Greens are On Deck

Green Partiers were not in the audience, but The Charles Koch Foundation CEO Brian Hooks said something that should be very encouraging to them at the Koch network semi-annual retreat last weekend. After describing how Barack Obama's election to President was a backlash against the failures of the George W. Bush administration, and Trump's election a backlash against Obama's failures, he predicted that we could see the same thing amplified after the Trump administration debacle. Hooks said,

 “If things don’t get better, then we should expect history to repeat itself. We should expect that the political pendulum will swing with even more force to the other direction the next time. With people even further to the left than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren! There are people right now who are prepared for the next four years to be a failure, people who cannot wait to be there to address the frustrated American people and introduce them to their own vision of radical hope and change. So the stakes are extremely high.”

The Libertarians/Kochists will certainly not be on the rise when the pendulum swings from right to left. That leaves the Green Party as the most likely party to succeed the Trumpists in four or eight years!

Aside from pondering the political pendulum on my own before Brian Hooks described it so well, another reason I put great hope in our next presidential turnover is the theory of the secular cycle of American history described in the 1997 book, The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. After the current fourth turning, which should end with the tRump administration, we will begin the secular cycle anew. The resolution of the crisis of the current phase will set us up for the beginning of the next 80 to 100 year secular cycle. Our next 20 to 25 year phase (the new cycle's first "turning") should be far less turbulent.

There comes a galvanizing event in a fourth turning which unifies national resolve and the problem we then join together to solve serves as a proxy for all of the major ills and threats facing us. To me, it looks like climate change could become that nexus, even within the span of tRump's presidency. Something worse than Hurricane Katrina, perhaps, would bring climate change to the fore. The Green Party would rapidly rise in esteem.

Photo by peterkreder

Then again, it doesn't have to be climate change that gives the Greens their turn at bat. The Green Party also holds very antimilitaristic ideals. Should we become involved in a devastating war (as all of our fourth turning forefathers have), the nation may afterward turn utterly away from militancy and bring the Greens in for assurance that our national security policy will embrace pacifism.

Whatever culminating problem the fourth turning involves, the Green Party platform offers hope through a banner of solutions showing how we would endeavor to serve the nation in crisis and in calm. When the time suddenly arrives for Greens to assume the mantle of leadership, having stepped up, advocated, and participated in shaping our democracy, let us finally be ready to govern.