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

by George Friedman

This government came into existence through design, architecture, and engineering. 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. Government was necessary, and so of course were citizens, but both had to be restrained in such a way that the machinery of government limited their ability to accumulate power. The founders had created such a machine.

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. It is one thing to invent a machine and another to make it run without extensive maintenance. The solution for this invention was to make it inefficient. The balance of powers that were created achieved three important things: first, it made the passage of laws enormously difficult; second, the president would be incapable of becoming a tyrant; and third, Congress would be limited by the courts in what it could achieve.

The man who named the Western Hemisphere was Martin Waldseemüller. He was a German mapmaker who in 1507 was drawing a map of the new world. Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer sailing for the Portuguese, was the first to realize that Columbus had not visited India but had encountered a new landmass. Vespucci sent his notes to Waldseemüller, who he knew was creating a map. Waldseemüller had to name the place depicted on the map, and the name couldn’t be India, regardless of what Columbus had thought. Waldseemüller decided to call the hemisphere “America” in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, and such was the origin of the name.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress.

The cowboy, the inventor, and the warrior all speak to the dynamic that forces the United States into storms from which progress emerges.

A cowboy is strong, laconic, fearless, and with an unshakable will to do what is right. His virtue is not in his depth but in his actions.

the inventor had to have a user and that business was the bridge between the two.

Technology and business are dedicated to pleasing customers and making money, to pursuing happiness.

Law shapes culture, and the abolition of a law does not by itself change the culture.

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 every fifty years and alters the dynamic of the American economy and society. Each cycle goes through the same process. The characteristics of a current cycle stop being effective, and the model begins to break down. 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.

Managing an empire means using minimum force, because a global empire is likely to be constantly at war if its first response is to use its own military. The primary strategy for empires is to use diplomacy or the military of others, rather their own.

The United States was born in battle. Its institutions were forged in war. 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. So far there have been three such shifts. Each was made necessary because the existing arrangements no longer worked. Triggered by the extreme conditions of war, the institutional structure revealed its weakness and required a new institutional system to replace the old one.

The three previous cycles have been distinct. The first started with the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 and emerged from the Revolutionary War and its consequences. This first institutional cycle lasted seventy-eight years until the end of the Civil War and the amendments to the Constitution in 1865, establishing the federal government but leaving its relation to the states unclear. 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 third institutional cycle began in 1945, emerging from World War II, and dramatically expanded the authority of the federal government not only over states but over the economy and society as a whole. If this pattern continues as it has, the next institutional cycle will begin around 2025. The coming fourth cycle will redefine the relationship of the federal government to itself.

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. But of course, this became a principle, the principle became a belief, and the belief became an ideology. The ideology created a class who felt entitled to govern and who were believed to be suitable to govern.

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. Technocracy was not primarily about wealth. It was about merit regardless of the rewards.

The institutional crisis is rooted in two things. 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. Diffusion is the distribution of authority among several departments or agencies. At a lower level, it is the diffusion and fragmentation of knowledge among individual experts. Knowledge of what is happening is diffused rather than integrated. Diffusion ties in with the problem of expertise. Expertise is needed. But experts are experts in different things, and when entities are constructed with specific expertise, barriers are built between entities that are sometimes dealing with the same issue. Instead of creating a single perspective on a problem, experts have perspectives on different parts of a problem, and the entity they represent has parallel responsibilities for fragments of an issue. This creates diffusion with the federal government and frequently contradictory directions for entities. What had begun in World War II as an effort that was highly focused on war and tightly controlled turned into a highly diffused undertaking frequently lacking a center from which it can be understood. This is not unique to the federal government. It happens in all, particularly large, organizations. Expertise has this inherent defect.

The other problem is entanglement, multiple federal agencies engaged in managing parts of the same problem. One form of entanglement is that of the various agencies, which battle each other for funding and turf.

The crisis is this: institutions built on expertise are no longer working. The federal government is increasingly diffuse and entangled and cannot operate in a timely or efficient manner.

The accumulation of wealth by experts, combined with the decreasing efficiency of technocracy, is creating this third institutional crisis. But because it’s early in the crisis, those who in some way recognize it are still impotent to change it. President Trump came into office promising to “drain the swamp,” a metaphor for attacking technocracy, but he had neither the clarity as to how to proceed nor the political base from which to do it. The country was still divided down the middle, with the technocrats successfully defending their institutions.

One of the critical aspects of the technocrat is that he had no ideology, or to put it another way, his only ideology was expertise—knowing something well. It was a class that spread to all areas, public or private, and carried with it the principle of efficiency. The technocrats represented a moral principle, however nonideological they wished to appear. That moral principle was the imperative toward efficiency in governance and all other spheres. It was therefore the expertise not of the plumber that was praised but of the manager, the professional, and the intellectual whose expertise was certified by the university.

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? Free trade, and capitalism in general, are constantly creating new wealth and on the whole drive the economy forward. But “on the whole” excludes those who lose their jobs as the economic revolution takes place and never find a new job. In the abstract theory of the free market, this is a price that has to be paid. In the real world of society and politics, where the displaced have more power than they have in the economy, the reality is that this process can destabilize important and powerful sectors of the economy. That’s what happened throughout the process, but it became a political reality in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The numbers grew and were concentrated in the same geographic areas.

The new economic crisis flows from the very success of the Reagan cycle, which generated a great deal of wealth but distributed it in the end, as it did in the beginning, with a focus on increasing money for investment. But as with all cycles, the problem solved in the current cycle generates the problem to solve in the next. The social problem that flows from this economic crisis is the tension between the declining class, the industrial working class, and the coalition that has in some way benefited from the rise of what we might call the technological class—entrepreneurs and investors. And with the social crisis, a cultural crisis must arise. 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.

This process has been visible since Vietnam and is now intensifying. The president surrounds himself with experts, with the cabinet no longer playing the role of chief advisers, and Congress acts more or less as an onlooker. The experts are focused on the issue at hand rather than on the broader question of American interests. Or more precisely, they confuse the area in which they are experts with the area the United States should focus on. As with domestic matters, the public loses not just control but also an understanding of what is going on, and under the presidential power of secrecy the confusion is institutionalized.

Technocracy had come to dominate both the institutional and the socioeconomic cycles. Technocracy is a simple concept. It believes that problems should be solved through knowledge and that problem solving of all sorts is technical in nature. Technology is not just a machine but a mode of approaching a problem. A civil servant in Washington working on health care is using a rational, methodical, and therefore technical approach to a problem, in the same sense that someone designing a microchip is doing.

Yet technocracy has now developed into an ideology in itself. Its vision of the world is that it is understandable and can be perfected by those who have the knowledge to understand and manipulate the world.

there is belief in the power of the mind to shape the world. The technocracy emerges from the Enlightenment, and as such it believes that reason can perfect the world or, if not perfect it, vastly improve it.

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 legacy companies based on the World War II model either changed or died. However, the federal government did not evolve. In distributing authority based on specialty, it fragmented itself into countless agencies or informal structures, each obsessed with its narrow function, few able to cooperate effectively with others, and most spending more time struggling with these other entities than performing their function. By their very incoherence, government actions increase the likelihood that projects will fail, or that they will succeed at an unacceptable cost, or that in succeeding, they will undermine the success of another project. There is no standpoint from which to visualize the whole, and the experts embedded in the nodes of the system are not foxes, nor have they access to the complexity. The result is, from foreign policy to health care, that the convolution of the issue is addressed through solutions that are even more complicated and therefore less understandable.

The rise of a class based on expertise was a direct attack on common sense as amateurish and insufficient.

Certainly, experts are indispensable. They cannot govern, however, because their perspective is limited by their expertise.

In its broadest sense, technology is the means of changing humanity’s relationship with its past and with nature.

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 2024 election will be the critical one because it will elect the last president of the Reagan cycle. As with Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover, the president will face significant economic and social problems, and what he will do is apply the basic principles of the Reagan era: lowering taxes and reducing regulations. This will be the case with either party. But the problem that the Reagan presidency was solving was capital shortage, and lower taxes helped with this. The problem at the end of the Reagan cycle is that capital has successfully expanded, but is no longer able to drive the economy, and has left a large part of society increasingly unequal. The solutions imposed will make matters worse rather than solve the problem.

In the military, there is the principle of commander’s intent. The commander lays down his intention to a certain level and then expects subordinates to apply that with awareness of the reality he is facing. Subordinates are not free to deviate from the intent. Nor are they free to apply the intent mechanically regardless of the reality they encounter. The commander is responsible for making his intent not only clear but understood. He then seeks to reach his intended goal by devolving initiative to his junior officers and NCOs.

Freedom of action based on commander’s intent means that the expectation is success, not a particular way of achieving success.

The university is the home of technocracy in the sense that it nurtures expertise and credentials as a basis for judging merit and is constructed in such a way that there is a hierarchy of credentials.

La Rochefoucauld said that “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue,”

This gives you a sense of how the world, even in the 1930s, thought of America. No great art, no deep thought, no brilliant strategy, but a country capable of extraordinary feats of technological brilliance.

Youthful ignorance makes the impossible possible, by not knowing what is impossible and not making reckless things impossible but making them real. And in that recklessness is the future.