The Gathering Storm

     "Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?"

                 Bob Dylan

Pete Buttigieg in Portland, meeting Kevin Stine

We are now at the beginning of something or the end of something. 

 In twenty years we will know what it is. 

Pete Buttigieg was in Portland yesterday. He said this was an inflection point in American history. Trump, he said, was a symptom. He said this period marked the end of the "Reagan Era" in American history, and some dislocations and problems had grown un-acknowledged and unsolved during these past forty years. Because of that distress a great many voters looked at America and just decided to "burn it down." 

They did it by voting for Trump. 

Zeitgeist. There is widespread comment that we have entered a new era, a time of intense political turmoil. Something is going on. 

Democrats fear we are entering a dystopian future of authoritarian nationalism. Investors and home buyers are voting with their money, buying long dated assets--stocks and homes--bidding up prices to new highs.

In twenty years:

Pearl Harbor, six weeks before the attack, 1941

Will we look at this era as the beginning of a new era of greater economic prosperity, brought by a pro business president, reduced regulations, and a successful trade policy?

Will this period be the last moments of the "abortion era" with a new Supreme Court in place or shortly to be reinforced, put on the court with the purpose of reversing Roe vs. Wade?

Will this period be understood as the pre-war era, that period prior to our entering conventional wars in the Middle East, North Korea, or elsewhere? (As we understand that troubled period of 1859 or 1940.)

Will this be understood as a brief ugly moment of crazy? (As we understand the Joe McCarthy period.)

Will this be the opening period of a great revolutionary era, the era before riotous street demonstrations of the kind we see in Hong Kong and Puerto Rico this week? (As we understand France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.)

Happy Days

Will this be understood as part of our spiral from democracy into authoritarian tyranny? (As we understand democratic Germany choosing Hitler in 1933.)

Will this be the happy, foolish debt-fueled boom era laying the groundwork of another economic collapse? (As we understand the Roaring Twenties, the NASDAQ mania of 1999, and the wild mortgage boom of 2005-2007)

Will this be the moment before a great apocalypse of nuclear war? (As we observe in the happy blue-sky-birds-tweeting opening sequences in Hollywood movies prior to the unexpected nuclear war.)

Will this be the period we understand as the pre-climate-change period while we ignored the signs of an environmental crisis, but did nothing? (As Churchill described Britain in The Gathering Storm or as JFK described Britain in Why England Slept.)

Youth Climate Activists, Oregon Capitol

"It's too soon to say."  In 1972 Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the meaning of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris. His answer, that it was too soon to answer, became famous because the question was mis-reported to suggest that the question was about the meaning of the French Revolution of 1789. 

We will not need two hundred years to understand the current era.