Why does the Great Crisis Pattern matter?

As a historian, I had noticed these patterns, but the fair question from you, the reader, could be “so what?”  We certainly cannot stop the great movement of history.  As noted above, there will be an event, perhaps two that seemingly is not connected to anything specific to the actual Crisis yet triggers a rush of actions that drive into the nightmare.  Who can stop such a thing?   However, the real point to note is that each Great Crisis has led to a change in government.  In fact, the working title for the book was Great Crisis Leads to Change in Government.  The reality is that each Great Crisis ends up with something different in government of the United States, and not always for the better.

 

 

Those words are from the sixteenth installment (find the earlier sections here) about my recent book, one that I am very excited about—Tracking the Storm.  An excerpt from Chapter 16 follows below.  You can download a pdf  if you enjoy reading on your computer or also purchase a printed copy of the book.

 

 

This fact demands that we spend a bit more time looking at the common point of detached political leadership.  That single common attribute from the roads to crisis deserves more scrutiny because it could be, ultimately, the core factor upon which the issue of our future hinges.  This is the real reason I wrote this book.  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 Whigs 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 and 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 in the colonies, the change was tumultuous.

 

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, of course we see positives.  Yet, for many 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.

 

Hopefully, you know of the difficult period post-Civil War in that time known as Reconstruction.  Even in the north, with the economic depression of the 1870s, things were not happy, not easy after the war.  And, as we noted previously, the 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.

 

In  the 1930s, to stop the bleeding 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 the war 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.

 

The reality is that these Great Crises are not just about the crisis itself, but also about the outcome.  Authors Howe and Strauss wrote that the first turning is a high period, with “a new civic order in place.”  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 good government built by the Founders.   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?