RE THE POST BELOW THE LAST STATEMENT

"Friday, April 13, 2018

WHY I'VE LONG SAID WE'RE TOAST YOU CAN TAKE THESE TO THE BANK

.....

We can't wait our way out."

This became very important, as what is called the Age of the Democratic Revolution emerged.

The American political system, revolutionary and ramshackle as it was, was nevertheless based on a state of mind and a state of things intrinsic to the ancien regime which it had nonetheless emphatically repudiated.

The difference with the French Revolution was marked. It ushered in a new and endless urgency in political affairs. The Congress of Vienna only seemed to put in place the same old regime system in place before 1789. This was not apparent at the time, and has not been apparent to most historians since.

The old imperial and noble powers had traditionally been informed by the principle that nothing much changed very fast, if at all, at least domestically. 

Even international relations were thought to tend toward some sort of rough equilibrium, called a balance of power, over limitless time. 

In this fog of late Western imperial ideology, even amid the rush of mounting contrary evidence, much of ancient and Western history had been more or less forgotten.

What had changed, or rather reemerged, in Western political history, was the fact and the critical importance of change.  All kinds of change at once.

No longer was drift, a principle on which both the ancien regime, and the ostensibly revolutionary American political system, been based, a viable or possible political stance anymore, even in domestic politics, going forward.

The notion of a balance of power, and related notions such as cyclical accounts of political events (Strauss and Howe, or whatever), which return to equilibrium and then endlessly repeat, no longer apply, (and frankly never applied under a longer view of history) going forward.

The notion of drift, something older political systems were supposed naturally to do during quiet times, no longer applies.

The run up to the Civil War was marked by long periods of what was called by Nevins 'drift'. It was what the system had been designed to do, and only to do, frankly.

British politics was characterized by similar means, based on traditional notions of ancien regime politics under which nothing much ever happens, domestically, anyway.