SOME SPECULATIONS RE DK TIME ARTICLE BANNON STRAUSS HOWE

'The power of Strauss and Howe's theory comes from its lack of a specific ideology.... '

 

Let's explore whether this is a sign of explanatory strength in a theory of historical change, or a sign or weakness, and what that might imply for those who refer to it for support, whatever their reasons.

 

DK's interpretation of S & H is that the death of a political economic and social order allows any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place.

 

We can look, for example, as he does, at what Bannon, a far right strategist, might have been thinking by incorporating such a theory, which, standing alone, ostensibly contains no special support for his agenda over any other, into his briefcase.

 

Perhaps at least one element in his choice may be an absence of scientifically valid verifiability or falsifiability, even within the sorely limited constraints of social science criteria. Someone versed in S & H, which I am not, could confirm or confute this educated hunch.

 

Another is surely that it predicted a crisis of a kind and roughly at a time in which the far Right happens to have been able to accrue power from both established parties, to the point to threaten the established order in a way resembling S & H prediction. 

 

Were it true, then Bannon, and others discussed below, might find it an attractive additional or supplemental theoretical window dressing for their actions, ideologies, and initiatives.

 

However, this is not an outcome really predictable in a scientific sense, certainly not from existing social science metrics.

 

It also leaves open a very wide range of other yet unknown possible major crises not yet visible today, but which easily might occur as soon as tonight.

 

Bernie Sanders might, on DK's interpretation of the power of Strauss and Howe's ideologyless theory, have reached a similar conclusion as DK, or as Bannon, about the moment being right for his bid for leftist globalist power and a new American social welfare vision.

 

So might globalist liberal Hillary Clinton, perhaps acknowledging, but only for the sake of argument, that a great crisis moment was upon us here, yet determined to avert that crisis and in effect overturn S & H theory, with 4 more years of more of the same ostensibly crisisless  liberal international economic order that has gone before for countless decades, ignoring S & H for a moment,  right through WWII really, since Wilson. Hillary could crow that she had broken the cycle of S & H, calling it the end of S & H cyclical history.