In Part 1, I quoted two comments in their entirety, from , first from smcclurk, which began:
It seems to me that the problem with our side isn't necessarily fighting. It is faith. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of believing in your ideals even when things look darkest.
I tend to think of this in terms of authenticity, which was the way Jean Paul Sartre framed it, or rather the larger issue which includes it. In order to be authentically human, we must openly act as what we really are, and all of our actions, including our political behavior, must be true to the part of what we are which we choose to affirm.
If they're not both fresh in your mind, please go back and read them before going on. Part 1 focused primarily on looking at Obama's failed promise from this wider perspective--being able to recognize it as such, and yet seeing that it was still an advance to believe in something deeply affirmative, rather than reacting defensively, even if that belief was ultimately mis-placed.
Bottom line: The Sufis have a saying: if there were no gold, there would be no counterfeit. The bad news is that Obama is a counterfeit. The good news is that he proves the existence of gold.
Gold lies within us all. And that's the subject of this diary, part two.
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. In this diary set, I'm looking at 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.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, the next part will deal with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values. The second part dealt with 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. This part deals with 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.
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