The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

A president faces two parliaments, countless federal judges, and fifty sovereign states. He

the economic system is undergoing a fundamental shift driven partly by an excess of money and limited opportunity for investment. This in turn results in a massive decline in productivity growth due to a falloff in innovation.

the glue that was holding American society together has weakened and will continue to decline throughout the 2020s.

One is the “institutional cycle,” which has transpired approximately every eighty years.

The second major cycle is the “socioeconomic,” which has occurred approximately every fifty years.

The current institutional cycle will conclude in a crisis around the mid-2020s, and the socioeconomic cycle will end in a crisis within a few years of that.

It should be remembered that each of these American socioeconomic cycles ended in a period of confidence and prosperity.

I am not predicting doom. I am predicting an intensely difficult period of time between now and when the next phase of American history begins in the early 2030s—and the period of

confidence and prosperity that will follow it.

Benjamin Franklin whether the nation would be a monarchy or a republic. His answer was “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

First, it created a government where none had existed. Second, it created a machine, the machinery of government, which had sprung from the minds of the founders. Unlike other governments, it had no past.

The machine was built on two principles. First, the founders feared government, because governments tended to accumulate power and become tyrannies. Second, they did not trust the people, because the people—in pursuing their private interests—might divert the government from the common good.

The most important thing about the machine they invented was the degree to which it was restrained from intruding on the things they held most important, the things that were not political.

The moral principles were complex and sometimes at odds with each other, but they had a common core: each American ought to be free to succeed or fail in the things he wished to undertake.

A person’s fate would be determined only by his character and talents. The founders did more than separate the state and private life. They created an ongoing tension between them.

Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin

Jefferson was a democrat. Adams was a Federalist. Franklin was an iconoclast, and perhaps best represented the American spirit.

E pluribus unum, meaning “From many, one.”

Out of many, one, turned out to be the basis on which the American people were founded,

but never easily. Here we are, 250 years later, and the principle of immigration still tears at the nation.

A pyramid is a massive undertaking, involving the wealth and resources and labor of a nation.

Annuit coeptis, meaning, “He has favored our undertaking.”

Novus ordo seclorum, which means a “new order of the ages.”

The Americans viewed the European age as founded on oppression and inequality.

Jefferson and Franklin questioned all political premises.

The founders speak of three rights: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

John Locke, a British philosopher who spoke of “the right to life, liberty, and property.”

Happiness is the emotional engine powering the United States. It is the only country to make the pursuit of happiness a fundamental right.

changing state institutions has traditionally been painful and intimately tied to war.

The Europeans became Americans and swept aside the natives. In doing so, they opened the door to inventing and reinventing the land.

Settlement began with the first English colony, founded on Roanoke Island in today’s North Carolina in 1587, less than a century after Columbus’s voyage. It failed catastrophically.

Jamestown, on the coast of what is now Virginia. It was the first colony on the eastern coast of North America to survive.

Jamestown presaged the future of America.

It was funded by investors, looking for a substantial return from the ambitions and efforts of others.

Plymouth was founded in what is now Massachusetts. Plymouth Colony is better known to Americans, and many believe it was

The Pilgrims didn’t run the colony. The Merchant Adventurers did. And the colony was divided between the religious and the adventurers, called Strangers.

The Atlantic and the Appalachians defined the colonies.

South of Pennsylvania, the Appalachians were over two hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. There was flat, fertile land in abundance, for large commercial plantations. North of Pennsylvania, the distance from the mountains to the oceans was much less, the soil was rocky and hilly, and the winters were long.

It was there from the beginning. Geography made slavery desirable and profitable in the South.

The settlers were all English, but they came with different ambitions. Some came to

live the luxurious lives of English noblemen, living in grand houses and, lacking serfs, being served by African slaves. Others came to America to live the solid middle-class lives of ministers, lawyers, and merchants.

the South produced different products than the North—tobacco and cotton.

These two main products of the plantation were sold primarily to England, not to the North.

The idea of a powerful national government was easier to grasp in the North.

In 1754, the Seven Years’ War broke out.

The war consisted of two alliances, one led by the British, the other by the French, and the triggering issue was the status of Silesia.

The British had more important uses for their troops.

Pekka Hämäläinen in his award-winning book The Comanche Empire

manipulate, and dominate….[T]he fate of indigenous cultures was not necessarily an irreversible slide toward dispossession, depopulation, and cultural declension.

Institutionally, the United States is one country. But the sensibilities of different regions were deep and constantly caused disunity.