George Friedman - Americas Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

The United States is living through a difficult time. Americans are focused on Donald Trumps presidency. His enemies believe him to be corrupt and incompetent. His supporters regard him as the victim of an entrenched elite wanting to destroy him. Much of the tension focuses on Trump, as if he alone were the problem or the solution.

There is nothing new about this. The kind of mutual rage and division we see in America today is trivial compared with other times in U.S. historythe Civil War, in which 650,000 died, or the 1960s, when the Eighty-Second Airborne was deployed to fight snipers in Detroit. Abraham Lincoln was called illiterate and an ape. Richard Nixon was called a criminal, which he turned out to be, even though he blamed it all on the media. Some presidents like Lincoln, Nixon, and Trump are reviled by some and loved by others, but the reality is they are not powerful enough to be causing the problemsnor in control of the underlying currents they are riding.

Americans place a great deal of emphasis on the president, going back to Washington, Jackson, or Lincoln. This is ironic, because the American president has little power compared with European prime ministers. The founders set this up intentionally, and this arrangement has stood the test of time. A president faces two parliaments, countless federal judges, and fifty sovereign states. He can rarely achieve anything, but he focuses the mind of the nation. So, when the nation goes through one of its periodic and predictable crises, rather than understanding the impersonal forces driving events, Americans blame or praise the president.

This is a book that focuses on the underlying process in American history, explaining this moment we are in within the context of our broader history and putting the current passions into context. It will also explain the very real coming crisis of the 2020s2030s and ultimately show how the United States will deal with the pain and confusion and emerge on the other side stronger and more dynamic.

At the moment, a series of deep structural changes are taking place in the United States, and these changes are creating profound stresses. The federal government is undergoing a periodic shift in which its operations and traditional relationships to society are changing. That shift is driven by increasing failure in the system. Simultaneously, the economic system is undergoing a fundamental shift driven partly by an excess of money and limited opportunity for investment. This in turn results in a massive decline in productivity growth due to a falloff in innovation. Between these two stresses, and the 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.

This is not the first time this has happened, by any means.

If we step back and take the long view, there are two major cycles in American history, and by understanding these cycles, we can understand the situation in the United States today. One is the institutional cycle, which has transpired approximately every eighty years. The first institutional cycle began with the end of the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution in the mid-1780s and ended in 1865 with the Civil War. The second institutional cycle ended eighty years later with the end of World War II. The strains of the next transition are becoming obvious now and will take place around 2025.

The second major cycle is the socioeconomic, which has occurred approximately every fifty years. The last shift happened around 1980, when the economic and social dysfunction that began in the late 1960s culminated with a fundamental shift in how the economic and social systems functioned. As I will explain in more detail in later chapters, the previous socioeconomic cycle changed in the early 1930s after the Great Depression started, and, before that, in the 1880s as the country refocused after the Civil War. We are now facing another period of social and economic instability that will conclude in the late 2020s.