Is there a Seventy-Year Crisis Cycle?
What is the nature of our moment in history? Are we at the rightmost point of a
normal political pendulum swing, as many people trust we are? I hope
so. But I have noticed another disturbing cycle. The cycle is about
70 years long, and it's a cycle of critical national crisis and division.
The first marker in this cycle is of course the Civil War, about seventy
years after the inception of our federal Constitution (which, itself, was a product of a governmental crisis in the young nation). The second is
less well known. There was a point early in the Roosevelt presidency
when another civil war of some sort seems in retrospect to have been
more, rather than less, likely.
Incredibly, the story
of Gen. Smedly Butler is not well know today. To make a long story
short, Butler was approached in 1933 by a representative of big business
leaders to be militarily installed as figurhead dictator of America. He
turned them down and went public, testifying about the coup attempt to
Congress. Had he been more interested in personal power than in
American democracy, another Civil War most probably would have exploded
in our already battered country.
In addition to this specific instance, the time was clearly one of crisis. The Depression was in full swing, political radicalism ran strong on both ends of the spectrum, and other characters like Huey Long looked like they might try to take advantage of the country's precarious position.
Well, here we are, 70 years later. We have our most ideologically
extreme and inflexible president (not to mention Congress, the Rehnquist majority, and even large portions of the press) in generations in an age of bitter and evenly split divisions in this country. The economy is tanking and
corporate corruption runs rampant. Civil liberties are being eroded in
the name of an indefinite war on terror. The opposition party refuses
to voice opposition. Political cynicism runs high.
Mercifully, we averted the worst form of disaster in 1933. Hopefully the Civil War will turn out to be the exception rather than the rule in this 70 year crisis cycle. Where are FDR and Smedley Butler when you need them?
7:11:04 PM 
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