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

by George Friedman

The Civil War was the most extreme case, but there have always been winners and losers in America. Detroit declines and Atlanta rises.

The immigrants came to have two cultures. One was the culture of their families, recalling their past. The other was the culture of the nation into which they merged without disappearing. The American culture was defined by this dichotomy, and hence the “American people” is a very real—but artificial—construct. It

There was one thing that all Americans had in common: they left the things they were born to, and they desired to come to America.

Technology is intended to create products, and products must be sold.

How does the culture of war coexist with the culture of happiness?

War has traditionally been a test of manhood, of courage, duty, and strength.

the moral standard that must be used in evaluating the Americans is the degree to which they imposed destruction on the Indians and the degree to which disease and Indian collaboration were involved.

Americans took advantage of all of this, killing more Indians, conquering their lands, and then signing treaties with sovereign Indian nations just as they would have with other nations. But the United States violated almost all of those treaties.

The United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.

the larger wheels of America are driven by two very orderly cycles—the institutional and the socioeconomic.

The institutional cycle controls the relationship between the federal government and the rest of American society, and it runs its course roughly every eighty years.

The socioeconomic cycle shifts about eve...

A period of political tension emerges, ultimately forcing a change in the way things are done. New models emerge and solve the problems, and the country begins a new cycle which operates until that cycle runs into trouble.

Political power is not about whim. It is about understanding realities.

Arguing that a president is a product of events and not their creator goes against the intense passions we feel for, or against, particular presidents.

The crisis of the 2020s will be abnormal not only because the two crises will combine into one but because the United States has reached an unprecedented point in its history.

Institutional cycles have historically been driven by war: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. The

it was founded as a moral project, a place where both human rights and the national interest could thrive. The United States has been torn since its founding between these two principles.

Harry Truman went to war without any authorization of Congress. The Cuban missile crisis was a purely presidential decision, as was the 1998 intervention in Kosovo.

The decision-making structure in Washington is complex, diffuse, and at odds with itself. It has streamlined itself not for routine decisions but primarily for crises.

Every eighty years or so, the United States shifts the way its political institutions work.

The broad framework of the Constitution stays in place, but the federal and state institutions change their relationship to each other and change the way in which they work.

we are close to a new institutional shift, forced by the inability of the system to deal with new realities and forged in the conflicts and uncertainty created by the emergence of the United States as the sole global power.

The first started with the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 and emerged from the Revolutionary War and its consequences.

The second institutional cycle emerged in 1865 from the Civil War and established the authority of the federal government over the states, lasting until the end of World War II.

The coming fourth cycle will redefine the relationship of the federal government to itself.

War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War.

Not all wars transformed institutions, but when social and economic stresses collided with the stress of war, the result was institutional failure—and ultimately a reinvention of the way the country worked.

After the Civil War, it was established that the federal government had ultimate authority over the states. It was a limited authority, but strong enough to establish an indivisible republic.

The federal government’s power rested in its capability to enforce the Constitution and to limit the sovereignty of the states to self-government within that framework.

But the federal government did not involve itself with the private lives of individuals or, for the most part, with the functioning of private property, particularly business.

The New Deal didn’t end the Depression, but it established the principle that the federal government was in some way responsible for the economy and could legitimately intervene in the economy and society.

What did solve the problem, ended the Depression, and finally broke the institutions of the second cycle was war.

Industrial production in such massive quantity and at such a fast pace solved the problem of unemployment.

The federal government could shape industry without being answerable to society, yet the technology developed would change the everyday lives of people.

it was the government that shaped the evolution of science and technology.

The Northwest Ordinance, which defined how American territories might become states and was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, mandated that every new state set aside land for the creation of a university.

Because federal inventions can’t be patented, companies like Apple took the technology and developed the smartphone.

The federal government’s relation to private life changed in World War II. It was central to winning the war, because World War II was won or lost on the ability to utilize the industrial base.

The idea that emerged from both the New Deal and World War II was that a state managed by experts dedicated to solutions without an ideology would do for the country what it did for the war: it would breed success.

Technocracy is the concept that emerged early in the twentieth century that argues that government should be in the hands of nonideological and apolitical experts whose power derived from their knowledge.

Veterans returned from World War II as a favored class. Many married and wanted to have their own homes, but they lacked the money for a down payment. The federal government stepped in and guaranteed the loans, and they were made with no money down and at low interest rates.

The federal government, in wanting to provide homes to returning veterans, changed American society to the core.

The ideology of expertise failed to take into account that the expert’s narrow focus prevented him—and other people—from anticipating what they had opened the door to.

The VA loan concept was extended to lower-income home buyers who had not been veterans.

It was managed by the Federal Housing Administration and allowed the lower-middle class to buy homes.

It is to make the point that this started as a very reasonable program to help veterans. It turned into a program to help the lower-middle class while also aiding business. What followed was giving banks the ability to sell mortgages, which over the decades both introduced private buyers of mortgages and made lenders pretty much indifferent to the creditworthiness of borrowers.

First, the governing class, and the technocrats, accumulate power and wealth, and they begin to shape the institutions to protect their interests. The second problem is that the expertise that won World War II and built the postwar world is now encountering its own problem of inefficiency—diffusion.

Another important aspect of the third institutional cycle is that the balance of the three federal powers has changed.

The Cuban missile crisis and many before and after could not withstand a congressional debate. Action potentially had to be secret to be effective.