I would like to know if historians have any generally agreed-upon sense of some periods (short ones — decades, not centuries) being more ‘pivotal’ than others — more pregnant with potential to determine the shape & structure of large human systems for long time periods afterwards.

In a recent Atlantic piece Joshua Green explained that Karl Rove’s entire view of American politics rested (past tense! hurrah!) on the assumption that a) such pivotal periods exist, and b) you can see them coming, and c) you can bend them to your will.

Putting Rove’s particular implementation of this view aside, I find the idea that the error term (as it were) is sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller an insanely alluring idea.

BUT if you told me that (a) is false, and that actually almost EVERY period has that potential — & whether it turns into a truly pivotal period or not is all contingency — I’d totally believe that too.

Or maybe I’d just pretend to believe it, secretly plotting my gambit for ©…

My most recent bout of what-ifs centered around “could the Western powers, at the end of WWI, have done more to sway the outcome of the Russian Civil War?” And then “if they had scaled up their involvement and still failed to stop the Bolsheviks, could this have lead to a faster alliance between Hitler and Stalin?” Kind of in the context of more recent US interventionism… But like you say, to play this game I think you need to have some serious chops and I don’t got ‘em.

Man in the High Castle anyone? For SF people: I love how the Embarcadero Freeway factors into the final scenes of that book. We tore that s#!t down!