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

by George Friedman

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.

It is impossible for the ordinary citizen to understand the complexity of the federal government. This is not because of lack of education or intellect, because it is not fully comprehensible even to those in the government.

The problem is, as we close the third cycle, the representatives of the public are unable to supervise the operation of the federal government in detail.

The problem is over-complexity and convolution, with subgroups of experts who do not cooperate, trust each other, or work well together.

How does the government back off protecting its citizens when the threats are seen to be increasing?

It can be seen in areas such as the rising tension between protecting the safety of American citizens and the invasion of citizens’ rights to privacy.

But there was a layer whose common sense, not expertise in a limited subject, might rule. And these were the elected presidents, congressmen, and judges selected by the people, sufficiently educated to understand the problem and manage the government.

Congress passes laws that are basically intentions funded with federal dollars. Experts interpret the intention and create regulations that are intended to implement the intentions. They then administer the regulations. The connection between the intention and the regulation is frequently incidental, but the regulations are so complex and the administration even more so that Congress or the president has no clear idea what is being done.

By the time it was turned into regulations and the regulations applied, many of the outcomes were unintended.

Common sense will argue that the methods and solutions used by expertise are incapable of dealing with these issues because the ideal solution, from a practical point of view, takes so long to implement and neglects the citizens’ experience so profoundly that expertise only creates the illusion of a solution.

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.

A new class of high-tech wealth arose but at the same time contributed to the decline of an old industrial system.

What little assets they have will no longer bring any significant earnings, thus intensifying the pressure on them.

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.

The third thing individuals get at university is the opportunity to develop the connections that may support them throughout their lives. The right school and the right friends can sustain a career. The wrong school can strand you or make the battle uphill all the way.

Above all, the technocrats will insulate themselves from the social and political upheaval by enclosing themselves in a sense of moral excellence complementing their technical excellence.

As the children of the white working class find themselves in the same position as African Americans, a more traditional social struggle will emerge, based on exclusion of the lower class. It will create alliances that are unthinkable today.

Hispanics will rise socially and economically on their own due to the dynamics of wave after wave of immigration, of which they are part. They will have only a passing interest in this new coalition.

Because this class is about 30 percent of the American population while African Americans are 13 percent, it is a powerful coalition bound by common interests and not sentiment.

How many of these letters were written by parents or even paid admissions coaches is unknown, but there are startlingly few seventeen-year-olds who could have written the kinds of letters that I read sitting on admissions committees. Those who had access to adults capable of writing, or at least coaching the writing of such letters, had a huge advantage.

Many students have no time for extracurricular activities because they are working on a construction site to help out their family or flipping hamburgers for pocket money.

Colleges don’t simply teach you skills. They socialize students into the culture of the world they will be entering and introduce them to others who are already part of that culture.

A student loan is basically a gamble on graduating and entering the elite of the technocratic class with a well-paying job very quickly. And for many students, the only schools they can get into don’t hold open that possibility.

poorer students at state colleges borrowing the most, because they start with the least. They will also make far less than a Harvard graduate, which means that there is a subprime class developing.

There is no inherent reason why a college education requires such facilities.

The second problem is that being a university professor is among the highest-paid part-time work in the world.

adjunct professors—people with the ability to teach but unable to get a permanent, full-time job.

The adjunct professor positions are far less prestigious than tenured professorships, but it is not clear that they know less or teach more poorly than full-time professors, although it is likely true that their skills diminish over time due to the tenuousness of their lives.

The cost of higher education can no longer be sustained. The problem of cutting costs while increasing capacity and quality is as important a problem as ending the capital shortage under Reagan or unemployment under Roosevelt. Core to alleviating

The university is the battleground of the crisis of the 2020s because it is the system that fuels the broad social bureaucracy. If the social bureaucracy is going to change, it must first happen with a change in the universities.

If student loans cease to be readily available in the future, the only solution will be cutting expenses or increasing the number of students admitted at lower cost.

Many universities are on extraordinarily valuable land that could be sold, the teaching load could be increased so long as a more demanding definition of what constitutes research is provided, and the reduction of student loan availability along with more rigorous credit standards will force the university to open its doors.

It was less cooperation than separately reacting to different aspects of the same failure.

So too we can expect the vitriol to die down when Trump leaves office and an uneasy calm to exist. Then, following the election of 2028, a new explosion, as the incoming president’s radical policies—from the standpoint of the prior half a century—come under attack. But this vitriol will be simply the surface of the deep structural changes.

During the 1920s, there were alternatives to a university degree. There were jobs to be had and small businesses to start. That was no longer true during the 1930s.

Either the rapidly declining white working class will gain access to the credentials needed to rise, or a permanent underclass will be created.

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

The industrial class, now the children of the generation that lost their standing, will be making demands but will not have the political weight to do it themselves. There must be a coalition to have the weight to force change.

The political system reflects and magnifies the shifting social patterns at first, then settles down into an apparently stable pattern before facing a terminal crisis and the end of the cycle.

It was driven by the industrial working class aligned with ideological and economic allies, but the technocracy remained intact and therefore had the strength to balance the Trump administration politically.

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.

The result will be not what the president thinks he is going to do but what he will be compelled by reality to do and by those who will elect him.

Institutional shifts are normally preceded by military conflict, with that conflict’s end creating the foundation for a new institutional structure.

This coalition will demand, as is normally the case, a shift in the distribution of power and wealth, but in doing so will be redefining once again the social landscape of America.

The problem must be solved, and the solution will be to introduce a new governing principle to the system. Oddly, it will be a principle that is already part of a vast federal system, the largest bureaucracy of all: the military.

This is not true of all armies. For example, the Soviet army was a technocratic army. But the U.S. Army was always an army that demanded initiative based on intent.

by placing power in the hands of junior administrators.

Without asking for permission, he modified a tank and discovered it worked. He violated several rules including modifying a very expensive tank without permission.

Culin, understanding the intent, acted on it in an unexpected way that was the key to breaking out of Normandy.

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