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

Over the following few years in the 2030s, the political confrontation, social tension, and economic dysfunction will be solved. The cycle will have created a new era, different from the past but built on the same foundation of invention, and it will endure for another half a century.

Nuclear war operates with a speed that prevents the president from consulting with Congress. In the event of nuclear war, the president had to have the power to immediately don the mantle of commander in chief without a declaration of war or a resolution from Congress as required by the Constitution.

Knowledge of what is happening is diffused rather than integrated. Diffusion ties in with the problem of expertise. Expertise is needed. But experts are experts in different things, and when entities are constructed with specific expertise, barriers are built between entities that are sometimes dealing with the same issue.

The ideology of frugality, the interests of factory owners, and the availability of surplus labor via immigration inevitably suppressed wages. With wages stagnant and production increasing, the system went out of balance and finally, in 1929, went into a deep crisis.

The federal government created these entities, and no elected official had the capacity to monitor them.

If this pattern continues as it has, the next institutional cycle will begin around 2025.

These presidents—Adams, Grant, Hoover, and Carter—brought the crisis to a head by intensifying the crisis by taking obsolete measures in an effort to solve the problems they faced. After this presidency,

The Reagan cycle solved the problem of capital shortage bequeathed to it by the Roosevelt cycle by shifting the tax structure. Reducing taxes on the upper, investor class freed up money for investment and also made taking the risk of investing more attractive.

President Trump came into office promising to “drain the swamp,” a metaphor for attacking technocracy, but he had neither the clarity as to how to proceed nor the political base from which to do it.

The federal government, in wanting to provide homes to returning veterans, changed American society to the core. We can debate whether this was an improvement, but what cannot be denied was that it happened.