Summary
The American president has little power compared with European prime ministers. 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. The founders set this up intentionally, and it has stood the test of time.
When the nation goes through one of its periodic and predictable crises, Americans blame or praise the president. There are two major cycles in American history, and by understanding these cycles, we can understand the situation today. One is the “institutional cycle,” which has transpired approximately every eighty years.
The second major cycle is the “socioeconomic,” which has occurred approximately every fifty years. The strains of the next transition are becoming obvious now and will take place around 2025. 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 systems functioned.
The current institutional cycle will conclude in a crisis around the mid-2020s, and the socioeconomic cycle will end within a few years of that. This is the first time in American history that the two cycles will culminate so close together, practically overlapping. We are now facing another period of social and economic instability that will end in the late 2020s.
Founders
The founders feared government and did not trust the people enough to create a democratic machine. This was the meaning of the right to pursue happiness; the state would not hinder anyone.
In the Declaration of Independence, there is a clear reference to something beyond humanity who judges and favors the undertaking, a providence, as it is called in the Declaration. There is a great controversy in America between those who argue the United States is a Christian country and others who claim that it is completely secular.
The founders could have referred directly to Christ, or they could have avoided any reference to the divine. Instead, they refused to name the providential force, but they made it clear that there was one. Maybe a deliberate move that developed an enduring creative tension.
Beneath the pyramid is the third motto on the seal: Novus ordo seclorum, which means a “new order of the ages.” This is how the founders viewed the founding of the United States. It was not simply a new form of government but a dramatic shift in the history of humanity.
Happiness is the emotional engine powering the United States. Americans love cutting-edge technology with a different but real passion. Medical breakthroughs don’t eliminate death, but they might keep it at bay for a while. So, technology is at times a substitute for other types of happiness, such as love and the divine.
With happiness comes disappointment, just as with technology. The regime is a machine, a novel tool for getting things done. But as what needs to get done changes, the structure of the regime must change. The first core culture of the United States was that of the first English settler.
American Culture
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant remained the defining center of American culture until after World War II. With that, the idea that the WASPs were the American culture declined. One could choose not to learn English but then be excluded from the economic and social life of America.
The cowboy, the inventor, and the warrior all speak to the dynamic that forces the United States into storms from which progress emerges. The warrior lives by duty, not happiness, yet is integral to American culture. Americans are regarded as unsophisticated and uncultured – but subtlety is one of their hallmarks.
The core of all cultures is the relationship between men and women. For most of human history, the relationship was defined and constrained by biological and demographic reality. The United States could not have defeated the Germans and Japanese without women. It was the Soviet army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht and made the conquest of France possible.
In the 19th century, marriage was about social and personal necessity. The role of women in reproduction within marriage used to define their role. Grace Kelly as Amy in High Noon and Rosie the Riveter revealed that women’s roles were no longer fixed but were open to interpretation.
Technology and business are dedicated to pleasing customers and making money, to pursuing happiness. War is about sacrifice and duty. The contradiction is real, and it is hard to reconcile. Yet in speaking of the subtlety of the American people, I will argue the two have lived side by side from the beginning.
Cycles
The larger wheels of America are driven by two very orderly cycles—the institutional and the socioeconomic. The institutional cycle controls the relationship between the federal government and the rest of American society, and it runs its course roughly every eighty years. The socioeconomic cycle shifts about every fifty years and alters the dynamic of the American economy and society.
All of nature is built on cycles, and therefore it would be very odd if human society did not also develop cyclically. The human cycles are different depending on where those humans are located, who their neighbors are, and how their nations came to be. In different places, cycles are much longer or much shorter or more, or less, predictable.
Americans are impatient by nature and that impatience leads to action, and that action leads to cycles that are both orderly and rapid. We make choices, but those choices exist within narrow boundaries, and the older we get, the tighter the constraints get. It is those constraints that permit us to predict the approximate course of a life.
Neoconservatives argue that U.S. power and force are needed for moral ends; the Left is more limited in the advocacy of force, but advocated it in cases like Rwanda and Libya. There is obviously a level in which humans make their own choices, but as Adam Smith pointed out, all those individual choices lead to a predictable nation. It is predictability that is behind the orderliness of American cycles.
American Politics
The United States has little reason to build an empire for economic and trade purposes. It exports only 13 percent of its GDP to the world, compared with Germany’s 50 percent or China’s 20 percent. Foreign trade is useful to the United States, but not so useful as to need to impose an empire.
In 1992, it was easier to imagine that life would go on as it had been, and fantasize that the world would welcome the United States with open arms. The United States rallied a coalition of thirty-nine countries, with twenty-eight of them sending military forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait. It behaved as the leader of the world and it was the leader.
September 11 attacks came out of nowhere, organized by a force that most Americans hadn’t heard of before. American response was to send a multidivisional force into Afghanistan, where attack against the United States had been organized. Instead of expecting an age of world peace, it was thrust back into war. Psychologically, September 11 was on the order of Pearl Harbor.
In Vietnam, the United States deployed a conventional force to fight a guerrilla war. This was followed by a multidivisional invasion of Iraq and smaller attacks in other countries. The great danger to an empire is permanent war – given global interests, something is always on fire. Even more important, if the empire doesn’t benefit its citizens, but instead exhausts them and disrupts their lives by war, the political support for it will quickly evaporate.
The United States has been at war for almost 100 percent of the twenty-first century. In the nineteenth century, the percentage was higher. When we include the war against Indian nations, it comes close to 100 percent. The Civil War and World War II placed unique stress on the nation.
During World War II, scientists discovered the basic principles of nuclear fission in universities. They presented the military with the possibility of building an atomic bomb. The military organized the scientists and tied them to business. The Manhattan Project succeeded, and the standing of scientists was elevated. It was a project so startling and defining that it became a model for the next cycle.
The Manhattan Project could only have existed with federal money, organization, and compulsion. It had to be an absolute secret, and the federal government controlled the lives of the workers and hid the project from its citizens. Psychologically, the decade of the 2020s will be a grim time, with the real institutional, social, economic, and geopolitical failures being ignored.
The federal system has been built, since World War II, on the assumption of expertise, and for a good part of that time it functioned effectively. But accepting the idea that expertise can result in failure will require a stunning shift in the public’s perspective. This is a key threat to the institutional structure of the third cycle and the technocracy that controls the institutions.
The U.S. global role and the inability of the technocracy to break out of an intellectual gridlock will be the two most important factors in the institutional cycle of the 2020s. The source of the problem is the idea that because expertise is essential, it should govern. Government by experts consists mostly of experts approaching problems through their own prisms.
The difficulty in bringing closure to our wars, and the difficulty in adjusting to our new status, flow from the same source. We are governed by people who know a great deal about narrow subjects, but few who can see the whole. It is a government of vast responsibility and vast know ledge that is bogged down in its own complexity.
The Fox and the Hedgehog
In order to know many things, the fox must be able to learn quickly. He can therefore learn what he needs to know well enough to get by. But if the fox has to manage a very complex matter, he will fail. The hedgehog can manage any problem in his area of expertise, but he can’t learn quickly like the fox.
Knowledge is essential, but by itself it is insufficient. Another way to look at this is as the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Who can say which sort of knowledge is more important to have and who has the ability to step back and consider the meaning of all the hedgehogs’ knowledge?
The federal government has become the domain of hedgehogs, urgently needed people but profoundly insufficient. The federal workforce has shrunk to the size it was in 1966. It reached its high point during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years and has been backtracking in size since then. The crisis with the federal government is neither its size nor its mission.
It follows the model created in World War II, of the highly centralized, hierarchical, expert-based system. It is the same model that drove General Motors into bankruptcy, and it was the only one that could not solve the problem of micromanagement.
American Technocracy
The technocracy is as much a social class as a governing body. The institutions most trusted are those that are perceived to not be drawn from the technocracy. A Gallup poll in 2017 showed that only 27 percent of respondents trusted newspapers to any degree. According to Gallup, the most highly trusted institutions are the military at about 75 percent and the police at about 58 percent.
In 2015, a Pew survey showed that only 19 percent of Americans trusted the federal government. Donald