It is a political fight over power. It represents the high water mark of the Reagan Revolution, which really WAS a Conservative Backlash of an obsolete worldview or paradigm that encompasses the entire "old guard" of thinking as it relates to the political-economy. This is a big end since it is the end of the Mechanistic Era being the predominate thought which goes all the way back to Copernicus, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment Period, the Industrial Revolution, financial Capitalism. This was and remains inevitable. For almost two hundred years a competing worldview or paradigm has been growing under foot and about to replace Mechanistic Thinking, (which is best described as thinking the world's system is analogous to a clock or Swiss timepiece, where humans can make adjustments here and there and fix systems like the economy or social organization or even human biology, ecosystems, etc.). That is over...
But for the last thirty-to-forty years we have experienced the final throws of this worldview that is best described as a Conservative Backlash against all that has been building from a new worldview that is best described as Organic's, (a view that human and the universe is more like the biological interdependent and interconnected systems). We have witnessed where even after contradictory facts have lead to the development a new paradigm, a centuries-long contest over what is the predominate worldview has ensued, be it in sciences like physics, or human social organization like politics or economics, or medicine or education or religion and culture. The old thinkers steadfastly have reject the idea of giving up their life's work and belief models even when confronted with evidence that their worldview is proven untrue, take GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE. This is called paradigm resistance, which is a special kind of reluctance toward facing reality, this is also described as a conservative backlash period.
You can read in detail much of entire subject in John Stewart's works, Evolution's Arrow Manifesto hereand entire HTML book here
Chrystina Freeland's extraordinary contemporary work, Plutocrats, The Rise of the Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, (which I highly recommend reading above all current examinations~great work Chrystina, I am just peasant but at least I am well read), where in her Chapter Four she explains how most react to changing paradigms with an anecdote from George Soros.
It is not just financial crashes we have a hard time anticipating significant time paradigm shifts more generally revolutions in politics and society as well as those in business and the markets are notoriously hard to foresee. Even after the revolution has begun after the first over leveraged bank freezes withdrawals from its riskiest fund after the protesters when their first important standoff against the soldiers of a ruling regime most of us are reluctant to admit that the world has changed.[...]
Instead according to London business school professor Donald Sull, most companies and people respond to revolutionary change by doing what they did before only more energetically Saul calls this “active inertia” and he believes is the main reason good companies fail:” when the world changes, organizations trapped in active inertia to more of the same. A little faster perhaps or tweak at the margin but basically the same old same old… Organizations trapped in active inertia resemble a car with its back wheels stuck in a rut. Manager step on the gas. Rather than escape the right the only dig themselves deeper[...]
Clayton Christiansen the Harvard business school professor whose book, the innovator's dilemma argues, established companies almost always fail when their industries are confronted with disruptive new technologies or markets. And that is not he, he argues, because their managers are dumb or lazy. It is because what works in ordinary times is a recipe for disaster and revolutionary ones.” These failed firms,” he writes,” were as well run as one could expect a firm managed by mortals to be but there is something about the way decisions get made in success organization that sows the seed of eventual failure.”
The business analogy goes to the big social organization of the American and Global societies. Tweeking the political economy through marginal tax rates is not going to work and neither is tweeking the environmental laws or regulations, fundamental changes will and doing it with the idea that systems are interrelated, interdependent and interconnected. This is what the nation is realizing with healthcare, increase the Medicare age and it pushes costs in many unanticipated directions, continue with a profit based healthcare system and the costs continue to escalate system wide and also forces higher risk citizens out of the system and into more expensive emergency room care.
The second era that is ending is theStrauss & HoweSaeculum or Four Turnings where Obama and his constituency represents the end of Great Depression Turning with the Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2009.
The Great Depression & World War II (Fourth Turning, 1929–1946) began suddenly with the Black Tuesday stock-market crash. After a three-year economic free fall, the Great Depression triggered the New Deal revolution, a vast expansion of government, and hopes for a renewal of national community. After Pearl Harbor, America planned, mobilized, and produced for war on a scale that made possible the massive D-Day invasion (in 1944). Two years later, the crisis mood eased with America’s surprisingly trouble-free demobilization.
Basically we are seeing the end of ideology based generational personality as dominant and the start of a generation of pragmatism, represented by the generation under 30 now being the tipping point in the electorate.
Finally this is the end of the era when white-males and suburban white's in the American society is predominate in being served by society. This includes the Baby Boomers (me) and consumerism as the focus of society and addressing the bigger problems of Global Climate Change and Globalization of merging societies. This is far bigger than simply trade and will rival the exploration period of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
So forget the import of the fiscal cliff except to witness the destruction of the political forces obstructing change.