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

by George Friedman

The primary system has virtually eliminated the presence of the professional party manager on the local level.

As a professional, the party boss saw himself as providing a service to the voters in exchange for their votes.

Bosses might have been corrupt, but the primary system has not abolished corruption.

Bosses had the power to cut through inefficiency.

The primary system also polarized politics. It turned candidate selection from a boss-led process to an increasingly ideological one.

With so few voting in primaries, those who cared the most won.

The primary process was thus turned over to the minority of ideologues who would show up on a busy Tuesday, in spite of work or of rain, taking the kids to piano lessons, and cooking dinner.

The point is that measured by outcome, the boss system was certainly no worse than what the primary system produced and perhaps in many ways it was better.

A Gallup poll in 2017 showed that only 27 percent of respondents trusted newspapers to any degree. A poll by the American Association for the Advancement of Science found only 14 percent of the public held universities in high esteem. According to Gallup, the most highly trusted institutions are the military at about 75 percent and the police at about 58 percent.

by personal histories and regional realities. They are bound together by the search for a better life, understood as rooted in economics.

We are now in a situation that is the opposite of the 1970s. Then there was a capital shortage. Now there is a capital surplus.

The ones who will challenge the technocracy in the coming decade will be the children and grandchildren of the industrial class who themselves have had no contact with industrialism beyond family memories, were raised in fairly difficult conditions, and face a grim future without a significant change in their circumstances.

They are the millennials who don’t fit the clichés of the dominant culture.

Identity politics, which emerged from the legal concept of “protected classes” in federal social design, is unsustainable.

The rising racial tensions we’ve seen in the past few years are bound to increase during the 2020s–2030s because of the pressures from the crises in the other areas we’ve been examining.

The only bridge there can be is one of common interest, as there was during the New Deal. Interestingly, that common interest is returning. Hispanics will rise socially and economically on their own due to the dynamics of wave after wave of immigration, of which they are part.

The selection process at the best schools is presently designed not to find the best minds but rather to find minds already shaped to the culture and ideology the universities regard as being able to benefit from their education.

The 2020 election, if it follows patterns, ought to be won by the technocracy, which means the Democrats, although in fact it is an election that can go either way and not significantly affect the process.

The 2024 election will be the critical one because it will elect the last president of the Reagan cycle.

The 2020s will be a period of failures. The 2030s and beyond will be a period of creation.

Our rituals were built around an early death and the urgency to reproduce rapidly. Death is no longer imminent, and reproduction is an option. Therefore, the traditional family will be redefined.

The founders sought to balance liberty and obligation. For them it was a political question. In the sixth cycle, it will be an existential one, defining who we are as individuals. The United States will face this more deeply than other countries, because American wealth creates many possibilities and those possibilities become endless.

Social media is too anonymous to survive as a social foundation in the sixth cycle.

If birth and death are at the center of the age, and the rituals for both are in tatters, the hunger for companionship is still there and asserting itself constantly.

Living a long life without anyone needing you, no one really caring if you live or die, is liberation, but the terrible implications of liberation emerge with time.

All human societies have rituals, and many of those rituals concern obligations to family and larger groups. I know of no society in which family doesn’t exist, and it carries with it obligations.

The tax on higher incomes will surge at the beginning of the sixth cycle.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary.

Successful empires use as little military force as possible, depending on the regional tensions between nations to maintain their interests.

Imperial wars exhaust the homeland when fought against forces that are not organized as regular armies and therefore cannot be defeated by superior forces.

Maturity is the foundation of empires, and the United States needs to achieve that stability.

As Americans live even longer with some regularity, the country may become wiser but less knowledgeable.

Other countries will deal with this differently. The United States will deal with it as it always does, with its citizens going through a decade of intense political rage at each other, accompanied by an economic crisis and a social