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

by George Friedman

I noted that every fifty years or so, the nation goes through a cycle of wrenching socioeconomic crisis, the last one starting in the late 1960s and ending in the 1980s.

second cycle—the eighty-year institutional cycle, starting with the American Revolution, reemerging in the Civil War, and shifting again in World War II. In 2025, it will be eighty years since the end of World War II. In 2030, it will have been fifty years since Ronald Reagan came to power.

pressure that emerged from the United States trying to find its balance in the global system, the glue that was holding American society together has weakened and will continue to decline throughout the 2020s. And regardless of who is president, fear and loathing will stalk the land for another decade.

The most important fact to bear in mind is that the United States was an invented nation; it didn’t evolve naturally from a finite group of people over thousands of years in one indigenous region, as did, for example, China or Russia. More than that, the United States was an intentionally and rapidly invented nation.

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 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 moral principles were complex and sometimes at odds with each other, but they had a common core: each American ought to be free to succeed or fail in the things he wished to undertake.

Happiness is the emotional engine powering the United States. It is the only country to make the pursuit of happiness a fundamental right.

There are three symbols that give us a sense of the American. One is the cowboy and his complex relationship to duty, evil, and women. The second is the inventor, who both imagines and creates the extraordinary things that compel America forward. Finally, there is the warrior. The United States is a paradox. Dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, America was born in battle and has fought many wars since. The warrior lives by duty, not happiness, yet is integral to American culture. The cowboy, the inventor, and the warrior all speak to the dynamic that forces the United States into storms from which progress emerges.

The atomic bomb posed a moral dilemma. As with Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, the Americans chose victory and survival over the moral absolute. America was designed by the founders as a moral undertaking. As such it was offended by what was necessary to the nation. The argument began at the founding. It was decided in the desolate places of America, where few lived.

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.

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.

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.