This week’s segments of The Spectacle Podcast are really worth watching because Melissa and I break down a host of data points that indicate something I’ve been writing about for a while. Namely, that a brand new era in American politics has been coming and is now here, and that means all of the old assumptions about how things work in this country (and elsewhere in the world, too) will be subjected to challenge and, often, found no longer viable. I’ve said that my 2022 book, The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, has held up awfully well in the two years since I wrote it, and I stand by that. I’m rereading it now as part of the writing process for The Revivalist Agenda, its sequel that I’m hoping to have out by the end of January, and a whole lot of what’s in there could appear right now in these pages and not seem out of date at all. Most importantly, the main theme of the book was that we’ve had three distinct political eras in our national history, and the third one is now over. I didn’t dream that concept up myself; it comes from the great James Piereson, who outlined it in a book called Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order. Piereson’s formulation was that the first American era began in 1800 and ended in 1860, while the second began in 1860 and ended in 1932, and the third era was falling apart as he wrote Shattered Consensus. The Revivalist Manifesto posited that the fourth era was beginning, and the opportunity was for revivalists, rather than conservatives, to lead it the way Jeffersonian Democrats, Abe Lincoln Republicans, and FDR Democrats led the previous three eras. Revivalism indicates a refusal to defend a status quo that conservatives used to decry but now accept. And, with the American public having turned on conservatism as expressed by establishment “conservative” figures from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney to Bill Kristol to Adam Kinzinger, it’s revivalists — or MAGA America Firsters, if you want to use a more common vernacular — who own the future. When the 2022 midterm election was more of a red ripple than a red wave, a different possibility emerged — which was that the fourth era had begun and it wasn’t a revivalist era at all. Instead, we were destined for something that looked a lot more like Chinese communism, and the pivotal election creating that dystopian reality was 2008. I played around with that idea, though not in so many words, with my second political book, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama. But there were elements missing in that formulation, and Barack Obama represented an attempt of a dead-ender Deep State to corrupt the country as a means of hanging on against an overdue reset of American politics, economics, and culture. The main feature of the previous three American eras was that their dawning unleashed a great deal of innovation, spirit, and energy. That’s not what the 16 years of Obama playing a dominant role on the political stage have wrought. So 2024 turns out to have been the big year. Welcome to the dawning of the fourth era. I’m not the only one who says this. On Friday, Sen. Mike Lee perhaps serendipitously regurgitated Piereson’s formulation that undergirded The Revivalist Manifesto in a string of some 36 X posts. Lee’s timeline is a little different, as he’s not marking the eras based on presidential elections but on other factors (he says 1776, 1865, and 1937 are the key previous years and 2025 will be the official founding of the fourth era). Otherwise, he’s singing from the very same hymnal. And what does this mean? Well, in this week’s The Spectacle segments, we talk about the rapid changes we’re seeing in urban America, changes that are unmistakable in the aftermath of the Daniel Penny verdict in New York, and the little-noticed upset in the Baton Rouge mayor’s race. Not to mention the popular political revolt you’re seeing in Chicago, the political holocaust of all those Soros district attorneys around the country, and the increasing collapse of the “civil rights” movement from its own corruption and idiocy (just look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decline, for example). We also talk about the collapse of the Washington establishment in the face of Donald Trump’s radical-reform-minded Cabinet nominations. The implosion of the effort to play what I call the “Old Game” to bury Pete Hegseth amid a spate of scandal-mongering rumors and innuendo is a perfect example of how things that used to be inevitable simply don’t work anymore. That trend was what touched off Lee’s X lecture: he’d just come from a meeting with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to talk about the proposals of the Department of Governmental Efficiency and he recognized that what had previously been impossible in Washington now looks inevitable. There’s also a segment about the collapse of the neoliberal, multinational “consensus” that has led us to the horror of the World Economic Forum, Paris Climate Accords, the Ukraine War, the Syrian civil war and other Middle East horrors, and the COVID “global reset.” On every front, that “consensus” has been a failure and in country after country it lies in often glorious ruins. There are more things we could describe like, for example, the slow death of the university from the poison of its woke corruption and the fast death of the legacy corporate media from the same cause. In fact, everywhere you look you see the Third Era New Deal/Great Society center failing to hold. Our ruling elites think this is a catastrophe. It is not. It’s the beginning of something newer, stronger, more just, more innovative, and more (little ‘d’) democratic. It’s very exciting, and you can feel it practically everywhere. The Revivalist Agenda will be an attempt to outline what it might look like and the elements it must contain. But we’ll be talking a lot about this subject, on this page, and on the podcast, between now and its release. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The ‘Civil Rights’ Era Is Over. Good Riddance To It. Hope Returns, Miraculously, To Baton Rouge The Old Game Continues Among the Worst GOP Senators The post The Revivalist Era Begins appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.