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About a month age I made the argument that essentially, future historians will draw parallels between Gorbachev and the Kamala Harris presidency, which at this point seems to be rather likely to come around next year. I can understand why it was downvoted because I made it deliberately vague, thinking that spelling my assumption all out in detail would narrow the discussion down too much and derail it at the start. Anyway, I recently read the New York Magazine article titled The Joyous Plot to elect Kamala Harris... by Rebecca Traister, and while I wouldn't say that it strengthens my argument to the full, it certainly doesn't include anything that would contradict it, I think. She's being lauded as a champion of both Democrat party leaders and grassroots organizers (mainly of female ones, that is), ushering in a new era of hope and political change after long and disheartening years dominated by old farts in leadership positions.
Again, please write something that strengthens this parallel other than that she is relatively young compared to other politicians. What issues can be her Perestroika, her Glasnost, her liquor ban?
It's not merely that she's relatively young, it's that she's much younger than the two presidents who'll have preceded her.
You can also name about a dozen potential issues, can't you? The college debt bubble, the NIMBY vs. YIMBY struggle, the opioid crisis, economic stagnation, the housing bubble, Medicare, women's rights etc.
Gorbachev wasn't that much younger. Andropov was 1914, Gorba 1931, barely 17 years difference. Why fixate on Gorba? There have been younger presidents since forever. TR had 15 years on his predecessor, JFK 27 years, both promised plenty of new policies. (Kennedy was born during WW1 while Eisenhower and Truman fought in it).
The Soviet gerontocracy problem was not simply about age of the general secretary. The problem that in 1980s, the politbyro had been staffed by generation of Brezhnev, implementing Brezhnev policies since Brezhnev. Then Gorba decided to try to implement large-scale changes to the Soviet state that weakened the authority of the dictatorship.
True, but Kamala isn't that young either, in fact she's 5 years older now than Gorbachev was in 1985.
Again, true, but the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.
I suppose one can make a similar point about the Dem party leadership?
This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.
Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).
I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").
If I had to guess, it was probably radioactive.
I can confirm that Roosevelt’s Progressives were relatively extreme reformers. We take most of that era’s changes for granted, but people were understandably upset about Gilded Age excesses. Externalities, as it were.
I would have guessed LSD, personally.
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