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

by George Friedman

This was the result of a massive investment boom that generated substantial returns that, given tax rates, accumulated in the hands of investors.

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.

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.

As an example, the technocracy’s increasing control of American life was made possible by abundant consumer credit after World War II and the emergence of a new social class: the suburbanite.

From the standpoint of the well-to-do, suburbia was poorly constructed housing without culture or a soul.

Before that failure becomes fully apparent, political crises break out,

starting as much as a decade before the crisis demands a solution. The political is the seismograph of emerging social and economic earthquakes.

It is always a time of tension and mutual loathing that appears to be tearing the country apart.

In 2024, a new president will emerge who represents the values of the declining era. The failure of his presidency will bring to power the rising class who will impose a new economic orthodoxy.

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 current institutional model has been increasingly unable to function successfully,

Because there has never been a period when both cycles reached their crises almost simultaneously, we can expect the 2020s to be an exceptionally unstable time.

The political conflict of 1968 would not be closed until 1980. So too the political tensions of 2016 won’t be closed until 2028.

For example, the shift to the Reagan cycle began with political instability during the late 1960s.

Thus, political instability is the preface to a social and economic crisis that perhaps a decade later will become unsustainable.

In the 1960s, it was the antiwar/antiestablishment faction against Middle America.

The Internet allows millions to read, and social media allows people to voice their views in unprecedented ways, but the users of the Internet and social media fall into tribes. They follow others who are peddling ideas they already agree with and intensify existing feelings.

The problem of the first institutional cycle was that it was unclear whether the federal government was sovereign over the state.

The problem of the second institutional cycle was that a sovereign federal government had limited authority over the economy and society.

The problem of the third institutional cycle is that the door was opened for m...

of American life, without def...

In the execution of foreign policy, he became the primary force. In the management of society, he was less elevated,

The president overwhelmingly controlled those wars, and yet his ability to create a goal that could be reached, or define a means of achieving it, became impossible.

The result is a massive mistrust of the federal government by those who need it the most and can understand it the least, not because they are not smart enough to understand it but because the federal government has become institutionally opaque as well as not fully coherent in its actions.

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.

The technocrats saw expertise as the only measure of a person. Therefore, distinctions of race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship were of no importance.

But technocracy does believe, above all, that someone must be judged on expertise and knowledge and not on incidental characteristics. To do so is oppression.

African Americans, regardless of their economic status, suffer from the effects of racism.

Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world.

The industrial working class is older. Its decline began some forty years ago. Their children have also suffered from the decline but need to be thought of differently.

The attacks don’t weaken their morality but in fact harden it into a sense of embattlement. Something that was ingrained from such a powerful authority, when attacked, will inevitably result in a counterattack, and that counterattack comes in political terms.

They resent that there are special programs for “oppressed minorities” but no one seems to care that white working-class incomes are in decline and birth rates of unwed mothers of this class now approach 50 percent.

No such concern is forthcoming from the technocracy today concerning the white working class. Rather, the technocrats regard them as being

the problem, while the white working class see themselves as being just as deserving as African Americans or Hispanics.

America is heading toward an institutional crisis in which the competence of the technocracy and the institutions of the federal government will be questioned.

She ran for office based on her credentials and vociferously spoke for the oppressed. She won the popular vote but lost the election because that vote was heavily concentrated in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

They could not reject basic principles such as free trade and respect for immigrants. What the rest of the Republican Party didn’t realize is that what had been a marginal trend in the Republican Party had now become dominant. Failing to understand that, they could not speak to this class.

In the same way that the Democrats could not fathom Ronald Reagan’s victory or the Republicans Franklin Roosevelt’s, Trump was incomprehensible.

Socioeconomic cycles are shaped by social and economic failure. Institutional crises are shaped by the wars the United States has been fighting.

In the 2020s, regardless of whether President Trump is reelected, indifference coupled with cynicism will dominate.

the fourth cycle will redefine the relationship of the federal government to itself. By this I mean redefine how the federal government sets priorities, how it focuses on achieving the priorities, and how it is held accountable.

There were the elected officials, as well as their direct subordinates, and the unelected managers. It’s been this way since the beginning of the United States, but the balance between the two shifted in the third cycle, with the managers becoming more autonomous and entwined with all aspects of government, as well as many parts of society.

the foundation of the institutional problem was the vast expansion of the authority of the federal government, and apparent power, and its inability to create coherent and understandable laws and policies. By understandable, I mean the ability of citizens subject to these laws to understand them.

Its ineffectiveness is therefore seen not as a systemic failure but as the result of a deliberate failure designed to benefit the powerful and harm the many.

It is even more frightening, perhaps, to face the truth, which is that no person is really in control and that the institutions are.

However, it rarely happens because the person who understands the public, the person who tries to consolidate the myriad parts, and the experts who craft the solution all find each other incomprehensible.

the critical thing to remember is that since 2001 the United States has been in a constant state of war, even if not on the scale of World War II or the Civil War. But it is a war that has lasted far longer than any other in American history. And in the inability of the government to frame the war in such a way that it might be won, the institutions of the United States revealed their fundamental weaknesses.

As I have explained, the problem of managing foreign policy is what normally shifts institutions.

The federal government wasn’t designed by World War II to manage power of the sort it had, and the inclination to use military power as a first response has proven unsustainable.

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

Many Americans assume that the problem of the federal government is it’s too large. The fact is that the growth in the size of the federal government ended in about 1988, a time when it still functioned fairly well.