To continue my scribbling with Howe and Strauss’ cohort work, I would like to offer a scenario based upon one of their latest predictions, which they claim seriousness for in part because some of their earlier predictions panned out. The prediction I am focusing on is: a profound change of the culture around 2005 or so, and the angle I’m taking is, of course, the impact on politics.

If you’ve followed the political scene for some time, or are otherwise astute, you know that at least one political party claims to identify with “the young” and seeks to drag them into the political process. If the people that are teenagers now are as Howe and Strauss described them – new “Civic” types who see involvement in the political process as either an opportunity or as a duty which good citizens should undertake – then the young will respond favorably to this inducement.

“Civics” tend to admire teamwork and see individualist talk as a cover for a bad attitude. Being a man or woman on your own would likely get you pegged as a “user” by this type. So, their own stereotypes incline them to politics, as the usual antipolitical arguments tend to focus upon how politics stifles individual goals. There’s also a hoax element to this, as the typical antipolitician describes the political system as full of users itself.

If you’re a demand-creates-a-corresponding- supply type, you would assume that this new mutuality of interest between the young and the political system would call forth a “Next Deal” – a new New Deal, whose major feature would be roping in a group of people judged to be deviants.

This line of reasoning is true, but what it does not show is the extent to which this swing to the goodness of politics will go. I will say at this point that the odds favor a restriction of liberty, as collectivism of spirit is too incompatible with the spirit of liberty. The libertarians among us would have to shift away from theory and towards muckraking in order to be heard.

If the course of events in America remains in the same river as the one floated down over the last twenty years, this period of reform would most probably be confined to a tightening of internal security, along with stigmatizations of the personality type prone to flout those new measures, and a reform of corporate disclosure practices in order to stop the “next Enron” at the creek stage. Undoubtedly, the bitterness engendered by the collapse of the dot-com bubble will turn some of Wall Street’s previously lovable affectations into examples of annoying and unprofessional irresponsibility. This implies that the new reform movement would also tighten up the Securities and Exchange Commission.

General Wesley Clark has publicly proclaimed the inherent goodness of the progressive income tax, rather than explaining it as a necessary measure. This is a sea change in itself, and traditionally is a guard-runner for a clampdown on the business sector.

But the question I haven’t answered is: will this gathering whirlpool turn into another New Deal? In order to answer this, I have to pull out my outsider’s toque and discuss the trigger for the New Deal somewhat callously.

We all know that the Great Depression was the enabling cause. But what not might be known is how deranged American politics became during the 1930s, and how completely the order of rank was changed.

Observers of the time described the 1930s as a “decade of mediocrity.” This had two takes: either contemptuous dismissal – H.L. Mencken called the New Deal brain trust a bunch of schoolteachers at the end of his Treatise of Right and Wrong (1934) – or an adolescent delight in mocking the old standards and those who espoused them.

People that were stigmatized as cranks in the field of economics all through the first two decades of the twentieth century were suddenly listened to and taken seriously. There were a whole bunch of “plans” floated about which any person literate in economics could see as senseless. What would you say if you saw in the op-ed page of your favorite paper a proposal to make every person, at the end of the week, buy a postage stamp from the Post Office equal to 1% of the value of a greenback and affix it to the back of that bill in order for it to remain legal tender? Or: a serious policy paper saying that economic productivity would be maximized by each business being put in a fixed category and issued orders from a government department specifying how much they should produce and at what price they should buy and sell at – with subsidiary orders to turn in anyone that pursued an opportunity not specified in these codes?

It’s hard to believe, I know, but the first proposal was taken seriously, and the second was implemented by the first Roosevelt administration – it was the NRA, an agency later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

Clearly, what used to be the kick-toys of the field of economics began to acquire real power, and this led to the usual cycle of resentment playing out. The Roosevelt faction truly enjoyed every clever way of dismissing the “old order” right out of hand also.

Why did the political culture turn so weird? Or, to look at this in a more pragmatic way, why were the only ones capable of taking charge at that time the groups that formerly occupied the crank slot? Because every mainstream expert had a real blind spot regarding the function of the managed gold standard. And had assured the American public to the point of hypnosis that modern economics assured near-permanent prosperity. The only ones capable of seeing that a problem existed at all were those cranks. That’s how the “new day” for crankdom arrived.

If there was to be a comparable derangement in the fabric of America, it couldn’t be because of a depression: too many respectable people in the United States have gotten through grinding poverty and survived nonetheless. Much more is known about the monetary system, so action plans from the mainstream could be developed quickly and easily. The Federal Reserve stopped at least one bank run in the making approximately thirteen years ago.

The shock would have to come from somewhere else. Since the dependence of the American economy and society on the Internet is too known, it is a good bet that a Net meltdown would meet with a similar, fire-fighter response. Including the use of alternative technologies to set up a new, jack-leg Net in the same way that emergency generators are used during blackouts. As far as economic crises are concerned, the Great- Depression-scarred United States is now too robust to be knocked down.

But there is a geopolitical blind spot existing today, and a group of cranks that could step into the void. It relates to 9/11, a crisis which was met swiftly and easily by the government of the United States. The deranging crisis would be: terrorists, or a hostile foreign power, successfully attacking United States soil with nuclear weapons.

You know how scary that would be. American culture is full of stories, tales, studies and position papers linking nuclear war to Armageddon. Tightly.

It’s possible that this is in part propagandistic in thrust, but all the internal dialogue I’ve seen indicates that these people really believe that. The mere mention of the possibility that the United States could survive a nuclear exchange is sufficient to get you labeled as a crank in those circles, regardless of how logical your reasoning is.

“If The Bomb Falls All Is Lost” – this is the blind spot. And the new group of cranks happen to be none other than the old first-strikers, the Why Not Victory? crowd.

If a group of terrorists or a hostile nation successfully attack the United States with nuclear bombs, then the only group that would be capable of launching a pragmatic response would be the ones that live in the underworld of geopolitical strategy, and have accumulated the same resentments of the stigmatized. Today’s equivalent of the “Money Cranks” are the “Bomb Cranks.”

Their entry into government as the only faction that was capable of handling a crisis of such a magnitude would give them the same kind of clear field enjoyed by the New Dealers in the 1930s.

And the same license to spit on the “Old Order” as obstructionist and reactionary. “Hurrah, the warmongers are in charge” would be the rallying cry.

This would shove world peace into the same “outmoded” slot as laissez-faire was.

I should say, as I bring this speculation to an end, that the above is scenarioizing – a sort of blend of fact and fiction. There’s no prediction meant in this, just an early warning of the same sort as “the next earthquake” scenarioizing in California. It’s merely an exercise in constructive imagination.