I tell you about the moral convulsions of the United States
The United States between news, history and political science. James Hansen's Diplomatic Note
Cycles like it. They seem to make sense of events that, on the spot, seem incomprehensible. They also give hope, somehow demonstrating that "this too will pass". American history, for example – at least as interpreted by a famous and extremely influential Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington – appears to be characterized by cycles of "moral convulsions" that recur roughly every sixty years. Writing in the early 1980s, the scholar identified four: the revolutionary period in the years between 1760 and 1770, the "Jacksonian revolt" (1820-30), the "Progressive" era that began towards the end of the 19th century and, in the 20th century, the massive social protests and the student revolt between the 1960s and 1970s. Huntington cheated a bit with the dates to get the score back – God forbid, history is not a precise science – but the important thing is that in 1981 he made a prediction: the next "American convulsion" would come in the second or third decade of the 21st century. That is, now.
Seen in hindsight, the current "Huntingtonian" convulsion may have begun to take shape with the emergence of the social and political forces that projected the very unlikely Donald Trump to the White House and broke the established political coexistence between mildly " left "and" right "- in American terms – dating back to the upheavals of the 1960s: the movements against the Vietnam War and racial segregation, the" clearance "of divorce and abortion, the sexual revolution, the marijuana boom , the "counterculture" and many other new things.
The cycles are mostly seen only later, when we try to understand what has already happened, but the historical confluence of an economic and another health crisis with waves of financial, technological, media, social and even dietary indigestion – and now of course politics – it is at least suggestive, and we haven't even mentioned Black Lives Matter …
If Huntington was right – he died in 2008 – the eventual decision on who the new President of the United States is will not solve much. We are only at the beginning of a new and troubling rollercoaster ride of American evolution. The knots that are coming to a head in the United States are many and in brutal contrast to each other. That it is absolutely not known which way to go is evident in the curious — and belated — discovery of "Socialism" in American style, which began with the surprising, albeit brief, popularity of the politician Bernie Sanders a few years ago and resulted in the creation of a sort of first " current ”explicitly socialist within the Democratic Party. She is promoted by four MPs – Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) – all more or less young, more or less colored, a little "ethnic "And ideas for now quite confused. If they are roses, they will bloom.
For the moment, more than roses they are reminiscent of avocado seeds put to "take root" in a jar of water on the windowsill of a university dormitory – then they sprout and you don't know what to do with them. Perhaps the American soil, as the unexpectedly strong election results obtained by Donald Trump show, is not yet ready for certain delicate plants …
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-le-convulsioni-morali-degli-stati-uniti/ on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 07:20:10 +0000.