It's been brewing since around 1970, plus or minus a few years. What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of cou

It's been brewing since around 1970, plus or minus a few years. What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it. The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments. But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction. And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.