There’s a snippet from Hassan Hakimians’s post at Project Syndiate considering why economists did not predict the “Arab Spring” that I found very intriguing:
According to the American sociologist James C. Davies’s so-called J-curve theory, revolutions – such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Egypt’s revolution of 1952 – occur when periods of prolonged economic and social development are sharply and suddenly reversed. In other words, it is not straightforward economic hardship, but rather frustration with the disparity between expectation and reality that awakens the masses.
And people wonder why I’m worried about the United States.
I liked this, a more elegantly stated version of what I have been saying for a long time:
The J-curve theory I suspect will be shown to employ cherry-picking events. Our own Great Depression did not cause a revolution. How often did Davies look at the dogs that did not bark, I wonder.
I am somewhat less worried about open conflict in the US now thanks to the wonderful stupidity and incompetence of Trump and the House GOP. They are both busy betraying their own voters. And as for Trump, he’s not even a wanna-be Mussolini. He’s just a garden-variety wanna-be caudillo looking to line his pockets, even when it requires treason.
I believe that it came closer than you think. Have you ever read It Can’t Happen Here? I think you’d find that it has great resonance with today.
IMO Roosevelt defused the situation by the sheer volume and energy of the things he tried early in his administration and through his “fireside chats”. Those went a long way towards assuaging nervous and frightened people.
Something that today’s elite do not seem to have learned is that if you can’t actually be superior you’d better not act superior or look down on the people you think are your inferiors.
I thought the j curve theory was well known, but doesn’t have that much predictive power, i.e. while revolutions are more likely to occur in that time period, there are so many transition periods where it doesn’t happen that it does have that much value.
Steve
Trump and the GOP are “betraying their own voters” in a manner which prevents conflict?
This means what? If true?
That the Elite Dems will suddenly start fighting for the Euro working class? That Obamacare was enough to placate them in the health field? Or that the Sanders folks will clean out the Clintonistas and
do the right thing?
It is important Trump acts on those awful H-1B visas.
It would seem as “betrayal” of Trump’s voters would anger them even more in the medium term otherwise.
I do agree that Trump should form his own NASHI at least if he truly wants to frighten his enemies.
(We do understand that the “treason” charge later has nothing to do with that Euro Am worker demographic which does not regard Russia as a dangerous enemy, not like the SJW’s suddenly do.)
I think yesterday’s competing press conferences by Rep. Nunes and Rep. Schiff are the harbingers of all-out political warfare of a kind we have not seen seen the pre-Civil War era.
Trump and Ryan are attempting to deprive millions of Trump voters of their health insurance while writing me a check. Trump has not even begun to look at an infrastructure bill, so no jobs are forthcoming.
The polls are starting to show weakening even in Trump’s core voters. Rather than gaining traction, this regime is incoherent, unstaffed, in way over its head. The possibility of civil war is drastically diminished by growing loss of faith in Dear Leader.
You might be right but there is both the question of postponement until neolibs take over and fail purposely again and the question of whether open conflict might be better than long slow decay.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/ideology-precedes-policy-which-determines-outcomes/
If there are peaceful alternatives, people will seek to exhaust them. We don’t even have a modern map of US governance. Difficult to get a critical mass willing to flip over the table if you haven’t even looked at the table seriously.
Reasonable people will. Most people aren’t reasonable.
The American Civil War did not begin because people had exhausted all peaceful alternatives. It started because people had decided that peaceful alternatives wouldn’t get them what they wanted.