RE DK STEVE BANNON AND THE FOURTH TURNING MY VIEW

"Looking at the whole sweep of American history, Strauss and Howe realized that a great crisis, involving the death of an old order and the birth of a new one, had occurred every 80 years at least since the 18th century. These crises included the period of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-1794), the Civil War (about 1860-1868), and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-1945). Doing the math, they predicted a fourth great crisis—or “fourth turning”—sometime in the first 15 years of the 21st century. While they were far too wise to attempt to predict exactly what might trigger it or what course it might take, they listed terrorism, financial crises and federal-state conflicts as possible events that might begin the new era. Their prediction has come true...."

 

DK excerpt, Time Inc. If Time objects to this excerpt, fair enough.

 

My own, very different view, different from that of Bannon, and from S & H,  is also that we are in a sort of crisis, but a crisis extending over a long period, even going back to 1787. There are good arguments for taking it back to the Reformation, really.....

 

I will call it, for lack of a better term, The Crisis of Western Liberalism. This crisis onset's hallmark was The French Revolution.

My view is that this crisis of the West was never resolved, went on and on, and still goes on now into the future, but in a vastly expanded and dangerous form.

 

This crisis has been transformed, over time, from one within Western Civilization to one between all civilizations.  But it has remained an unfolding crisis.

 

Why is it coming to a head only now? Many different reasons.

 

One of the main reasons, in connection with its manifestation in the current division in American domestic political life, has to do with the fact that this liberalism has gone on so long, long after the defeat of its original purpose as a liberal revolution only within Western Civilization, to the point where other civilizations and their ethnic and religious people and principles now overbear all liberal Western nations, which have so long accomodated them as part of its liberal anti imperialist creed.

 

Thus it has finally, it seems, gotten to the breaking point, both in Europe and America at the same time, where they have so long been awash in foreign made products, immigrant guest workers, students in great numbers, and refugees from other civilizations, which have no inherent love for either the West or its values, but only for its wealth, its knowledge, expertise, capital, and technology, and its openness to their people, their products, and ultimately their power. 

 

So, in the United States, and in Europe, now, we see a backlash spectacle of a surge in blind conservative nationalism (not Western civilizationalism, or renewed imperialism, (dead letters now) which are, frankly,  the only kind of thing that would have stemmed this tidal decline) which could only have been effective 70 or a hundred years ago to stem a tide of civilizational decline set in motion already in the 19th Century by the liberal ideology of the West itself.

Sir Michael Howard, rather cynically really, points the finger at the US, as the final killer of the colonial hegemony of the West, at its end, at the end of WWII.

In doing so, he conveniently ignores all the things which Britain, above all, had done, in the preceding two centuries, to bring the hegemony of Europe, as a civilization distinct both from Islam and from Russian Orthodoxy, to an end. See prior reference to Schroeder, with pages listed.

It is a long story. You haven't the patience for it. I know that too.