I'm not sure "eh... don't worry about it" is the wisest approach to Obama's economic kamikaze run, but the premise of Wesley Pruden's column has merit.
Unless, maybe, you look at the pendulum swing of American politics instead as a NASDAQ stock "trading in a range" -- which will always break out to the upside or downside with a vengeance eventually. And more powerfully so the longer it's been bouncing around inside the lines.
Notice Pruden has calibrated his pendulum with FDR, making the cycle a phenomenon of the modern era of U.S. history. Yet philosophies, Republic-shattering debates, and, yes, political parties(!) now extinct once roamed the American political landscape prior to that.
Is it unreasonable then to assume our present troubles might end in something other than just another standard-issue swing to the Right? That they might mean something bigger and uglier, up to and including one major party not getting up off the mat? Or another shattered Republic?
I'm not calling it for the apocalypse. I actually take comfort in Pruden's logic, which I've used on friends recently myself. The Constitutional bedrock of the Founders is still the firmest in world history, and we have relatively little history under our belt yet.
I'm just saying Pruden is technically flawed in suggesting things never change, and if there was ever a time ripe for a seismic paradigm shift (for good or ill) the Obama Era would certainly fit the bill.
Then again, we've already established how my brain works.
3 comments:
I like the baby boomer conspiracy theory.
When the baby boomers were young, they demanded and got "freedom". Lax limits on free speech, porno anything goes. When they got to house buying age, tax laws that subsidized their savings. When they got near retirement age, the dot com bubble followed by the sub prime to keep the economy rolling and their investments increasing. (This didn't end so well). Now that they're near retirement, they want to be totally covered by entitlements. So a full coverage euro welfare state is in order.
Maybe nobody actually sat down and made this happen, but it's interesting that it seems to be following that plan.
As the BBoomers begin to lose political clout, it will be interesting what the next gens who are going to have to pay the bills will do.
Retirement camps?
I totally believe that. Everything comes back to that generation sooner or later.
And I don't know about retirement camps, but I do know we on the anti-abortion right have been warning these abortion pioneers for years that they could be creating a euthanasia monster that will turn on them in their dotage, courtesy of the mindset they've cultivated in their children and grandchildren.
I picture the eviroterroist grand kids sizing up the Boomers and throwing them to starving polar bears.
Heck, maybe aging hippies like Al Gore will do us all a favor and throw THEMSELVES to the polar bears.
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