Skallagrim
Well-known member
It's the opposite of defeatism. It's the certainty of victory, just tempered by the realism that this kind of thing doesn't happen overnight.
Quite to the contrary: I'm typically annoyed by the fucking idiots who keep expecting a civil war any day now... and have been since 2008. No, retards. Look around. Too many people are still way too comfortable. Once things get really tight for enough people, you get the real conflict. But we're very obviously not there yet. So @Cherico is simply right about that.
Right now, the most radical thing any large mass of people will do is elect someone like Trump. Which is a sign of the times, because that would have been impossible 2-3 decades back. But it's a long way off from 'actual violent overthrow of the ruling political caste'.
On this plus side: the establishment witch-hunt vastly increases Trump's chances of being elected again. Which I find hilarious.
You're going along with a persistent framing here. Certain people here always repeat that the supposed claim of macro-history is "80 more years". In actual fact, the estimation is that the current system has roughly until 2080. Last I checked, that's not 80 years away. Not even 60. And then there's the fact that it's an indication of how long it'll be, not an exact number. (Anyway, it illustrates how little they know about the ideas that they so eagerly dismiss.)
Conversely, 2050 isn't even 30 years away, and I see about zero prospectives for any real resolution within that time-frame. As I said: in 2008, I heard a lot of people boldly stating that the system would collapse any day now. It didn't. They were projecting their own hopes onto reality. The truth is that it always takes longer than you think.
Which is, however, not to suggest that things will just remain stagnant for decades to come. I have no doubt that matters will escalate, with periodic upheavals. And our dear Orange Man is representative of one such upheaval. Let's see if things are wild enough to see him pull a Cleveland and get a second, non-consecutive term. I doubt he'd get much done this time, either, but the seething of the establishment types would be very amusing.
And I do live for such little enjoyments.
To quote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who got it right remarkably often: "For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution."
This shit didn't start in 1945. It started in 1789. And it's not a hundred years of life for this paradigm, but roughly three hundred. And its last third didn't begin in 1945, but rather with the break-down of the previous "social settlement", and the consequent rise of disaffaction and populism. In America, you see this manifested -- at that time still as a distinct undercurrent -- by Ross Perot in the early '90s. (Note that this also co-incides with the break-down of the previous geo-political alignment.)
Fast-forward three decades, give or take, and we have Trumpism and MAGA. More prominent, sorting more effects, but still demonstrably unable to dislodge the established elite. Your argument is that the next 'fast-forward' is going to be the one that does the trick, and topples the current order. I rather think we won't be sufficiently far along for it then, either-- and that it'll take another turn, after that one, before this dance is really done.
That analysis doesn't even require any macro-historical theory, either. Just a look at the facts on the ground. How close are we to boiling point? Answer: not close enough for anything to bubble over.
Donald Trump, at the end of the day, is 'merely' a simmer. A prelude to a still-fairly-distant boiling point. A promise of a future in which more violent anger bubbles up, because the ones with their hands on the dials kept turning up the heat, despite all the early warnings.
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