✓ Reading the two registers
Every mark on this chart is one of two kinds. Keeping them visually separate is the whole discipline: it stops an argument from borrowing the authority of a measurement.
Measured — counted, sourced
Argued — interpretive claim
⊙ Pre-registered predictions
Written before judging the lanes, so the goalposts can't move after the ball lands.
Nixon-inflection thesis: if 1968–74 is where the field turns durably illiberal, the political/media lane should show a discontinuity there that the earlier lanes lack.
Rival reading: if illiberalism runs continuously back through Goldwater '64 and the Dixiecrats, the same marks appear earlier — Nixon is productization, not origin.
Recession ↔ crime null: the easy story says downturns drive violent crime. The verified series predicts they barely track. Watch the crash of 2008 land inside a falling crime line.
≈ RFT lane — handle as argument
The Truth / Power / Purpose regime band is your thesis rendered as a mark, not a measurement. It is hatched and off by default for exactly that reason. The honest question it holds open: is the political re-anchoring (Premodern) and the cultural dissolution (Postmodern) one rupture of the Modern settlement, or two?