Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Thank you to Don Rollins for helping to sound the alarm on the decline and fall of this empire’s manifest destiny (“A Nation in Decline: Somebody Has to Break the News,” September 2025 TPP).
Cultural/political cycles have been occurring for thousands of years. Plato refers to five types of government in his Republic ranging from rule by the best degenerating gradually into rule by tyranny.
Closer to home and our times are the writings of the eminent, Russian-American social philosopher, Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). This Harvard professor, who also taught at the University of Minnesota in the 1920s, wrote a four-volume work, “Social and Cultural Dynamics” from 1937-41, later published in a much abbreviated (by him) version, “The Crisis of Our Age.” Essentially, Sorokin systematically and primarily covers European and American civilizations through roughly 3000 years employing three, repetitive cycles: The Ideational, the Sensate, and the Idealistic. The Ideational centers on the supersensory or superrational as revealed by God, the only true reality; the Sensate is characterized by materialism and truth of the senses; and the Idealistic synthesizes both using our reason. According to Sorokin, we are currently experiencing a progressive, sociocultural decay and revisiting the emergence and slow growth of either an ideational or idealistic order.
Instead of avoiding and denying the bad news, we would do better to make the best of it by opposing in whichever way we are able the brazenly illegal, inhumane, and incompetent steps thrust upon us by Trump and his disreputable acolytes: Refuse cooperation with despotic policies, join/host rallies, do phone banking and postcarding, support progressive candidates for office, and sign email petitions, as examples.
The bottom line is we cannot afford to let down our guards in these precarious times.
RICHARD LAYBOURN, Bloomington, Minn.
