The crisis of the 2020s will be abnormal not only because the two crises will combine into one but because the United States has reached an unprecedented point in its history. It has become the preeminent power in the world, and it doesn’t know if it wants the honor or how to manage it. This frames and intensifies the coming crisis of the 2020s.

In looking at these two major cycles, we see something we have not seen before. The current institutional cycle will conclude in a crisis around the mid-2020s, and the socioeconomic cycle will end in a crisis within a few years of that. This is the first time in American history that the two cycles will culminate so close together, practically over