Cycles in American History - 2
The double headed snake of republican and democratic movement.
Top-down versus bottom-up.
In this section, will be explained why the bivalent mode of republican and democratic revolutions is to be preferred over the generational model of Strauss and Howe. It must be emphasized that Strauss and Howe work from the Generations model which has a large amount to recommend it. It is also a model that fits their time: they are from a generation model because the wave of generations suits the baby boom extremely well. At almost no other time is a generation, before it is born, set up to be an overwhelming force. Whatever it is doing at the moment whether growing up, dominating college, teaching college, running a business, or being president, the baby boom swamps all opposition when it gets in place to do so.
Three methods of organization have different views on the same topics: bottom-up, top-down, and middle outwards. The first two are well-known the last is both less well-known and takes a great deal more explanation. This explanation will occur later in the piece, but for now, it can be delayed until it will emerge from the two aspects that we are going to talk about: A generational change occurs when there is a large mass of people who want the same things or a set of things in a particular order.
The United States in World War Two was a signifying and synchronizing moment. Things needed to be done in order. As soon as the US forces returned home an ocean of restrictions came down and a magic clock was set: everyone started at the same starting line to get married, have children, and settle down. Does the Generations model seem to be everywhere all at once? One can adopt this model and almost no other and see the entire pattern of post-World War II economy, politics, culture, and physical needs of the United States.
Except where one doesn’t. after all, while cis-heteronormative was indeed at the starting line of a dominant cycle, many others found themselves at different points in a different cycle. This includes homosexuals, transsexuals, “fifth sex” - that is those people who did not want sexual partners at all, and a myriad of others who did not feel the urge to merge with the splurge of spring. These people might have been too old, these people might have wanted different things, and these people were not about being in tune with the rest of their society.
If you think about it, there is a need for the sole genius. Einstein was such a person. Noether was such a person. Nash was such a person. Von Neumann was such person. They may have it in because other people were going to adapt themselves to the person rather than the person sitting in with the others, but there was something odd about them. All were always outside the general movements of the time, or they created their movement. An interesting example is Wernher von Braun. He was both a pioneer in the field of rocketry and an organizer such that thousands of people could be collected together and work on the problems that came up in space travel.
On the other hand, once discoveries have been made, there comes the practical necessity of which ones are to be put in place. This means there are a lot more people of the first type than of the letter type. Quaternions are an extremely interesting mathematical concept, but it was a very long time before they had applications. (William Hamilton was another person who saw more deeply into mathematics than most other people do.)
However, which applications are determined much more by the nearly bright than by the enormity of genius. On this level, people need to work together in concert and as a team to build anything worth having. So, UNIX originated from very few hands, that gave it use it use. They did so by making not an operating system, but a way of using data as a text stream manipulated by applications. The operating system as it exists now emerges from millions, with each making some large or small contribution to its analecta synthesis. (Yes, I mean exactly that. Meaning bends Grammar not the other way round) And when the time to replace UNIX came, Gnu-Linux was an amplification, not a replacement as such.
So, if you are in the crowd of very right people, realize there are more of you than is necessary and you have millions of things to do. There are cities to be built, there is a generation who needs virtually everything being made for them with the available materials and reducing outputs that are acceptable to the biosphere. In other words, for this group of people, there is no time like now to be alive. For the people who want something else, there are always questions that need to be answered and the problem is merely to find one that seems obvious to you but not obvious to anyone else. Both/and. Or in this case, Generations is necessary but not sufficient. This is because the bottom mechanism of generations is counterbalanced by a top-down need to organize society in a fundamentally different way rather than coming up with a way to provide the necessities for a particular group of people.
So, millions of people are having children, then soon millions of children will go to school and then will want a job in a pyramid. Fortunately, there is any for that the population Pyramid.
The population pyramid is most often represented by a series of histograms arranged in a series from youngest to oldest at the bottom of periods.
This is the map of the United States right now. there are two bumps, one for the baby boom and Generation X and the other for the Millennials. If one is looking to gain a significant impact, then one can see that there is a position to announce a “fourth turning” at this particular moment: one generation is reaching the peak of its power, and the other generation is beginning to realize that power is something more than on the music charts. There is a unique residence because this is the moment where a generation that is in charge of the gerontocracy, the sphere of the Beltway, and of the echoes which stem outwards from it such as town meetings and city mayors, but also a new generation that has very different ideas about what this country needs. At this moment Strauss & Howe introduced their thesis and it is far from a coincidence. After all, they study generations from many angles and look at the world from a generational aspect. So, it is natural for a generational model to step forward at the point where the generational models would suggest there is a natural business point between the parents and the children engaged in a turning of the generations. From the Baby Boom and their minions among Generation X, comes a new basis for the Millennials and the people who come after them.
This moment has also several problems, one of them is confusing a top-up change with a bottom-down change. Simply put they are confusing a top-down change with the present bottom of change and therefore confusing what is happening. While announcing a change must be contingent on demographic realities, the announcement is not the same thing as the substance. This means that there is no global economic catastrophe but there is a generational change in what needs to happen. We are not then a time. Where the nature of political consensus changes but the idea of the direction of material and cultural vectors in the society.
But let us move from theory to practice. The idea of a turning of government has already happened. While Strauss and Howe could stake their claim on the statistical realities of demographic change as being permissible, they cannot alter the substance. Unfortunately, they have and that ruins the book that they are, for want of a better word, pimping. Not good at all.
The reason for this needs to be explained, and it needs to be explained how the back-of-the-envelope EV/Popular Vote is an entranceway to a much sounder theoretical basis. What Strauss & Howe are looking at is the time histogram representation of the mass of people. So far so good. In that time histogram representation people go through cycles or people from the outside come to the United States in search of particular opportunities. However, the fourth turning is not a time-sensitive histogram. The Civil War did not occur because of age but because of property rights including people. There was no generational change but there was a political consensus change that reached the center of power in the national government. A new party was formed only four years before, and it nearly won the presidency on its first attempt.
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Let us recap: When a generation changes, a move from the bottom-up demands change. People who support this change will move up the ladder. These changes accumulate from the need for a top-down consensus. This means that wherever the movement for the bottom is, there will be a demand for changes. Counterbalancing this will be a top-down force. Neither bottom-up nor top-down, is positive or negative. For example, both getting 18-year-olds the vote in the 1960s and arresting slaves who had escaped to freedom in the 1850s were bottom-up changes. One was positive and the other negative.
This then is the first point: the two forces move in tandem. While in general, a mass movement is a statistical movement of people the individual actor creates his movement. For example, William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 but he is more like the prominent progressive generation which, Strauss and Howe argue was born in 1843 noting “the progressives lived a lifecycle in reverse. A set out as sober young parents in the shadow of reconstruction - attired in handlebar mustaches and tight corsets - and ended up as give it any midlife spurs in an era of Rough Riders and gunboats.” On 219 of Generations. When William Lloyd Garrison founded 1831 the newsletter The Liberator, he was not a missionary for abolition but used the Liberator to gather together individual societies and form a great movement with particular notions of the constitutional method to expunge slavery. This means that the statistics do not necessarily mean that every member is part of the stochastic mode. When a person engages in counter moves a person can be effective in that they are an individual which can counterweight the general mass.
This means that the statistics yield a general trend but also stochastic irregularities which are the point of history as opposed to sociology or political science or economics all of which focus on the general trend as opposed to the specific exception. But it is the specific exception that must be accounted for because a president is only one person and might take a few people in as his advisors, what he is by definition an exception. This is also true of major players in business and culture. This means that there is a generational mood of leaders, but each leader may well be the exception rather than the rule.
For example, in 1882 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born. Sometime after he had graduated from Harvard a change took place in FDR’s internal psychology which made him unusual in that he could see that basic changes had to be made to the United States government, but they must be controlled and timed. One particular example is that FDR knew from quite early on that the United States would have to go to war, but he knew that this truth would have to be hidden because the domestic policy had to be addressed first, and that the mood of the country was isolationist and antimilitary. Thus, he worked behind the scenes to create the sinews of a military operation while at the same time saying he would not go to war. Some of this is within his generation but most of it is not: he knew that war in Europe and with Japan was coming but he deliberately lied about this to the American public.
What this means is that instead of a pure generational cycle, one must consider the tandem relationship of generational and specific as it relates to governance. Again, this was very clearly known by the first years of the 21st century and it shows how things have played out. The key error of Strauss & Howe is to appeal to understand that the generational cycle is democratic and the specific is republican.
The next section is on the double major of democratic and republican change as it relates to American history.