Looking for Matches

We’ve discovered that there are common attributes within the historical pattern of events leading to the Great Crisis that has come, regularly, every 80 years or so, for the past 400+ years.  In no particular order, those common attributes are the random trigger event, a critical piece of political writing, blood in the streets, economic distress and it all begins with some war.  Politically, weak governing leadership, new political voices, overt/active opposition to the government, and misguided governing decisions that indicate a growing distance between the government and the people impact the road to crisis, with a new explosive communication tool raising the pressure.  And finally, one big explosive event leads to a controversial decision by the government that galvanizes citizens to the idea that active opposition was the only choice.  Philosophically, all compromised had ceased.  The divide was too great.   So, the question we must now answer is “how many of the common attributes have we seen?”

 

 

Those words are from the fourteenth installment (find the earlier sections here) about my recent book, one that I am very excited about—Tracking the Storm.  An excerpt from Chapter 14 follows below.  You can download a pdf  if you enjoy reading on your computer or also purchase a printed copy of the book.

 

 

That the journeys have all begun with war is somewhat ironic.  In all four great crises, the country was successful in the wars.  It’s not as if we lost and then people were angry over the outcome, feeling a distaste for the loss of life and economic cost of war.  No, the victory at each level was fairly complete, especially the French & Indian war and the Mexican-American war.  But that fact that a national victory only exacerbating tensions is one piece of evidence that the war was not the crisis itself.  Clearly this has been, or perhaps IS, our situation now.  Regardless of how current Americans feel about the “War on Terror,” President Bush’s poorly phrased concept of our post-9/11 actions, we won.   Yet, just as in our previous pre-crisis wars, it is after the victory that tensions mounted.

 

The election of 2006 and 2008 clearly point to two of the things on the list:  new political voices, overt/active opposition to the government.  Coming out of the 2004 Presidential election, two new groups—codepink and moveon.org hit center stage.  Codepink began in 2002 while moveon.org was first on the scene in 1998 during President Clinton’s last years, yet both really became better known as active opposition to the governing policies of the Bush White House years.  As “far left” groups, both organizations played critical roles in the 2006 midterm election victory by the Democrat Party.  On the other end of the political spectrum, after the election of President Obama in 2008, the “far right’ found it’s new political group in the Tea Party movement.  Just as in 2006, these new political activists contributed greatly to the 2010 election takeover of the House of Representatives by the Republican Party.   With both the right and the left, we must continue to watch to see if these groups merely shift the ideology of a current political group, such as happened in the 1920s and 1930s, or if either might become an entirely new political party as with the emergence of the Republicans in the 1850s or the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s.

 

Most of the anger felt from many Americans today is due to a sense that the governing leadership is very weak.   The weak leadership, just as we have seen in the other roads to crisis, continuously makes misguided governing decisions that indicate a growing distance between the government and the people.  Whether looking at the choices in Acts like the Patriot Act (which neither President has really handled well) or responses to natural disasters (Katrina for President Bush, the Gulf oil spill for President Obama), the decisions of the governing leaders is consistently poorly received.  At times, the Congress seems to choose to push through legislation that they know is against the will of the people, most recently seen in the choices of the Congress to pass a version of universal healthcare.  During the last election cycle (2010), in state after state, city after city, angry citizens came to meetings with their various representatives to yell, scream, and otherwise loudly complain about the decisions being made.  The reaction by the politicians looked like actors reading a script from Prime Minister Grenville’s stunned responses to the uprising in the Stamp Act.  The politicians of today seem incapable of perceiving that the distance between them and the people is now vast.

 

That’s six of our eleven common traits.  What about the rest?  Well, we’ve already discussed the writings.  This one will be harder to track until the actual Crisis bursts upon us.   In fact, the equivalent of Common Sense may not be a book at all; it could simply be the emergence of Twitter or the smart phone.  Maybe it will be a TV show like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. 

 

Speaking of communication speed leads us to see how the new instant access of the Internet has completely transformed information exchange.  First there was simply the presence of bloggers who could and did move faster than more traditional media.  Alongside them came web 2.0 type websites that allowed more user interaction and control.  Digital became commonplace within the world of images and with the arrival of the “flipcam” in 2009, tied to sites like youtube.com, photojournalists became “everyman.”  Status updates from facebook and twitter increased the sense of interaction that occurs between people, and the new “mini-computers” (typically called “smart phones” though they really are computers) allowed people to update from everywhere.  Imagine how the Kansas-Nebraska act would have played out with people posting videos on youtube and others tweeting about events happening in real time.

 

Economic distress?  Well, in a word, yes.  We have that.  As I discussed in chapter two, the situation for the country economically is as bad as ever.  The point of having the distress is not just the economics of it all, but also the impact to the people.   Today, with the average ticket price for a sporting event climbing towards triple digits and a hotdog and coke more than $10, the ever-widening disparity between the haves (the small percentage at the top) and have-nots (the growing percentage of us who find +$3.00 gasoline brutal on the budget) is reaching explosive proportions.  As we saw in Germany during the late 1920s, it is during the economic crisis that the citizen soon finds radical solutions as possibilities.

 

Which brings us to the last three common attributes that we uncovered: bloodshed in the streets, an event that provokes misguided government response that galvanizes the citizens, and the unforeseen trigger event that brings the onrush of events.  None of these events has seemed to have hit yet, or if they have, then their presence is not fully clear.  Obviously, if it were up to us, we would wish to see none of this.  So far, as I write this now in April of 2011, there hasn’t been any act yet that brings the war of words to actual fighting, but there are hints of all three.

 

In the end, if all things remain the same, at some point in the coming few years (I would guess between 2012-2016), some act by the government, will push someone over the line.  Maybe it will be a forced vote in Wisconsin; perhaps it will be a decision that, on its face, seems innocuous at best.  Few in Washington DC could really know how abolitionists or slaveholders would take the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  At that point in 1854, the concept of “popular sovereignty” was only applied to lands in the far west, where few people lived.  Who knew that entire college classes from the north would covenant to move west to Kansas to ensure it would be a free state?  Who knew that slaveholders and abolitionists alike would attempt to use terrifying violence, just like the Sons of Liberty years before, to get their point across?

 

Perhaps, just like the British in 1770, the government will be merely attempting to protect certain citizens and find itself caught into a scenario where it has to open fire upon its own citizens.  Maybe, just like in 1938 with Kristallnacht or 1932 with the Bonus Army, the government will be enforcing laws that average citizens will decide are unfair, so they fight back.  In any case, as before, once that line is crossed, all things are different.  No one can tell what kind of random event will trigger a rush of events.  We can only hope that as we all face the events of our time, we will be ready.