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

by George Friedman

The lack of wood, and the added effort of drilling wells, meant that this area had (and still has) many fewer people. This has created two sorts of American lives. In the East, well-populated farming communities grew up, and the small towns of American memory were created. In the West, the population had to be more widely spread, so as not to tap the aquifer too intensely in any one area, forcing wells to be drilled deeper and with far more difficulty. The farther west you went, the less likely there was to be farming and the more likely there would be ranching—grazing the grassland. In the West, communities were smaller and more scattered, and the settlers were less reliant on neighbors than on themselves. Two very different ethics emerged. In the East, there were communities. To the west, there was a more solitary life. It created a different political sensibility. In the East, there had to be collaboration. In the West, collaboration brought unnecessary complexity.