Almost five years ago I posted a thread about a
cyclical theory of political alignments. There was some push back on the issue from more rationalist-oriented posters, and rightly so: they said that cyclical theories of history are "mystical rubbish", unquantified and unquantifiable - and I largely agree with them. The old adage that "history does not repeat, but it does rhyme" might be applicable here; it's entirely too easy to read patterns into the entrails of history that simply are not there.
That said, cyclical theories have an inherent aesthetic appeal to me. And so I will present the forum with another one. Like the old thread on Democratic Underground, this theory is not mine, and I can make no claim on it; it belongs to a user named Kurt Horner, who posts on the Strauss & Howe (Generational Theory) forum. If you had pop-history and pseudopsychology, you're undoubtedly going to hate this idea as well. But if you think there's something to generational cliodynamics, you might appreciate
this.
To greatly simplify, Mr. Horner has taken the
Nolan and
Mitchell Charts, overlaid them with the political compass test, and arrived at this monstrosity:
Horner explains further:
This is where Horner begins his analysis of contemporary history. If I quote extensively from him, it's because he does a better job of explaining his own idea than I ever could. And just a word before I begin: Horner borrows and modifies Strauss-Howe generational theory, but he uses the same terms. Basically, they are self-explanatory, but for the uninitiated, a "High", or First Turning, is a period of relative social stability, as in the 1950s and early 1960s; an "Awakening", or Second Turning, is a period of
inner crisis, as in the 1960s and 1970s; an "Unraveling", or Third Turning, is a period of social
fracturing, as in the 1980s through the early 2000s; and a "Crisis", or Fourth Turning, is a period of
outer crisis, as in the Great Depression and our current period.
That said, I'll let Horner take it from here:
Horner also takes this theory and extrapolates further into the American past, from the 'Transcendental Awakening' (the Awakening period preceding the American Civil War, in which the Bostonian Transcendentalists were active, along with authors such as Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe) through to the American Civil War and the 'Progressive Awakening', the mauve decade of the 1890s that shaped Franklin Roosevelt's Missionary Generation and exemplified by a sort of rationalist spiritual awakening in the form of the
Chautaqua Movementand Art Nouveau:
Now there are obvious weaknesses to this theory, and I'll attempt to head some of the criticisms off at the pass: it has no explanatory value; other than generational re-alignment based on a tenuous pop-culture theory, it offers no mechanism by which this transition can be identified. But it still makes an
intuitive sort of sense to me. The Civil War period was in fact a conflict between simple rules (the free soil-ism of the abolitionist North) and the challenge to authority of the Confederacy. The New Deal era was a period of conflict between complex rules (the New Deal) and deference to the authority of traditional industrial organizational and managerial complexes. So,
very broadly, it makes sense and, I think, is accurate.
And it does suggest a testable, empirical predictive hypothesis - that the coming 'saeculum' - the unit of historical measurement in Strauss-Howe theory - will be defined by a conflict between the precise rules of the modern administrative State and the challenge to authority embodied in, example, the Internet. I think that's pretty accurate for what we've seen so far, and is probably more useful as an instrument of social measurement than a mere 'conservative' and 'liberal' divide, as partisans of both will surely end up on each side - just as there were many conservative Unionists and radical-utopian Confederates.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?
