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

by George Friedman

The crisis is this: institutions built on expertise are no longer working.

The accumulation of wealth by experts, combined with the decreasing efficiency of technocracy, is creating this third institutional crisis.

The country was still divided down the middle, with the technocrats successfully defending their institutions.

social and economic dislocation. Politics isn’t the engine pushing the system. The system is pushing politics.

Inevitably, new immigrants challenged the stability of society, their arrival changing the economic system to some degree, and the social order substantially.

When cycles enter a transitional phase, political instability and electoral chaos are common.

The Electoral College could not manage to muster a majority, divided as it was over several candidates. It wound up in the House of Representatives, the only election ever to go there, and the deal making was prodigious. Adams won, and the Washington era hung on.

First, the actions required to adjust to a new cycle frequently cause economic pain, particularly to those who did not anticipate the changes,

Second, nearly a decade after the presidential shift, the transition was still under way.

He signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave 160 acres of federal land in the West to anyone who would farm it for five years.

Jackson era, became the social foundation of this new era. It enforced moral behavior, including the most important virtues: frugality and hard work.

Throughout the 1920s, there was significant activity on the Left, including Communists, and anti-Communist activity by the federal government.

The tax rate on incomes over $250,000 was 70 percent. Wealthy investors, calculating risk, saw little reason to invest when success would cost 70 percent of the gain.

Potential entrepreneurs were also discouraged from taking a risk where success was a long shot and the returns were severely capped.

As usual, the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one were marked by political uncertainty, sometimes beginning more than a decade before the transition.

The Reagan cycle solved the problem of capital shortage bequeathed to it by the Roosevelt cycle by shifting the tax structure.

The theory of free trade is that it increases the wealth of nations. Left open are two questions. First, how long will it take to achieve this end? Second, how will the increased wealth be distributed?

GDP has increased by more than 35 percent since about 1993. Median household income has increased by a little over 5 percent during that time, but in real terms has declined since 1998.

The dislocation of industrial workers, coupled with the damage done to prudent savers by low interest rates, has begun to generate an economic crisis. Inevitably, there follows a social crisis.

That cultural crisis is in many ways the cutting edge of the others, because in pitting rising and falling classes against each other, the struggle may be economic, but the driving edge is a divergence in values.

The political is the seismograph of emerging social and economic earthquakes.

New social forces emerge and mature, dividing the country in new ways. The economy enters a period in which economic dysfunction becomes unbearable to one social faction, even while another continues to benefit.

The last act of the decaying era is the election of a president utterly committed to the principles and practices of the prior era.

Over the following few years in the 2030s, the political confrontation, social tension, and economic dysfunction will be solved. The cycle will have created a new era, different from the past but built on the same foundation of invention, and it will endure for another half a century.

Donald Trump’s election in fact signaled the beginning of the lead-up to the fourth institutional cycle and to the sixth economic and social cycle.

The economic and social crises have created a massive decline in the condition of what had previously been a pillar of American society: the industrial workers.

First recall that there has always been a politician from the declining class who holds the final presidency in a cycle and oversees a failed presidency. This will likely be a Democrat standing for the technocracy—a conventional Democrat in the sense that Jimmy Carter was a conventional

The old cycle collapses under its own weight, to be replaced by a new cycle, symbolized by a new president.

Donald Trump’s election was the first indication that the Reagan cycle is coming to an end.

The side that was experiencing the pain of change saw the other side as the agents of their misery.

Each cyclical change involves intense incivility between the clashing social forces.

The Rust Belt is still starving for jobs, and American industry has moved on.

Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world.

The goals of the industrial working class were not to change the world but to find a secure place in it, to understand its rules and to live within them.

the condition of the white working class now is not dissimilar to the condition of African Americans in the 1970s.

she won the heartland of the technocracy and lost the heartland of the country—the declining industrial base.

It was not the industrial working class that defeated Clinton but the geographic concentration of her support and defection of voters that ought to have voted for her.

Trump was incomprehensible to the technocrats because the white industrial class was incomprehensible to them.

He could not convert his opponents, nor could his opponents convert his supporters.

Trump does not represent the transition to the new era. He is instead the first tremor who appeared decisive to his supporters and frightening to his opponents.

The institutional shift will weaken the credibility of the technocracy heading into the 2028 election.

We are governed by people who know a great deal about narrow subjects, but few who can see the whole.

These tensions will spill over into becoming social issues, and finally they will become hot political issues—especially around elections—in the coming decade.

Second, the sum of expertise was less, not greater, than the parts. The experts did not collaborate on the whole, and entire projects became fragmented, with each part working alone.

The rigidity of the Supreme Court therefore is that it is a legal and political institution, now run by technicians, utilizing seemingly nonideological methods for ideological ends.

Common sense, the ability to see consequences far removed from the technical issues, has been banished. The Supreme Court does not understand that sometimes abandoning the technical in favor of political common sense is its responsibility.

the primary system, which empowers minority ideologies and demands large amounts of effort to permit participation.

At least 75 percent of the voters are not interested in the primary process,

Those who tend to vote in primaries are those who are passionate ...

Because the majority of Americans are not passionate about ideologies, it means that candidates from both parties are selected by a minority who is passionate.