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Category: Crisis Era

Subreddit of the week: murderedbyAOC

Subreddit of the week: murderedbyAOC

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Years back, I wrote a blog post about how Millennials use social media for consensus building. I was tying into predictions based on Strauss & Howe generational theory on how the Millennial generation would behave as young adults in this era, the Crisis Era. One prediction is that they will enforce a code of good conduct.

Prediction about Millennials from The Fourth Turning.

Fast forward to today, and cancel culture is fully in place. Well, what is “cancel culture” if not an effort to enforce a code of conduct by ostracizing those who violate the code?

It seems that complaints about cancel culture come mostly from the political right. But before you call it a phenomenon of the left, I challenge you to go to a right-leaning site like parler and express support for President Biden. I’ll bet you get “cancelled” pretty fast.

Could the right’s problem with cancel culture just come from the fact that the left has been more successful at it? Perhaps that is because the left’s code of conduct better reflect’s the majoritarian view. Perhaps that is because the left didn’t choose a champion who is a criminal mountebank.

found on /r/murderedbyAOC

Or maybe the left really is just better at the culture game. We all know from reddit that the /r/TheRightCantMeme. And look no further than reddit to find a Millennial who excels at enforcing good conduct with her brilliant wit.

I mean Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has her own subreddit, dedicated to reposting the stinging comebacks to red zoners that she makes on social media. It’s a happy little bubble for a blue zoner to go and assure themselves of the superiority of their partisan viewpoint. And as a partisan blue zoner myself, I’m happy to declare /r/murderedbyAOC the subrreddit of the week.

Silent of the Week: Mitch McConnell

Silent of the Week: Mitch McConnell

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He may well be the most hated man in America. Mitch McConnell has simultaneously angered Democrats by letting Trump off the hook for the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and angered Republicans by betraying Trump. In a bizarre moment in American political history, he acquitted the former President at his impeachment trial, then made a speech blaming him for the very crimes for which he had been acquitted.

Senator Mitch McConnell (b. 1942) makes a blistering speech condemning the former President, moments after voting to acquit him.

Egregiously, his reason for acquitting the former President was that the Senate didn’t have the power to convict an impeached officer once they were out of office, even though, as majority leader when the impeachment articles were presented to the Senate, he had refused to try them! It was like he was playing a shell game. Because of this, McConnell will likely be remembered by history for duplicity, even cowardice.

And yet there was that speech, laying the blame wholly at Trump’s feet. What gives? Well, consider that McConnell, as I have brought up before, is from the Silent generation (b. 1925-1942). This is a generation that puts process over principle. They are indeed masters of process, which McConnell certainly demonstrated with his little political trick that enabled him to personally blame Trump for January 6, while sparing his fellow party members from having to make any similar such political statement.

Honestly, I think that is his game. He is trying to divest the Republicans of Trump with as little risk as possible to the current Republican office-holders. At least, that’s my understanding of his motivation. If, ultimately, this gambit fails and Trumpism rises again (the feared “beer hall putsch” scenario), then McConnell will go down in history as one of those double-dealing politicians who fails to confront a growing threat until it is too late. Like the Compromisers before the U.S. Civil War, or like Neville Chamberlain.

But for now, since Mitch McConnell has demonstrated the art of political process and a thorough appreciation of his powers within the political system, I name him my Silent of the week.

The Small Wars Come Home

The Small Wars Come Home

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In their book The Fourth Turning, Strauss & Howe assert that there is a difference in the way wars are fought in the third phase of their historical cycle, versus the way they are fought in the fourth and final phase. In the third phase, wars are fought with moral fervor but without resolution or consensus. In the current cycle, this was the phase of the Iraq Wars and the War on Terror. In the last cycle, this third phase coincided with the First World War.

In the fourth phase, the Crisis Era, wars are fought to conclusion, for maximum effect. In the last cycle, this was the time of the Second World War. One can easily see how the Second World War can be understood as the First World War re-fought, but to a more decisive end.

In the mid-2000s, when the U.S. was floundering in Iraq, I actually described a kind of heady vision of how affairs might be different in the next era. In other words, how the nation-building wars in the Middle East might be re-fought, but more decisively.

As I understood it, we would finally have the right generational constellation for the Boomers to translate their values obsession into significant world change. Back then in the Bush era, it seemed to me that red zone values were dominating and a Republican would likely be the one to fulfill a role like that of FDR in the last cycle. Here’s what I wrote in conclusion:

Imagine, if you will, a President Sam Brownback. He knows the greatest poverty and oppression in the world lies in the continent of Africa, which is also where the greatest terrorist threat now lives, since Al-Qaeda has fled there after the Middle East has finally been stabilized. Imagine serious nation-building efforts to raise up the poorest of the poor African countries, which might include invasions to depose an intransigent dictator or two. Imagine a corps a hundred thousand strong of enthusiastic young Millennials, guided by competent middle-aged Gen-Xers, joining up to serve in one or two year tours, helping to build infrastructure and train indigenous peoples and do police work. This would be Boomer values finally bearing fruition…

–me, ~2008

It seems ridiculously out of touch now, but where I was clearly going in my thought process was to imagine that there would be a redux of the failed intervention in the Middle East, but one that would actually be successful. Just as World War II had been World War I fought to conclusion, I conceived of a future United States embarking on a new round of nation-building wars, but this time seeing them through to the end.

What’s actually happened, we now see with hindsight, is that nation-building has been repudiated, and the United States has pulled back from its global wars of intervention and turned its focus inward. And the circumstances the United States military faced in the Middle East, it now faces at home. Armed militias disrupt the functioning of government. A “green zone” like the one that was set up in Baghdad is set up instead in Washington D.C. itself.

During the War on Terror, doctrines emerged for fighting “asymmetric warfare”, part of a new focus on “small wars” in an age of unilateralism, with the United States as the sole superpower. “Post-conflict stablization” became a new mission in the wake of invasion and regime change. In a kind of karmic comeuppance for U.S. hubris, these small wars have come home. It’s like the mission now is to stabilize the United States – in the era in which the last round of wars are re-fought, but decisively.

Arguably, the degree of political instablility in America is nothing like what it is in the parts of the world where the U.S. once felt obligated to intervene. But consider that in the Crisis Era, to quote The Fourth Turning, “wars are fought with fury and for maximum result.” (p. 104). The fact that the energy of the U.S. has turned inward, and that the nation has just had a brush with violent domestic regime change, is ominous.

2021 State of the Coup

2021 State of the Coup

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If you haven’t seen any videos by YouTuber CGP Grey, then you should check them out. I highly recommend them for being engaging and informative, as well as amusing in that they are mostly stick figure animations. Grey is one of those Millennial “explainer” YouTubers; I’ve blogged about them before. What gives these folks the credentials to speak authoritatively about the subject matters they cover? Basically, being intelligent and educated and willing to take the time to do some research and thinking.

I bring up CGP Grey because of this remarkable video of his titled “The Rules for Rulers.” It’s a 20 minute long primer on how to stay in power under various forms of government, including a dictatorship. There’s even an example of a coup which shows a little stick figure mob storming a government building. This is obviously relevant today.

I can’t speak for how accurate Grey’s video is in terms of political theory, but it is certainly compelling. The description of the video indicates that it is adapted from the book “The Dictator’s Handbook“. One of the basic tenets of rulership as described here is that, as a ruler, one must retain influence over the “keys to power.” These are the people/social elements that let you get things done.

We can see in this video that the little stick figure dictator needs the help of other stick figure “keys” that look like they belong to three distinct branches of society: the military, the police, and the business elites. A wannabe dictator pulling off a coup needs these keys. Sending a mob to storm a building is a useful ploy, but only when these keys are in the wannabe dictator’s pocket. The mob itself is not a key to power.

And so you can see the fundamental flaw in the plan of a certain wannabe dictator. He has a violent mob, but he doesn’t have all of those keys in his pocket. He certainly doesn’t have the business elites; they have deplatformed and pulled financial support from him and his political allies. And he doesn’t have the military, as evidenced by the statement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in support of the U.S. Constitution and the incoming Biden administration.

Now it’s possible, unfortunately, that the wannabe dictator has some support from the police. It’s been known for a long time that police forces in the United States have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Connecting this fact to a certain leader’s need for keys to power casts a whole new light on the protests against police brutality last summer.

A violent mob and a percentage of rogue law enforcement officers is not enough influence to install a wannabe dictator in power, but is still a danger to the public. We’ve all seen the threatening postings on social media. While the coup has failed, we’re not out of the woods yet.

So be careful out there. Be prepared for some disruption in the days to come. Domestic terrorists can do a lot of harm, but they can’t take down our Republic. Their blind rage alone is powerless to overcome us.

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Covidiots

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Covidiots

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I still sometimes see people out and about and not masked. I call them “death spreaders” and give them a very wide berth. There was a death spreader at the Post Office over the Christmas holiday. It was in much too close quarters for anyone to be unmasked and it pissed me off. It’s sad that this is still a problem, with the pandemic raging and the numbers just getting worse and worse.

When I first observed this phenomenom I called these people Covidiots. Their presence was ominous and invoked the feeling of being in an apocalyptic movie. How can it be getting worse?

We all know the real problem. The pandemic has been politicized. One side of the political divide believes the pandemic is a lie, just as they believe the election is a lie. And now the Covidiots are out on the streets, armed and dangerous, attacking democracy itself.

It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. So get ready for the final chapter in the trilogy, coming soon to a country near you.

What I learned in 2020

What I learned in 2020

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Looking back at 2020, it at once one of the most eventful and one of the least eventful years of my life (of all of our lives, I imagine). Mostly we stayed at home and did nothing. Very uneventful. But also, we experienced a once-in-a-century pandemic, and I moved in permanently with my BFF. Absolutely earth-shattering.

And then there was this insane election and this dreadful sense that we might be close to a coup of some sort and the end of democracy in the United States. I believe that danger has passed, but for awhile there I was shaken up.

This year I’ve blogged extensively about both the political divide and the pandemic. On this final day of 2020 I wanted to think a little more about the year’s lessons.

My BFF was telling me that some Trump supporters on her social media feeds have argued that total deaths this past year are actually no different than in past years. It’s not to deny the reality of Covid-19, but to say that because of the lockdowns other causes of death have been reduced (for example, vehicle-related), so it’s evened out. I guess they think this is a reason to open up the economy again, though when I think about it, wouldn’t it make sense to never reopen, even after everyone is vaccinated and Covid is no longer a threat? Then the death rate should really go down!

In all seriousness, I understand that we accept certain levels of risk in our society. There is no way to eliminate altogether the possibility of death or bodily harm. We can’t live our lives at all if we are too cautious about accepting risk. And we have schemes to mitigate risk; we all accept the dangers of automobile use, knowing that our insurance system will absorb the costs, if not guarantee our lives. Less effectively, our health insurance system does the same for medical risks.

The point that anti-shutdowners seem to be missing is that the costs associated with Covid-19 are much too high for our healthcare system to absorb. So just accepting the risk in the way we do with the dangers of automobile use is not a good option. To bolster their arguments, pandemic deniers fall back on questioning the data altogether. It must be that it’s all overblown. And I understand part of the motivation for believing this – for many people, the shutdown has been financially devastating. It is quite a quandary.

So a big lesson of the year is that we need to restore trust in our society, and to heal the political divide. It has been tough living in this time of contentious politics. And we need to reform our fragile system so that when public health demands drastic change, it isn’t quite so destructive of people’s livelihoods. It’s certainly doable, with all the wealth in our country.

And maybe we should have been practicing some of these health measures already – wearing face masks in the flu season, for example. Certainly when we ourselves are symptomatic; this is common practice in other societies.

I know its easy for me to accept the pandemic protocols, since I am a privileged stay-at-home worker. Personally, I’ve had one of the healthiest years of my life, except for a bit of a lack of exercise. Not travelling, and having the boys stay home from school has meant that I haven’t had a cold since early in the year. Usually I get sick a couple of times at least. And not commuting has been a blessing, saving both time and money. But like I said, that’s not an option for everyone.

Ok, I’m rambling. What did I learn this year? That I am very lucky. That what matters is family and loved ones. That we should enjoy life while we have it, because it is very fragile. Our whole world is fragile. Live fully in each day because time always rushes on.

Subreddit of the Week: aboringdystopia

Subreddit of the Week: aboringdystopia

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I’m sure you’ve heard of the science fiction genre known as cyberpunk. I’m not talking about the recently released video game; I mean science fiction that is high-tech and futuristic in its setting, and politically and socially dystopian in its outlook.

An early example in film was the 1982 movie Blade Runner, based on a Philip K. Dick novel from the 1960s. It was a real trendsetter for the cyberpunk aesthetic – bleak and dark, but also slick and stylish. Like how everybody dressed in the nineties. It promised a future of brutal corporate rule and film noir cool. Did it get that future right? Not really. But as I broke it down in a review of the film and its sequel, science fiction is just modern mythology. Most of it is fantastical and completely unrealistic in its extrapolations; the real point of it is to explore the human psyche and the meaning of life.

Cyberpunk took off in the late 1900s, but as the world turned and the real cyberworld evolved, it looked less and less like the jaded, punk settings of the fictional genre. Going into the twenty-first century, cyberreality was becoming helpful and consumer-oriented. A more accurate depiction in dystopian fiction of the world to come was captured in the 2002 movie Minority Report, also based on a Philip K. Dick story. It was quite prescient in its forecast of a society under continuous surveillance and evaluation. The world it envisions even includes targeted advertising, and self-driving cars. The big thing it gets wrong is that, instead of psychics, we use machine learning algorithms to predict human behavior.

Now that we’re one-fifth of the way into the new century, and deep into the Crisis Era, the luster has come off of the consumer-oriented market society. Concerns about wealth and income inequality, and the plight of the underprivileged, have come to the forefront of popular dystopian science fiction. In the 2018 movie Ready Player One, a powerful tech company dominates society and a permanent underclass can only find respite in virtual reality. Sound anything like your life?

In the even higher stakes story of 2013’s Elysium, the Earth inhabited by the poor is almost unlivable, and the privileged middle class has taken to an orbital space habitat, where they enjoy vastly superior lives to those on the planet surface. Clearly this society has not dealt successfully with either climate change or the rising cost of healthcare. As far-fetched as the techonologies may be in the film, the allegory of an elite class that has completely abandoned any sense of social responsibility is unmistakeably relevant.

What kind of harrowing, high-tech dystopia do we actually live in today? That takes me to the title of this post and the subreddit /r/aboringdystopia. Here the teeming digital masses chronicle all the petty injustices and cruelties of the modern world, all the ways the megacorps keep us under their thumbs, all the ways that late stage capitalism is failing us. We did manage to get to a dystopia of oppressive corporate rule after all, it’s just not futuristic or cyberpunk.

Somehow we became an oppressed underclass without keeping any sense of style. We’re sitting in our sweatpants and binge-watching Amazon Prime video, not running around in cool leather jackets like Neo and Trinity. But in our own sad way, we’re jacked in to the Matrix and trapped in a dystopia.

The Red-Blue Network-Centric Wars, or, Clash of the Media Bubbles

The Red-Blue Network-Centric Wars, or, Clash of the Media Bubbles

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In the late 1990s, with the Cold War just ended and the United States as the world hegemonic “sole superpower”, a new doctrine of warfare called network-centric warfare emerged. The gist of it: “use information networks to get an advantage.” It was an acknowledgement of the growing power of densely networked computers, such as the Internet which we take for granted today.

Meanwhile, a constitutional lawyer named Philip Bobbitt was writing his seminal book The Shield of Achilles, in which he argued that the constitutional order of the industrial nation state was giving way to a new order, which he called the informational market state. Securing opportunity and choice were the new functions of government, over providing welfare and solidarity.

Fast forward to 2020, and we are in the midst of Cold Civil War II, the battle between the red zone and the blue zone that I’ve been blogging about lately. The United States has abandoned the world stage, and is focused internally. A pandemic undermines the legitimacy of the new market state order, by both reducing economic opportunity and creating a public welfare imperative. And the power of the world wide computer network is something to be feared now; it lets bad actors, even foreign powers, manipulate public consciousness. Information runs amok and the Internet is a battlefield in a domestic war, with each side using the network to spread agitprop promoting its particular version of reality.

For example, in the red zone reality bubble, millions of votes cast for Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential election were fraudulent. Personally, I think that’s BS – if it were true, Trump’s lawyers would explicitly make the claim in court instead of only in media statements. But I am a partisan of the blue zone in this war, so how could my words carry any weight with a partisan of the red zone? It seems we’re at an impasse – and it shows in the paralyzation of our government.

The problem is, with each side convinced of the veracity of its version of the truth, how is the consumer-citizen of the informational market state supposed to know which version is correct? If we are a really in a state, as Bobbitt argues, where we can choose from a menu of informational realities – will that be facebook, or parler, sir? – then how could we ever function as a polity? We need some common ground to stand on.

I am reminded of the time of the French Revolution, when rumors spread readily and people on either side easily believed the worst about the other faction. It was a mindset that pushed the people of that time to extremes of violence. I worried about this earlier in a book review. No, they didn’t have the Internet then, but that’s beside the point. An information network is there, regardless of the technology in use.

Ultimately, the chaos and violence of the French Revolution opened a path for an autocratic ruler to emerge and restore order. The people of the time were just glad for extremists on either side of the partisan divide to be put down. The moderates prevailed, but only because an authoritarian silenced the mobs. Trump might have been like Napolean and achieved this…but as it turned out, he didn’t.

I think the willingness of people to ensconce themselves in their media bubbles and stick with their partisan “zone” reflects a strong need for a consensus narrative, for a sense of collective purpose. We just need that purpose not to be at odds with the vision of a major segment of the populace within our same society. Maybe the United States is paying a price for becoming the sole superpower: there is no external power to unite us, as there was in the last crisis, so we’re left to fight each other. 9/11 might have been like Pearl Harbor…but as it turned out, it wasn’t.

So how will the center hold now? I honestly can’t say, but I suspect we’ll find out in the months to come. This will probably be my last red-vs-blue post for awhile, until some major change breaks. Meanwhile, I certainly will be watching my media bubble feeds with trepidation.

Trump’s Legacy for Good

Trump’s Legacy for Good

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While I personally detest President Trump, I’ll give him some credit for what he achieved in his bid for power. It can’t be denied that he has shaken up American politics. Thanks to him, the electorate has become more engaged than at any time in my memory. President-elect Biden is the first candidate to have received over 80 million popular votes. But Trump himself actually holds the next record, beating out Obama’s previous one from 2008. He could actually be proud of this, instead of dwelling on the fact that he lost the 2020 election, especially since he sees Obama as his nemesis.

Trump also forced the Republican Party to confront the fact that its platform does not conform to the needs of the American people. He hijacked the party, and you could say he made it into his own cult, but he also energized a right-wing populism that is likely here to stay. If Trump had been a more competent leader, he might have entrenched that version of populism in power. Instead, he simply gave a pass to the Democrats to attempt a return to the Obama era.

The left-wing version of populism, spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, was not so successful. But now that Covid-19 has taken over daily life, Biden can’t simply turn back the clock to 2016. So by energizing and engaging the populace, and by bungling the pandemic, Trump has had a big impact, which could shake us out of our neoliberal dream and actually take us to a brighter future for all Americans.

The Red-Blue Wars: Holding the Line

The Red-Blue Wars: Holding the Line

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I’m going to keep going with the “Red-Blue Wars” posts I’ve been doing. It feels like there is nothing else to write about at this moment. As I sit here anxiously watching the results from this absolute nail-biter of an election, I just want to go back to the first post in the series, which was about the “generational constellation” – the arrangement of generational archetypes in their respective phases of life during a social era.

The Crisis Era generational constellation is what creates the sense of tension and urgency, as well the feeling of solidarity, as society faces the threat of the crisis. It’s clearly evident in the massive, record-breaking support that each candidate in the election has received, as well as in the fact that the supporters on each side won’t back down. As The New Yorker put it, “Trump, despite the catastrophes of his rule, has retained the loyalty of the vast majority of red America.” This is to be expected in a Fourth Turning, or Crisis Era. People will stick by their leaders even when they fail, because that is the only hope for progressing an agenda.

Now if only each side of the partisan split didn’t perceive the main crisis threat to be – the other side. Clearly we have to figure out how to work together, and I am starting to see opinion makers shifting to that perspective. It’s the only way we can get to a true civic regeneracy.

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From the New York Times Twitter account, 11:12 AM · Nov 4, 2020