The Cultural Thucydidean Trap

The Cultural Thucydidean Trap

Harvard political scientist and professor Graham Allison identified a scenario he calls the Thucydides Trap. Basically, the Thucydides Trap says that as a rising power challenges the dominance of an established power, that dominant power is likely to respond with violence. It's a model for predicting when warfare is likely between two nations, but also a way to propose alternative solutions meant to prevent warfare. After all, the whole point of identifying a trap is to avoid it.

What is being described, presently, for the status between the U.S. and China, has a more domestic political application, presently, with the decreasing white-conscious demographic and the ethnic-consciousness of non-white identifiers (and much like the transgender issue of identity, you don’t have to be white or non-white pigmented to have the cultural sympathies and affinities for either).

What was classically regarded as ‘White America’-middle class, the suburbs, upwardly mobile, white picket-fence, and Mom’s Apple-pie religious and cultural orientation-is economically, as well as demographically under siege by the rise of non-white cultures of different enough cultural values from the classic cultural values to be considered, at the least, a competitive heterodox narrative from the earlier cultural narratives. This has shown itself in the Trump electoral strategy, plus the present contentions over Confederate war monuments.

There will be violence by the more militant margins of each demographic. On the whole, the generational population fluctuation increases and decreases-with the intercultural and inter-racial crossovers, will be the technical determiner of the cultural narrative and mores, than any present dogma from any part of either demographic spectrum.

((PS: for ‘Tony’-There is a discernible difference between a transcendent act being honored and revered to an action based within the temporal context of the period)

[Concerning a Confederate trooper at Fredericksburg: He went out into no-mans land to give humanitarian relief of water to both Union and Confederate dying and wounded on the battlefield, while not being under a flag of truce, which could only be arranged by the commanding officer of the area. For his actions a monument has been erected near that site in Fredericksburg in honor of 'The Angel...", who did this transcendent humanitarian action])