Posted on 01/14/2013 3:25:07 AM PST by Kaslin
It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10.
It was 76 years from Washington's First Inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in 1865. It was 76 years from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 to the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Going backward, it was 76 years from the First Inaugural in 1789 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which settled one of the British-French colonial wars. And going 76 years back from Utrecht takes you to 1637, when the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies were just getting organized.
As for our times, we are now 71 years away from Pearl Harbor. The current 76-year interval ends in December 2017.
Each of these 76-year periods can be depicted as a distinct unit. In the colonial years up to 1713, very small numbers of colonists established separate cultures that have persisted to our times.
The story is brilliantly told in David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed." For a more downbeat version, read the recent "The Barbarous Years" by the nonagenarian Bernard Bailyn.
From 1713 to 1789, the colonies were peopled by much larger numbers of motley and often involuntary settlers -- slaves, indentured servants, the unruly Scots-Irish on the Appalachian frontier.
For how this society became dissatisfied with the colonial status quo, read Bailyn's "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution."
From 1789 to 1865, Americans sought their manifest destiny by expanding across the continent. They made great technological advances but were faced with the irreconcilable issue of slavery in the territories.
For dueling accounts of the period, read the pro-Andrew Jackson Democrat Sean Wilentz's "The Rise of American Democracy" and the pro-Henry Clay Whig Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought." Both are sparklingly written and full of offbeat insights and brilliant apercus.
The 1865-1941 period saw a vast efflorescence of market capitalism, European immigration and rising standards of living. For descriptions of how economic change reshaped the nation and its government, read Morton Keller's "Affairs of State and Regulating a New Society."
The 70-plus years since 1941 have seen a vast increase in the welfare safety net and governance by cooperation between big units -- big government, big business, big labor -- that began in the New Deal and gained steam in and after World War II. I immodestly offer my own "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan."
The original arrangements in each 76-year period became unworkable and unraveled toward its end. Eighteenth-century Americans rejected the colonial status quo and launched a revolution and established a constitutional republic.
Nineteenth-century Americans went to war over expansion of slavery. Early 20th-century Americans grappled with the collapse of the private sector economy in the Depression of the 1930s.
We are seeing something like this again today. The welfare state arrangements that once seemed solid are on the path to unsustainability.
Entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- are threatening to gobble up the whole government and much of the private sector, as well.
Lifetime employment by one big company represented by one big union is a thing of the past. People who counted on corporate or public sector pensions are seeing them default.
Looking back, we are as far away in time today from victory in World War II in 1945 as Americans were at the time of the Dred Scott decision from the First Inaugural.
We are as far away in time today from passage of the Social Security in 1935 as Americans then were from the launching of post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Nevertheless our current president and most politicians of his party seem determined to continue the current welfare state arrangements -- historian Walter Russell Mead calls this the blue state model -- into the indefinite future.
Some leaders of the other party are advancing ideas for adapting a system that worked reasonably well in an industrial age dominated by seemingly eternal big units into something that can prove workable in an information age experiencing continual change and upheaval wrought by innovations in the market economy.
The current 76-year period is nearing its end. What will come next?
Wasn’t the Cloward-Piven strategy to do just that in order to expand the Welfare State?
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It is my understanding that the Cloward-Piven paradigm is to be employed as a strategy in which the welfare state is expanded to unsustainable limits with the goal of collapsing our economic system. Their ultimate goal is to sweep away our entire system of free enterprise and our political structure and replace it all with their Marxist utopia.
Wasn’t the Cloward-Piven strategy to do just that in order to expand the Welfare State?
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It is my understanding that the Cloward-Piven paradigm is to be employed as a strategy in which the welfare state is expanded to unsustainable limits with the goal of collapsing our economic system. Their ultimate goal is to sweep away our entire system of free enterprise and our political structure and replace it all with their Marxist utopia.
Despite his flaws, Sulla gave the corrupt Republic an opportunity to redeem itself from the democratic excesses of the Gracchi and Marius.
Romans preferred the Imperial route.
Sorry if I pay into something then I want what I paid for. If the government does not want to pay me my social security then they can refund all of the money I paid into the program right now. Anything else is theft...
You create a beautiful building? I blow it up and create a pile of rubble -- we are both creators, aren't we?
I believe that a lot of the Cloward-Piven folks are focused entirely on destruction, and pretty much act on faith that when the dust settles, some sort of communist utopia will be quickly and easily put together. They aren't working on the plan to implement that vision -- they just assume it will all work out. They key thing is to destroy that church, the family, and the free enterprise system: these things are impediments -- once they are removed, the communist utopia will "naturally" follow.
Almost every other national need has been set aside to provide more money for Obama’s wealth redistribution.
He had $900 billion dollars in stimulus money that was supposed to be spent on “shovel ready” infrasturucture improvements. Instead it has just disappeared down Obama’s wealth redistribution toilet.
When money is spent on infrastructure the nation benefits znd has somethng useful to show for the expenditure. When money is spent on Obama-Phones, freebies for illegals and other moocher handouts it disappears immediately and the next day there is nothing to show for it except the same moochers crying “More! More!”
The moochers and their political overlords in Washington will not let entitlement programs die. They will destroy the country first - and that is exactly what they are doing.
The only way to get Obama’s Free Stuff Army off the dole will be to pry the EBT card fromm the moochers’ dead hands after Obama finishes his quest to drive the country into a total apocalyptic collapse.
Because it will be impossible then. Nobody will be willing to provide the "entitled" with goods or services in return for worthless government script.
SS was/is nothing more than a tax disguised as a retirement benefit.
If it were truly a retirement benefit only, then the payments would stop once a beneficiary got back what they had paid in plus some interest.
After that point is passed, it’s welfare, pure and simple. And it really should be called such.
Perhaps this is just a quibble, but I believe the statement above is too simplistic.
If there is a bridge in my town, and a civil engineer studies it and says "This thing is going to fall down sometime in the next 10 years", then some politician may go seeking $10M to fix the bridge. The end result would be that we spend $10M, we improve the infrastructure, and the nation goes on as before with no appreciable benefit of any kind.
I recognize the value in avoiding a bridge collapse, but building new highways, new canals, developing a transcontinental railroad -- there are infrastructure feats which quite definitely benefit the nation. But in the modern world, the federal government spends billions of dollars to patch existing infrastructure and the benefit to the nation is quite negligible.
Now -- if politicians argued in favor of this, saying "potholes are bad" or "we don't want that bridge to collapse" then I think this at least would be honest. But Obama definitely doesn't do this. Obama explicitly says that we will grow the economy and create millions of jobs by fixing potholes on Route 84. I'm sorry: economic growth does not occur that way.
Yes we paid it but while we were not paying proper attention our govt stole it. Now, if we are going to receive it, the govt will have to steal it from our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
I am pro-Sulla.
VERY pro, now. And it’s not just Obama. Congress is worse.
“Sorry if I pay into something then I want what I paid for. If the government does not want to pay me my social security then they can refund all of the money I paid into the program right now. Anything else is theft...”
You are quite right in your comment. Unfortunately, my guess is that most of us on SSA have gotten (or will get) more back than we contributed (that’s why Obamacare is set up to hasten us all to our graves). We can thank the RATS and RINOs for having spent our money buying votes instead of investing it to grow our retirement nest eggs. SSA was a bad model. But it was made totally unsustainable by the Congress!
No problem. Do you have change for a million-dollar bill?
...key thing is to destroy that church, the family, and the free enterprise system: these things are impediments — once they are removed, the communist utopia will “naturally” follow.
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I think you have described their plan quite accurately. And they have been quite successful with much of the destruction phase. It still boggles the mind to see the enormous social changes that have occurred in my 65+ years on this earth.
Riiiiiiiight....just like the “Era of Big Government is Over.”
Communism tried what? Russians gave up a war in the midst of being invaded, very nearly did destroy their currency, dispossessed property owners of all kinds, and like I said literally murdered entire classes of people based on the fact that they owned, maybe, a single cow. They lasted 70+ years!
I think there goal was simpler and modester. They wanted a guaranteed minimum income. Which we might kinda sorta unofficially already have, for some at least, but you have to jump through hoops and maybe commit fraud. Their dream was, say, $20,000 a year, no questions asked. You don’t feel lille working, go tell em you wanna get yours. Here’s your money, sir, no questions asked.
Certainly they would’ve pushed for more once they got it, but that was the stated goal of the Overwhelm the System strategy.
You didn’t pay anything into any system. There is no system. There’s just taxes and expenditures. It was already theft, if it is theft, but no moreso than any other tax you paid. Except maybe for the legitimate functions of the state, if there are any.
Nobody will be willing? That’s what guns and jails are for. Tell me, did Germany emerge from its monetary disaster—worse than what we should expect, probably—with smaller or bigger government?
Today's babies are the "Homeland Generation" who are supposed to be like the Silent Generation of the 1950s or the "Compromise generation" that fumbled the slavery issue.
We may not actually see the Millennials step up and do the right thing. They are the ones moving back home because of the bad economy.
Of course a lot of the "GI Generation" had to struggle with the Depression before really coming into their own, but maybe, as Strauss and Howe said of the Progressive Era cycle, a hero generation just won't emerge.
It was a fun theory in its day, but I wonder if the history that's happened since the books were written hasn't started to unravel the theory.
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