The Fifteen Year Grace Period

A while back, Stefan Molyneux made a video (which I can't find now) where he looked at the relationship between women's suffrage and the onset of socialist policies in the western nations. Consistently, the socialism lagged by about fifteen years. For instance, in the US women got the vote in 1920, and the floodgates of social welfare were opened by the New Deal between 1933 and 1936, with the Social Security Act coming right at fifteen years. Perhaps some blame lies with the Great Depression, but other western countries show a similar fifteen year gap, even in early or later decades.

Recently, E Michael Jones was talking about the Lutheran Church of Sweden, which was the official state church until the year 2000. That is an interesting date, because fifteen years later the country opened its doors to all the Muslims the world could throw at it. It took fifteen years for the Swedish country to transition from one with no official spiritual identity, to one with no identity at all.

In the US, there are a couple of fifteen-year gaps of note. Following World War II, the US chose not to demobilize but to establish itself as an empire to maintain global order. A couple decades later came the Immigration & Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the preference of western Europeans to immigrants from other lands. It took fifteen years (or so) after the country embraced empire until it also declared itself as more of an armed global corporation than a traditional nation of people. Another gap is seen between the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the government coups against the presidential election of 2016. It took fifteen years to go from "we need to intrude on some of your rights for national security" to "we will nullify electoral outcomes we don't like." I suspect there are many other examples of national acts where the bill came due fifteen years later.

At the core of all this is what Brett Stephen's calls the Fundamental Fallacy - the belief that we can change the way things are done and still have the same outcomes. But outcomes are not independent of identity. You can't have universal suffrage and a rational electorate. You can't have spiritual death and a national will to survive. You can't have a police state and a liberal democracy. Fifteen years is a long time, especially when the news cycle is two or three days. It's about half a generation, or two 2-term presidencies. In fifteen years, most of the people responsible for the decision have cycled out of their positions. Perhaps that is itself a contributor to why fifteen years should be the grace period. Those with skin in the game try to see their new programs run responsibly, but soon enough are replaced.

Fifteen years is the grace period from when the lie is told to when it starts to come due. The liars will often try to use that grace period as an argument in and of itself. For instance, people today will say, "see, we allowed gay marriage nothing terrible has happened." Well, it has, as now the battle is to sexualize and castrate children, and it's only been four years. That bill won't actually come due until 2030. It's hard to even imagine what that decade will look like.