#mostly just fascinated because they are mostly not based on modern speech patterns

[quatregats]

Also I realize that the answer is probably just reading enough period sources but as a linguist I really do need to pick Patrick O'Brian's brain about where in the world he got his different speech patterns from

[kelyon]

It can be hard to write characters whose “voice” differs from your natural writing style. When writing dialogue, how do you blend speaking with the character’s voice while letting your own shine through? Or do you prioritize one or the other?

I don't find myself fighting to put "my voice" in a fic. It should be the fic's voice, which covers both dialogue and narration. And if me as a 30-something cis woman in the 21st century can't speak the fic's voice, then I've got to do some research.

Etymonline is my best friend for choosing words. You put in a word and it tells you where it comes from and when it started coming into regular use. For example, I wanted to use the word "wrangle" at the end of Dark Mistress, but that's wasn't used as a verb until the 1890s for American cattle ranchers, so it wouldn't fit. I play it pretty fast and loose, but it's helpful to know what the facts are when I'm trying to decide if something feels right.

I think etymology and the history of language are fascinating, and getting it right for fics adds a layer of immersion. It also helps me (and the audience) know the characters. I use just as many intentional word choices in a modern setting as I do in an historical or fantastical one.

(For example, Golden Cuffs Belle is never going to use the word "whackadoo" to describe a crazy situation. That is a word tailor-made for Storybrooke Lacey.)

I guess it all boils down to the character and the setting (which is part of the character, because it's where they come from.) I looked up Aussie slang for Belle in Nephila. I wish I knew more about the speech patterns of working-class people in coastal Maine, because that's the environment Lacey would have grown up in. Hell, I wish I knew more Scottish turns of phrase that wouldn't end up sounding stereotypical.

It's actually kind of fun for fanfic in particular. Something doesn't just have to be something Belle would say, but something this Belle would say, that another Belle wouldn't--again, based on the character and the world they grew up in and how they think of themselves.

(Last example. In Golden Cuffs, I tried to make sure Belle narrated in complete sentences, because she was an educated young lady who'd had notions of propriety drilled into her head since she was a child.)

And all of these voices are my voice as well, because I contain multitudes and I mostly only write about things I already think I understand.

[omoi-no-hoka]

Problematic Language Gender Divide in Japanese

Today I stumbled across a very interesting article about the language gender divide in Japanese and how it impacts women in the Japanese workplace.

Here is the link to the full article.

This article touches on a lot of things I have felt living in Japan as a woman, so I thought I’d share it with everyone.

“This is not just a matter of linguistics: these gender-specific forms, with their different levels of assertiveness and politeness, and the societal expectations behind them, put women at a huge disadvantage against men, in life and particularly in the workplace.

Beyond specific words, gender language differences in Japanese are evident in how and what women say. Women are softer spoken and use more euphemisms. Unwritten rules around women's language reflect the acceptable features of women in Japan: never direct, always respectful.”

Can you imagine how difficult it would be to conduct a business negotiation while remaining “indirect” and unassertive? 

This article touches on a point that has ALWAYS ground my gears not related to the workplace.

“Interestingly, Nakamura observes that the Japanese female language is most prominently represented in the Japanese translation of women's remarks in Western literature. For example, Hermione in the Harry Potter wizarding novels sounds much more ladylike in Japanese than a girl her age in Japan today would. In fact, Hermione speaks as briskly as her male peers in the original English.

But the translation sends a subliminal message that all women, even Western ones, should be speaking demurely. Intellectually we know that this is not true. Western professional women are much more outspoken, but they are not any less charming for that.”

This feels like hyperbole to type, but I would honestly say that 100% of the Western female characters I’ve seen translated into Japanese have been hyper-feminized. Hermione’s character is built upon her independence and her self-assertion. It feels wrong to translate her dialogue into such demure speech. 

Has Japanese Always Been Genderized?

Contrary to what Japanese people are taught in their Japanese classes at school, onnna kotoba (female speech) and otoko kotoba (male speech) has not always been delineated. 

Many Japanese people are taught in school that Japanese has been genderized since the 4th Century AD, with court ladies, Buddhist nuns, and geisha speaking differently. Sounds so romantic and beautiful, that this historic, refined way of speech is preserved and upheld by women to this day!

HOWEVER, that is blatantly untrue. The delineation actually took place in the late 1800′s!

A linguist named Orie Endo was one of the first people to demonstrate this. He did it by comparing two literary works, one from 1813 (“Ukiyoburo”) and the other from 1909 (“Sanshiro”). The truth is that before 1887, when people started noticing feminine language, males and females spoke the same; differences in speech patterns were based on social status, not gender. Endo found that males and females used the same sentence-enders in “Ukiyoburo,” but these were split between men and women in “Sanshiro” (just 96 years later). The sentence-enders ぞ (zo), だぜ (da-ze) and ぜ (ze), for example, were used by both males and females in “Ukiyoburo” but only by men in “Sanshiro.”

This excerpt was taken from an older but fascinating article from The Japan Times that you can read here.

How/why did this change take place?

The Meiji Era (1868-1912) was the catalyst. Feminine language was initially frowned on by male intellectuals. The sentence-enders てよ (teyo), のよ (noyo), and だわ (dawa), in particular, got a lot of attention. This “vulgar language” (now considered a long-lasting and beautiful tradition) was blamed on hicks and lower-class Japanese.

Two big things helped feminine language go from vulgar to accepted tradition. The first was the philosophy of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother). This was encouraged by the government and showed up in a lot of women’s magazines — written by women who spoke in the new feminine form. This type of woman was shown as a member of the ideal middle class. As a result, other women emulated them. Feminine language became widespread, and necessary — if you wanted to be well-educated, happy and all the things a woman “should” want to be.

The other big transformation that helped embed gendered language in Japanese was the rapid modernization and Westernization of the Meiji Era. Change was occurring so quickly that it seemed as though Japanese culture was disappearing — that Japaneseness was being lost. People began seeking out traditions they could hold on to. One such “tradition” was feminine language; to be Japanese — and, more importantly, to be unique from Western cultures — meant speaking in a gendered language. This was just one of many “traditions” that sprang from times of rapid transformation (it happened again post-World War II, during the Allied Occupation, with the Nihonjinron (theories about the Japanese studies).

Do You Need to Conform to These Norms as a Non-Native Speaker?

This is entirely my own opinion and experience as a foreign woman in Japan. What I believe may not be what you believe, and that’s okay. 

I use feminine speech in Japanese. My pronoun is “watashi,” and I do end sentences in “dawa” or “nano” like a Japanese woman would. It would feel downright weird or wrong to change my pronoun to a masculine one like “boku” or “ore.” I do use masculine “zo” or “ze” to end sentences when I’m kinda joking around or fired up about something.

However, I have long been aware of the inherent deference that lies in the polite “watashi” and the lack of assertion hidden within “nano,” etc., and I am not a demure or unassertive person by nature. 

It’s for this reason and a couple others that I often temper my demure feminine Japanese by using more casual Japanese instead of desu/masu. I’m not going up to the client and speaking to them like they’re my bros, of course. For them I always use desu/masu and observe all societal norms. But around my coworkers and people that know me, I will use casual Japanese. 

By using casual Japanese, I do the following things:

I attempt to show, “I think of you as on the same level as me.”

I attempt to express the camaraderie and warmth I have for the person I am talking to. (In English, a more warm and casual way of talking is seen as friendly and polite, and I consciously hold that mentality when speaking Japanese, despite knowing Japanese doesn’t operate under the same logic. I’ve also explained that mentality to my Japanese coworkers.)

I attempt to show that...hmm. For lack of a better word, I’m not gonna take any shit from anyone. haha.

Caveat 1: Even though I tend to speak more casual Japanese, I still ALWAYS put -san at the end of every coworker’s name. Without fail. Not adding -san would be very rude and putting them beneath me, which I do not want to do under any circumstance.

Caveat 2: While I do speak mostly in casual Japanese, I do everything in my power to say things directly and honestly but with tact.

A regular Japanese person maybe couldn’t get away with this casual Japanese in the workplace. But since I’m a gaijin, I get a sort of pass. “Ah, she’s an American and they speak their minds.” Or “Ah, Americans do that thing where they speak casually to people they are comfortable with.” 

I believe that this strategy has worked in my favor. Nearly everyone in the project comes to me for advice on...well. Damn near anything, at one point or another. Things I’m not even remotely related to. I think they do this because they know I’ll give their question a hard think and a genuine answer. This could be reflected in my personality, but a large part of our personality is illustrated by the way we speak.

Just some food for thoughts. How do you feel about the distinction between feminine and masculine speech in Japanese? How do you use it?

[vod-ika]

Clones; A Sociologic Rant

I’m pretty sure I could base a whole sociologic thesis off of this show I have so many thoughts this is LONG.

So the fascinating thing about clones is that over and over it’s emphasised in show that they are considered property/cannon fodder/disposable, and at the same time it’s shown that they understand that claim, and still go so far out of their way to control some kind of their own independence.

I occasionally have a hard time separating show and fanfiction (fuck canon it’s my world now) but even in show, the allusions to modern militaries, the decorating of armor, the personalisations such as accents, names, and specific groups (Domino Squad) all point to an entirely unmitigated, completely developed culture inside the Republic. So this is basically a list of things I’ve seen, wondered about, or headcanoned in TCW.

- I would just LOVE to sit down with Filoni or Lucas and a sociologist and just Talk about how, if this army was real, what all would the Kaminoan’s have programmed in their heads (mental stability, coping mechanisms, stamina, self-preservation instinct, etc,) and how would it work in real-time, on and off the battlefield. What kind of programming went on in those eight to ten developmental years that ensured that loyalty was innate, the knowledge of property was omnipresent, and that they believed they weren’t allowed to own anything? What did they do to them to make sure that they would never want to form an uprising???

- “We are only as good as our weakest link” is repeated in team events endlessly, something that can extend to both skill and health. How deeply engrained are checkups, both mental and physical? I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that day in and day out clones, regardless of rank, are able to listen to and watch brothers die and Not have that affect them.

- Were they programmed with “protect the Jedi” in mind, or was it just, “bam. here is your CO, they outrank you so you have to respect/protect them?”,  and then one of them jumped off a building with no armor and their captain had a heart attack? With the whole “Jedi were peacekeepers now they’re generals” thing I feel like the Senate just took two pieces of a puzzle that don’t actually go together but fit anyways and shoved them together and now they’re just kinda staring at each other like “the fuk u doin here”

- HEALTH. IS SO. IMPORTANT. When you know that any injury severe enough or illness overlooked long enough could result in you being swiftly and carelessly replaced by someone who looks Exactly like you, how much more of an emphasis is put on health, bodily wellbeing, and injury prevention? Clones are human, and while they’re very highly trained, strong humans, they’re still human and skin is skin. (Applying real logic to a cartoon) Seeing clones in things like explosions that they potentially survive, but lose a limb or two always made me sad because, to The Republic/The GAR/ Kamino, what good is a crippled clone? To Kaminoans, their life’s purpose is over and you might as well treat them as a lame horse. Fuck Kamino.

- I just realised something. When most modern soldiers deploy, they deploy with the intent to eventually be replaced because they have served their time wherever they are, and are being replaced by a new wave of soldiers. Clones deploy with the intent to die and be replaced until the battle is won.

- When Marines or Infantrymen or Sailors ship out, they always have duffel bags or those gigantic green laundry bag stuffed with clothes and personal items. Now, we know that clones collect personal items, and assumedly have multiple pairs of blacks (or no sweat glands) but I have yet to see any kind of carrying devices other than crates and small backpacks like for small Hutt babies or explosives. Do they have to leave everything behind when they’re op-hopping to their next planet? Are there barracks left behind that hold the ghosts of personal blankets and magazine clippings? Or is there a mountain of green laundry bags just off-camera?

- Naming culture, good god. So, you’re fresh out of boot, and you’ve got your number still. You’re like, “dope. I’m CT-1234. I’m a GAR mortarman. Go time.” Then, some dickhead is like, nah you’re called Sparkles now lets go prank Gogo and Jazz. Naming is WILD, and I’m mostly drawing from fanfiction for this. Either you’re named for some major or heroic or kickass reason like Tracer or Wolffe or Fireball, or you’re named for the most mundane thing like your number ends with 22, so you’re Twos or there are checkers on your armor so now you’re Check. either way it is a personal choice that Specifically defies the number they were assigned at decanting. Even Dogma had one for fucks sake.

- Painting armor. You know that time had to be taken to sit quietly and detail on that eel, or those lines, or that decal. Did it do anything to better the Republic? Did it win any battles or save any precious Jedi? No, but it happened anyways. People like to discuss why we play video games; there’s no societal, familial, or interpersonal benefit, only benefit to the one playing. There’s no societal, familial, or interpersonal benefit to painting armor, only benefit to the one painting. Fuck Kamino. 

- Vocal inflections! The places they’re deployed affecting their speech patterns! I personally have a wild mashup of regional American accents because of the time I’ve spent traipsing, so how does being deployed planet after planet affect clone speech patterns??? Who rolls their r’s and who doesn’t? Are there transfers from other battalions whose accents are indiscernible because of where they were last deployed? Or ones who just have a whole additional vocabulary of local language? I’m three states away and the Louisiana accent blows my mind. Imagine that, but a whole fucking star system away???

- LINGO. Military lingo, planetary lingo (see above), sign language etc. give me different forms of communication outside Basic, used in both the formal and informal settings. (name calling in ASL/BSL during a briefing, talking about shinies in front of their faces in a language they don’t yet understand, talking about Jedi in front of their faces in a language they don’t understand.) Clones are told all that they are is property but damn if that property isn’t going to be able to talk shit about you to your face.

- To add on... Mando’a???? Is it innate? Is it learned? Did Jango Fett personally sit every clone ever down and teach them how to say Cat and Dog and Yes and No? Does every clone know it, or only those who sought it out? Literally it’s the most impersonal personal thing. “You, a thing who was made for combat, who looks exactly like millions of others, know one language of BILLIONS in the galaxy, purely because the man whose hair we based your genetic makeup off of knows it.” like WHAT

- HELMETS. BEING. SO. VERY. PERSONAL. Everything you see, speak, hear, smell is filtered through that bucket on your head. Are HUDs customisable? Is wearing or touching someone else’s bucket a no-no? Who’s watching telenovelas on guard duty?

- Speaking OF helmets: When your waking hours are constantly covered by your bucket, how do bodily “tells” betray what your face can’t? People acclimate. How common is it to be able to read your brother’s emotions like a fucking book based purely on how squared his hip is in parade rest, or which shoulder is higher than the other at attention?

- Or even just armor. Dude, that is literally the only thing between their skin and certain death by laser bolt. You ever talked to an athlete? And how picky they are about what cleats they wear or what goggles they use, or what percentage Gatorade their water is? We’re incorrigible. Imagine that, but the choice made results in how mobile you are, or how much laser to the shoulder you can stand.

- Time is so fucking short and they all must know that. I think I’ve used the line, “the average lifespan of a clone is measured in months, not years,” and boy does that fucking hit. How do you handle life when you were made to be snuffed out by it?

To conclude, I have many thoughts about the minute details of a working army that is comprised of identical people created, raised, and sent off to die for a war they didn’t start. Sounds a little ridiculous when you say it out loud, but between the show itself, fanart, and fucking fanfiction, it’s a little hard not to attribute human nuances to the show that exemplified my childhood. I’m an adult and it is my very highly specifically adult choice to psychoanalyse this show, and you can bet I’ll throw hands with Disney at any time.

“When my creator cares not how I face death, only that it is for them, how do I use the time death allows me? Cruel is my maker to have given me eyes to see and ears to hear the world, but denied me the chance to explore it. I can only hope that those who follow see what I could not, and that eventually a painting of all the world will be born through the eyes of the many.”

[timespakistan]

I know why the caged bird sings | Art & Culture Nightingale With Lock. A young unkempt boy, paper in hand, utters an incomprehensible word, and weavers pick a certain shade of wool, and start adding it to the half-woven rugs on their looms. Different sounds – rather commands, make them replace colours, tie more knots, modify design, till an entire piece of the tapestry is complete. Anyone who has ever visited such a place is intrigued by this form of communication – a secret dialect shared by workers at carpet-weaving units across the Punjab, if not the entire country. Besides this mundane but practical and professional language, there is another language attached to carpets. Floral patterns and geometric motifs are actually codes for complex meanings and refer to faith, spirituality and sublimity. What we step on could be a garden, even Eden; and what we hang on the wall could be the Tree of Life. In both cases, extremely stylised, and with a rich chromatic scheme possible due to indigenous dyes. A number of artists have been inspired by the tradition of carpet making, but Parviz Tanavoli’s interest in this conventional method/imagery is more than cursory. Belonging to a society known for manufacturing rugs of high aesthetics, he collected carpets, and wrote several books on this practice including Kings, Heroes and Lovers; Lion Rugs and Persian Flatweaves. Tanavoli has also created works based on the vocabulary of carpet, screen prints from 1974, shown recently at Grosvenor Gallery London. A person familiar with Parviz Tanavoli’s art is aware that his inquiry into the Persian carpet is not a surface infatuation. Tanavoli’s entire corpus of work is rooted in the cultural expression of this region. He is known internationally for his sculptural work and referred to as the Father of Modern Iranian Sculpture. He has also produced paintings and scholarly works. One of his most celebrated sculptures consists of Persian word heech, which means ‘nothing’. He says, “the shape of this work, which is composed of three letters, fascinated me so much that for four or five years I worked on it, making many, many heeches.” At the Grosvenor Gallery, Tanavoli’s screen prints, intended as layouts for rugs and tapestries woven in Iran, were on display from April 26 to May 8. Though all these prints are almost 47 years old, they do not appear outdated just as traditional carpets do not date easily and sometimes acquire more meaning, significance and worth with the passage of time – not as antique pieces, but as part of everyday existence. A carpet by its essence, is not to be used as a museum exhibit, but handled as an essential possession of the household – to sit, step, recline and sleep on. It is only for outsiders that these rugs are exotic pieces, purchased and preserved like precious items; because to a traveller, a cultural tourist, a European connoisseur – who is unable to crouch, or comfortably sit cross-legged, and eat and hold conversation – these rugs have more decorative importance than any practical value. On the other hand, Parviz Tanavoli, born in 1937 in Tehran, investigates the practice from an insider’s position. With this privilege, he is able to deviate from the standard sensibility of a carpet. His prints recall the language of pop art, since these rugs, in a sense, are ‘popular art’ of the Near East and Central Asia. Tanavoli, admirably, has not followed the typical colour scheme, traditional motifs and conventional content. Employing a chromatic order that ranges from bright blues, greens, scarlet, yellows, vibrant turquoises, pinks, peaches and greys to stark black, has assembled a new narrative. Eventually, they were fabricated by tribal weavers, all interpreting original design differently and supplying their unique responses. Talking about this and his travel in the region from early ’60s to early ’70s, Tanavoli recalls: “I noticed that they weave their rugs by looking at another rug, and do not use cartoons like city weavers. This is how I decided to make my own rugs”. Purely because of this observation, preliminarily ideas of rugs – his screen prints, are open to manipulation, alteration and addition. In any case, when an image (or for that matter a text) is translated into another diction/medium, it is bound to change its contours – and context. Parviz Tanavoli’s pieces had potential for elaborations; and the exhibition catalogue documents how one print, Farhad and I, (originally a painting of the same title from 1973) was modified separately by Qashqa and Lori weavers. Probably the greatest contribution of Tanavoli is not continuing with a rich heritage, but bringing artisans into the realm of contemporary art, and recognising their aesthetic choices and respecting their pictorial solutions. In a sense, the intervention Tanavoli accepted in his work, is what he has done to the tradition of rug making. Tanavoli travels between intervention and invention in his art, particularly his 1974 prints. Proportions of these screen prints conform to the conventional rectangle of rugs; but it is the imagery that determines how an artist converses with tradition, and morphs it. His visuals are ingrained in the cultural history of Persia, but his approach is that of a modern, fearless, yet reverent painter. Akin to traditional mode of weaving stories in patterns, he also infuses a narrative in his art, a narrative that deals with language, love, and freedom. An important – and readable ‘picture’ in his ‘carpet-prints’ (or car-prints) is of the nightingale. Either caged in a block of buildings, or with a locked beak. This state of the bird signifies restrictions (one recognises the prophetic power of Parviz Tanavoli here. He was envisaging a scenario of repression and curbs on speech five years before it was witnessed after/with the 1979 Revolution in Iran. The nightingale also announces the presence of love, because in historic Persian (and Urdu) poetry, it is associated with passion, love songs and longing. Besides drawing the bird in profile, Tanavoli writes its Farsi name, bulbul. In another print, a poet – stylised to an unbelievable height – is holding the fowl. Another work, Oh, Nightingale, is filled with a composite figure, partly a human form with feet and legs, and partially modulated head of the bird, with windows and locks. Farhad Squeezing Lemon. For Tanavoli, the poet and the bird are companions, as witnessed in Poet & Bird, with its variation of human-type figurine holding a simplified version of birds. The artist recounts: “The poet… was the freest of all humankind. I consider him to be like birds in the sky, belonging everywhere”. His Last Poet of Iran looks like a document, of poet’s multiple variations, without names/identities. A print from the same series, Disciples of Sheikh San’an, with its architectural structures – and the caged bird – refers to a story from The Conference of Birds, the poem penned by Faridoddin Attar in the twelfth century. Regardless of the detail of his subject, characters, references, it is his way of transforming a living being and objects in delightful patterns that connects him to the tradition of carpet weaving – as well as to the convention of modern art. Mostly evident in his lion series (Lion and Sword, 2008; and Lion and Sun 2010), in which the ferocious animal (a symbol of political power, the king) is rendered like a simplified toy. In their colour, shapes and arrangement, Tanavoli’s people, birds, things, are at once traditional and modern. Created by an individual, who taught sculpture in Tehran and Minneapolis, and lived in Iran and Canada, the imagery is one of the most convincing proposal for a marriage between the past and the present. Because both the historic Persian rugs and Parviz Tanavoli’s prints made in 1974 are works of art that in the words of DH Lawrence, “will be for ever new”. The writer is an art critic based in Lahore. https://timespakistan.com/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings-art-culture/18742/

[gerryconway]

Why I believe Donald Trump is like Jimmy Carter.

As those of you who, for reasons unknown, follow my self-appointed punditing may have noticed, I like to find historical patterns reflected in current political events.

To mangle a familiar phrase, I believe whether you study history or not, you’re often doomed to repeat it.

Like Steve Bannon, I too read the book “The Fourth Turning” twenty years ago, but unlike Bannon, I’ve read other books, mostly centered on U.S. history, including biographies, general historical surveys, critical studies– some popular histories, some academic. I’m particularly interested in American political history and its cyclical nature and apparent contradictions. To me, the political crisis in the decade before the Civil War is more intriguing and informative than the tragedies and heroics of the war itself. Ditto with the era of nascent American Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and the struggle to adapt to modernity that followed World War One.

Similarly, I’m as fascinated, if not more so, by historical failures as by history’s heroes. I love reading about James Garfield and the lost promise of his Presidency, and how Chester Arthur, his successor and a political hack with no previous signs of virtue, rose to the occasion and helped pass the Civil Service Act, which forever changed the nature of political parties in America. I have a fondness for the good-hearted but hapless Warren G. Harding, a man who meant well but was genuinely clueless, and whose wife, Florence, was the real brains and force behind his political career. I admire Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Johnson, and even Clinton, but I find people like Nixon, Polk, Grover Cleveland, Reagan and McKinley equally compelling.

In my view, history– political history, anyway– moves in cycles, as many scholars and pundits have observed. “The Fourth Turning” makes a case that those cycles are generational, with the generation currently ascendent creating the conditions that will influence the three generations that follow in a predictable eighty year-or-so cycle. This is undoubtedly an oversimplification but it’s a useful construct to discuss something that’s readily observed by anyone surveying America’s political history. And, compellingly, it satisfies the first requirement of any “scientific” theory– it predicts certain results. In the twenty-odd years since its publication, “The Fourth Turning” has had remarkable predictive success.

(Don’t take my word for it.) https://smile.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-History-Americas-Rendezvous-ebook/dp/B001RKFU4I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489945595&sr=8-1&keywords=fourth+turning

Anyway, the predictive success of the cyclical theory of political history aside, we find ourselves in a bizarre moment in American history, one that appears on the surface to have no precedent. Before Trump’s astonishing electoral victory last November, I felt certain we were in the midst of an historical realignment from a Republican/conservative political era to a Democratic/progressive one. Trump’s triumph called that realignment and my belief in historical cycles into question. For several months, until his inauguration, I tried to make sense of what appeared at first glance as a rejection of the cyclical movement toward progressive political dominion. Surely, I thought, the country was done with its embrace of failed conservative economic theories, theories which had produced the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, higher levels of economic inequality than any era since WWII, and social policies rejected by the clear majority of Americans. How could the country have taken such a weird step– not just backward but, thematically, almost sideways into a strange alternate universe?

Then I realized– yep, almost inevitably, we as a country have been here before.

The realization came to me, in part, while I watched “20th Century Women,” a terrific film I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s set in 1979, an interesting year. Late in the film there’s a scene when a group of people watch Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Crisis of Confidence” speech. At the time, Carter was criticized for his dark view of America at a moral crossroads. In hindsight, of course, the speech is prophetic and ironic, as Carter warns the country against making the moral choice it would end up making when it elected Ronald Reagan as President the following year. Reagan’s election, of course, is seen historically as finally completing the country’s turn against the socially progressive vision represented by the previous forty-plus years of Democratic dominance.

But there’s another way to read the 1970s, and, in particular, Carter’s single term as President– the only Democrat to be elected President between 1968 and 1992.

In 1969, political writer Kevin Philips wrote a book called “The Emerging Republican Majority.” His thesis was that the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 was a watershed event, the turning of the electoral cycle that would produce Republican majorities for decades to come. And Nixon’s massive win in 1972 against the ultimate progressive Democratic candidate, George McGovern, would seem to have borne that out.

But then Jimmy Carter threw a monkey wrench into that analysis.

Because of the unique circumstances of Nixon’s Presidency (the ongoing and divisive Vietnam War, social upheaval due to Civil Rights activism, Feminism, and the youth movement, economic uncertainty, and, of course, the crimes of Watergate and its cover-up) Nixon’s Presidency was a time of polorization and strife. Clearly the old political order was breaking down, and in 1976, when Nixon’s heir – the pleasant but hopelessly establishment Republican Gerald Ford – ran against Jimmy Carter, the outsider who promised a populist Presidency unencumbered by the baggage of a clear political agenda, Ford lost. More clearly, perhaps, the political establishment of both parties lost– because while Ford was the establishment choice for the Republican Party, Jimmy Carter was anything but the establishment choice of the Democratic Party.

In 1976, in other words, the traditional political establishment of both parties lost power.

There were hints this was coming. The Democratic establishment began to collapse politically in the mid-Sixties, reached a crisis in 1968, and imploded completely in 1972. Similarly, the Republican establishment began showing signs of fragility in 1964, pulled together in 1968 and 1972, and began to collapse in 1976 with Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Ford’s nomination (a challenge from ideology very similar, I’d point out, to Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton last year). When Ford faced Carter in the general election he was the representative of a party divided between its establishment and ideological base. With a weakened party behind him still struggling to settle on its future political identity, Ford was defeated by someone who in fact represented no party or clear political philosophy.

Carter, in 1976, though a very different moral human being than the man I’m about to compare him to, served an identical role to Donald Trump in 2016.

Like Carter, Trump faced an opposing party that, while rising electorally (current situation notwithstanding), is still struggling to define itself in a conflict between establishment and ideological principles. Like Carter, Trump is an outsider who hijacked a party whose political power is collapsing though its apparent electoral effectiveness is still strong. (In 1976 the Democrats were still the overwhelmingly dominant political party.) Like Carter, Trump represented no clear political philosophy, is at war with the establishment and the conservative ideologues of his own party, and has a purely populist, anti-establishment appeal.

And like Carter, I believe, Trump represents a temporary diversion on an inevitable political realignment that, like the Republican realignment which preceded and followed Carter, will have lasting consequences for government over the next thirty to forty years.

If history is cyclical, if patterns repeat, then I predict Trump will be a one term President whose failures (and the failures of his party) will be seen as an aberration, a momentary slip in an otherwise clear movement of a newly progressive-dominant Democratic Party. Just as Reagan conservatives moved from opposition to establishment between 1976 and 1980 (and beyond), Sanders/Warren-style progressives will move from opposition to establishment within the resurgent Democratic Party in 2020 (and beyond).

Just as the Democratic Party of 1976 seemed to be on a roll, only to collapse within the next decade and a half, the Republican Party of 2016 is mid-way through its own collapse. By 2030 the Republican Party we know today will be as irrelevant as the Democratic Party of 1994.

That’s my reading of history and its cyclical nature, in any case.

One thing’s for sure, though: whatever happens, Trump’s post-Presidential legacy probably won’t resemble Jimmy Carter’s. When Trump goes down, I have a feeling he’ll stay down. No second act for this one-term President.

Assuming he lasts a full term.