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The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. A classic example is the Hindu cosmology of cyclical yugas, starting with the Satya Yuga, and descending through the Trata Yuga, and the Dvapara Yuga., each one more degraded and less refined, until one comes to the Kali Yuga, which, of course, is where we find ourselves today. The ancient Greeks had a similarly dismal view, as seen in Hesiod's Works and Days, which laid a cosmology of five successive, and descenting Ages of Man, each of which ends in destruction.
Modern writers have taken both a more hopeful and a more empirically-grounded approach. The historian Arnold J. Toynbee was a giant in this enterprise--in sharp contrast to Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West built on an entire century of declinist thought among European conservatives and reactionaries, as surveyed in Arthur Herman's flawed, but still somewhat useful guide, The Idea of Decline in Western History . [See Amazon.com review for cautionary advice.]
As Wikipedia notes, Toynbee was neither a determinist, a pemisimist, or a conservative:
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
Toynbee's spirit is one I share, and in this diary set I want to examine the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall-the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers that have maintained a recklessly destructive regime in power, despite its fundamental attacks on principles dating back at least as far as 1215 (habeas corpus, from the Magna Charta).
In ascending order of scope, there three waves are: - The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
- The rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
- The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
My concern here is two-fold: first to lay out these frameworks and explain how they relate to one another, and second to articulate a political argument based on them. The two tasks will not necessarily fall into neat separate categories, but it should be possible for readers to readily grasp the analytical framework, and still critically question my political argument in meaningful ways that incorporate, rather than devaluing or rejecting these frameworks which are the product of considerable intellectual work far beyond my own individual labors.
The survey and argument begin on the flip...
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