773.

The generations are all in place according to the Strauss-Howe paradigm as well: We have the inner-directed Idealist/Prophet generational archetype (Boomers) entering elderhood, full of fervor and moral certainty; the alienated and pragmatic Reactive/Nomad archetype (Gen Xers) entering mid-life; the outer-directed Civic/Hero archetype entering adulthood ready to be achievers; and just in past decade, a new, and likely Adaptive/Artist generation (Homelanders?) is being born. If these last grow up through a successfully resolved Crisis, they will be protected during the great doings, thus becoming risk-adverse and somewhat conformist in general, as a result of their childhood experience.

The human mind loves to find patterns, and it might be that the Strauss-Howe generational paradigm is just that, except that they provide very good historical evidence of the saecular rhythm in modern Anglo-American history. And now, as a Crisis appears to be catalyzing before our very eyes, the predictive power of the paradigm will be tested. In Generations they say:

"Anyone who claims to possess a vision of the future must present it with due
modesty, since no mortal can possibly forsesee how fate may twist and turn.
Readers who encounter this book fifty years from now will no doubt find [the
predictions it contains] odd in much of [the] detail. But it is not in our purpose
to predict specific events; rather our purpose is to explain how the underlying
dynamic of generational changes will determine which sort of events are most
likely." (p. 15).

Still, that one sentence in The Fourth Turning almost jumped off the page at me in light of the events that are catlyzing the coming Crisis. As I re-read this book, my new place in space and time, and in experience as a leading-edge Gen Xer (and I agree with this placement for me, at least), will likely create more of those "big chill" moments.

Making Ready: Cross Quarter, the Election, and Saecular Winter

Christine over at The Thinking Mother made the following suggestion in her post Election Outcome a few days ago:

"Now that we have elected a new President I have an idea. How about if we all write down our thoughts about our futures and our hopes or worries?"

In her post, she says that is is not necessary to blog it, but just to write it down for our own future reference. I am going to blog it, though I certainly understand why Christine and others might want to be more circumspect.

I have not been paying much attention to the news since Wednesday. The Engineering Geek and I have both caught rather bad colds for the first time in three years. We believe it is a function of the Boychick's return to school and my return to work. More contacts with random people means more viruses we haven't yet had.

But I have been paying attention to the light and the turning of the season. Winter is coming to Sedillo, and Thursday night was the last cross-quarter day of Common Era 2008. Friday morning, the temperature at 5:45 AM was 16 degrees F.

As the sunrise appears to move south of east, the meadow grasses are dried and waving in a cold north wind.

And just as we go through the seasons of the year, our civilization goes through cycles and seasons: summery seasons of civic and economic growth, and winters of civic and economic crisis. In their book The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe predicted that at about this time in our history, we'd be entering another winter in the cycle, another crisis in our history, comparable to others such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the Great Depression-WW II.

We have elected a new president, and his election is historic, not only because he is the first black president of the US, but because he has been elected at a crucial moment in our history. It is a time of war and economic uncertainty, and a time when our Constitution is in peril. The problems that he has inherited are grave, and they are not the result of the trends of the last eight years, as the campaign rhetoric would have us believe. the man we have elected to this office is relatively inexperienced: he has no executive experience and served in the US Senate for less than one full term. His campaign rhetoric about foreign policy was naive at best, and his progressive economic ideas are unseasonal and out of step with the reality that the Federal government is not only broke, but the valueof the dollar is in question due to the printing of billions, and the economies of developed nations across the world are in trouble. He is, however, a good orator, and he gave a good speech in Chicago on the night of his election. In it he said:

"And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too." (B. Obama, Nov. 4, 2008).

I am one of those Americans whose support Obama has not yet earned. I am waiting to see whether this high-flown rhetoric is real, or whether the nastiness of his supporters towards those who disagree with them is going to be the order of the day. I hear the words, but I am waiting to see how well Obama can work within his own party to quell the "partisanship and pettiness . . . that has poisoned our politics for so long", (ibid.) as well as how readily he will reach across the aisle to work with those who have different ideas. Will they be supressed or will debate be allowed? The Democrat majority in Congress has, during the last two years, been every bit as willing to supress debate as have the previous Republican majorities. And we are going into this new administration with the same leadership, only more so, of the most disapproved of Congress in the history of the United States.

Here, I need to clearly state that my concerns and views have not been represented in this election by either major-party candidate. The disenfranchisement that I feel comes from the fact that other voices were shut out by the press and the major parties, and that many important issues were not discussed. We got sound bytes and debates in which the argument was about who did not vote or did vote for specific bills, but with no indication of which earmarks or unrelated language decided their votes. Thus the trading of accusations was meaningless. And I was further unimpressed by the treatment that Sarah Palin received from the Obama supporters. Although I disagree with Palin on many issues, I was apalled by this kind of behavior. It makes me wonder what Obama means by the word 'unity.' Does it mean forced, lockstep agreement, or does it mean bringing consensus from varied viewpoints and within the mandate of the Constitution? I hope for the latter, but given the vituperative nature of the campaigns, I am prepared for the former.

As an American who loves and respects the Constitution of the United States, I accept Obama as the Constitutionally elected President of the United States. However, my loyalty must be to the US Constitution, not to his person, or the person of any president or government official. Government is our servant, not our master; the duty of government is to protect our rights, not to save the world. I am uncertain as to whether Obama and his supporters understand this. (I am certain that his predecessor did not). I will know by what he does and not what they say. At his inauguration, he will swear to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in this duty I wish him success and resilience. The Presidency is an awesome job and a great responsibility, and so I wish him health, long life, and good courage. But I do not promise him unquestioning loyalty or unwavering support. That would be inappropriate. I am a citizen, not a subject.

I believe that the crisis that is coming could not have been averted no matter who had won the presidency. As I said in response to a comment on a previous blog entry:

"Sooner or later you have to pay the piper; he is at the door, bill in hand."

The longer we try to stave off the pain, the worse it will be when we finally face it. So, just as the birds are gathering their seeds for the coming winter, we have been preparing for the coming hard times. Not with panic, but with purpose. We have stocked up reserves of food and other necessary items, in case the current printing blitz at the US Treasury leads to inflation. We have moved investments out of the country, because Obama has promised much higher capital gains tax rates. Such high tax rates have historically supressed investment, profit-taking, capitalization, and trade. We have also purchased a hunting rifle and ammunition for the Boychick, because Obama has promised to raise taxes on them. Hunting is a good way to supplement the food supplies if the recession deepens or a depression comes. The Boychick has passed his BSA badges for the rifle and the shotgun. The Engineering Geek, being a veteran, already has a rifle and a side-arm.

Frankly, I remember the Carter years, and his economic policies (which were a deepening of Nixon's and Johnson's) led to stagflation and misery for the middle class and working people. Obama's economic plans are very similar to Carter's. So I am expecting an economy like the '70's or worse.

But even though I am expecting hard times, I am not unhopeful about the future of the country. My hope does not rest upon the president, nor upon the leadership of the government; rather it rests in the wisdom of our forefathers and in the Constitution. As Thomas Jefferson said:

""It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." --Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:388

And so, as we pass the fourth cross-quarter, and move into this year's winter, I believe we are also passing into the Saecular Winter, a time of testing and crisis. The Spirit of America has been there before, and has come forth stronger.

As Judy Aaron says in the sidebar of her blog, Consent of the Governed:

"The answer to 1984 is 1776. Teach your children well . . ."

Our Constitution is in peril. If we are to emerge from the hard times ahead with our values in tact, our children must know what the Constitution says, and they must see us prepared to act upon threats to it. The greatest threat to it is the unqualified trust we have put in our government of late. We must let them know who is the servant and who is the master. It may be that the historic nature of this election can be useful for teaching our children more carefully about their rights and the proper way for Americans to secure them.