If you’ve watched any of the recent events involving Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican Party nomination for President, you can see all too clearly how the philosophical divide has now moved from mere words to angry actions. That ought to be reason enough for anyone to pay close attention to what is transpiring, and what is potentially coming. I am not saying that people should not protest any candidate…go protest them all. But I am saying that the fact that people will move to angry, violent protest ought to be warning enough to you that crisis between the two sides of the philosophical divide is imminent. I explained how there was such a political divide in my last post; now let’s understand why the outcome matters.
Why does matter? I mean, the obvious of course is that no one wants to live in troubled times. No one wants to see a Great Crisis. But the bigger point is that with each crisis, the government style has changed. Get ready for this coming change; you can sense it clearly no matter which side you find yourself on. I wrote about this in my book, Tracking the Storm, which focused on uncovering the common attributes, common steps or events that happened before each Great Crisis.
For some, reading about a crisis may only seem like hysteria or fear mongering, but I believe you are stronger with knowledge. No one can stop the events of history, but you can be prepared for what is coming….and what is coming will be fundamental change.
If that phrase sounds vaguely familiar, then you are remembering back to 2008. On October 31 2008, then Senator Obama made a very clear statement when he spoke at a politically rally, saying, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” While he may have just been caught up in political speak at the final days of a tough campaign, and he may have just meant the excitement of electing the first African-American as President, the core idea of the phrase stuck with me. To fundamentally change or transform anything means to bring something different at the core of the thing.
That idea of change, of a fundamentally different government, was precisely what the rebellious leaders in England were thinking in 1688 as they worried about the King bringing up his son, and their future king, as a Catholic. So, they took the final steps into the Great Crisis of that time by inviting an invasion to overthrow the current government (King James II); the Glorious Revolution was the result. Now, from our vantage point, the change that they enacted, including the English Bill of Rights and the full concept of a constitutional monarchy, was a good thing. Yet, clearly, for many in England at the time, and many citizens living in the colonies, the change was tumultuous. The early decades in the 1700s saw tens of thousands decide to leave England to move to the New World. Some came for the economic opportunity but others came to still find a new kind of freedom.
Equally true in the 1770s, a fundamental change from a monarchy, even a constitutional monarchy, to a Republic was a monumental undertaking. As we look back at the changes, including our Declaration of Independence or our second governing document, The Constitution, not surprisingly we see positives. Yet, for many other citizens of that time, soon to be known as Loyalists or Tories, the change was a terrible thing. For them, the war and subsequent American victory only brought on economic ruin and loss. Even life for the victors, as you should know from your history classes, was less stable than we have often been taught. The first 25 years from 1775 to 1800 brought revolutions and citizen uprisings (Shays’ Rebellion, the “revolution of the better sort” leading to the Constitution, Whiskey Rebellion, and the Revolution of 1800) before there was any sense of real stability. Certainly, the end product, a government “of the people,” was an amazing development. For one of the few times since the Roman Republic, power would lay with average people who had some degree of control over their lives. Still, you must understand that the end product was a massive CHANGE in government and in the lives of the average citizen.
Eighty some-odd years later after the shots fired at Lexington and Concord, a great Civil War was the next Great Crisis. Hopefully, you know of the difficult period post-Civil War in that time known as Reconstruction. Even in the victorious north, with the economic depression of the 1870s, things were neither happy nor easy after the war. Lincoln’s effort to save the Union had actually altered the government. Certainly, the Southerners were making an attempt to overthrow the government, or more accurately, leaving the Union because they didn’t think they could overthrow or change it. Yet, to stop the rebellion, the current government style had to change to become more aggressive, more controlling. Lincoln actually took steps that make our own Patriot Act seem tame by comparison, and his bold, probably illegal stance towards the Supreme Court is scary to contemplate. His choices, and that of his government, forced citizens to accept the central government’s ability to dictate morality and decisions in areas that had always been the purview of the individual. Though he would have denied it, to save the Union, Lincoln had to create a new, stronger government and the old order was largely overthrown.
The journey to crisis in the 1920s happened in the world Lincoln had created. The people came to adapt to the new government in 1870-1900 years, though the Founders would have been horrified. Of course, to be fair, the Founders could not have foreseen the large, national corporations that seemed to control and dominate so many lives or so much money. Perhaps they too would have suggested more democracy or at least more regulatory power held by Congress, as the Populists did…and their ideas became the foundation of Progressivism. Yet, by the 1930s, to stop the economic pain in hopes of thwarting the Depression, the people were then open to accepting a socialist style of government control that radically changed the Lincoln-styled US government. When World War II came, though President Roosevelt would have denied it just like Lincoln, an even larger government that was tied into all phases of common life was empowered. If the government wasn’t regulating businesses like the airline industry or the agriculture industry, they were giving money to people through acts like Social Security or unemployment assistance. Meanwhile, the government continued to expand through contracts within the military-industrial complex, or copying Hitler’s Germany, building our own Interstate Highway System. If the Founders had disagreed with Lincoln’s actions and the government after the civil war, they would have been stunned to see the power and reach of the new Federal Government in the 1950s and since. To put it bluntly, the government of my lifetime, especially since my adult years from the 1980s on, has more power, and controls more of our personal lives, than anything King George III dreamed of in the 1770s.
It’s been eight years since President Obama talked about fundamentally changing the country. Many would argue about whether he did or not. Yet, the reality is that these Great Crises are not just about the crisis itself, but also about the outcome. Authors Neal Howe and William Strauss wrote that the first turning is a high period, with “a new civic order in place.” That is because the country just emerged from crisis; everyone is happy. Still, regardless of happy or not, the government was changed. Sometimes that “new civic order” has turned out for good, as we saw with the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. Yet, the last two crises, while ending well in one sense (elimination of slavery in the USA and then the defeat of fascism), proved to be the undoing of the government built by the Founders. To get through the crisis, leaders took more power to themselves and made decisions that altered the government forever. Perhaps it was not as obvious through the years between the Civil War and World War II, but clearly in the years since WW2, our government has become more intrusive and controlling.
The bottom line is that a crisis will rock the country. Are we ready for that? Are you? Do you know where you would stand philosophically? Get mentally ready. As we are now seeing in actions concerning current candidates for President…people on both sides of the divide are no longer content to merely vote and hope for the best. They now seem determined to take physical, even violent action to get their point across.
It’s not long now.