Deep Into the Dark Decade
It's just a cycle.
About a decade ago I binged on Anglo-American culture in the 1970s. It started with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and went on to Blaxploitation, Marvin Gaye, The Fawlty Towers, European spy comics, all the way to Charlie’s Angels and Saturday Night Fever. If I had done MA, my thesis would have been on liberalism in 1970s Indonesia.
The 1970s is a decade I’m happy I didn’t live in. It was better in Asia than in the West thanks to the high oil price (which was good for Indonesia) and thanks to Japanese investments. And it was such a decade of despair in the West. The British Winter of Discontent. The energy crises. The German Autumn. American serial killers. Political crises in the Caribbean and madmen in Africa. All the cults and swindling wise men.
But now I get to experience my own dark decade. The same experiments with gender and sexuality. The same decline in the West. The same weak and uninspiring American presidents and British prime ministers. The same young people demanding revolutions. Worse, Moscow and Beijing are more hostile to Washington D.C. in 2023 than they were in 1973.
In 2020 I desperately looked for an explanation for why things suddenly went bad with the pandemic and the post-Floyd riots, and The Economist’s books of the year could no longer provide answers. Eventually, a low-key book told me what happened: George Friedman’s The Storm Before the Calm.
I confused George with Thomas Friedman, before remembering his faulty 1991 bestseller The Coming War with Japan. His 2009 speculation The Next 100 Years was an NYT bestseller and a common bookstore fixture in 2010. As Joe Biden was entering the White House, I bought a digital copy of The Storm Before the Calm simply to be entertained.
Friedman does what a professional Western historian doesn’t: believing in cycles. He divides the history of the United States of America into 50-year socioeconomic cycles, initiated by successful presidents and ended by failed presidents. The successful presidents weren’t particularly bright and the failed presidents weren’t particularly fools. They were just actors playing the parts handed to them by rising and failing technologies.
Running together with the socioeconomic cycles are the institutional cycles, which change every 80 years. The first institutional cycle ran from the founding of the American Constitution to the Civil War, and the second institutional cycle ran from the Reconstruction to the Second World War. Too bad for us, the third institutional cycle is expected to end in 2025. Yes, I know how this sounds like the Mayan Calendar.
What makes more sense is the socioeconomic cycle, influenced by constant migrations and a piece of important technology. In the first cycle (1783 – 1828), the United States was a mercantile republic tying its economy to London. The United States expanded west and populated the new territories with Presbyterian Scots-Irish and Lutheran German migrants. The Midwest was born as a place hated by the aristocratic Northeasterners right to this day.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars created a transatlantic financial crisis after 1815, and land prices in the Midwest fell as food prices increased in New York. The 1824 presidential election pitted the aristocratic John Quincy Adams against a Scots-Irish raised in poverty, Andrew Jackson. Adams won ugly through the House of Representatives contingent election, but he couldn’t deal with a modern economy run by steamships and urban factories.
Andrew Jackson began the second cycle (1828 – 1876) and supported the backing of the dollar by gold and silver. As the British Empire expanded into India, the industrializing North wanted protection from British imports while the South exported its own cotton which was superior and cheaper than the Indian cotton. The American Civil War not just ended slavery in the United States but also ensured the supremacy of the North. The Midwest rose in the aftermath, as the steel and coal of Pittsburgh and Columbus rivaled New York and Boston.
The end of the Civil War created a bond crisis. The collapse of railroad stocks spread to Europe and ended regional banks in the Midwest. Ulysses Grant, the hero of the Civil War, is still remembered as a lousy president1. The Ohio small-towner, however, had presided over a continental republic stretching all the way to the Pacific that produced 20% of global production.
The third cycle (1876 – 1929) ended with another chaotic election, as Rutherford Hayes, who was less popular in cities, won the Electoral College. Steam power had given way to electrical power and the internal combustion engine. Treasurer John Sherman picked gold as the sole guarantor of cash and Europe investors turned their bets to lightbulbs and oil. The new waves of German and Scandinavian settlers expanded into the Dakotas, the Rockies, and the Pacific. Meanwhile, the Scots-Irish had been assimilated into the WASP aristocracy, unlike the Catholic Irish who tried to survive Boston and New York.
The late 19th century United States contrasted the virtuous Protestant villages and the vicious cities, populated by black migrants from the South and Jewish and Irish migrants from Europe. The United States also took more cheap labor from the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Latin America as it had become the king of the global industry in 1900.
Sadly, many buyers of American products died after 1914 and economic depression hit the Midwest as early as 1925. Friedman argues that the Great Depression is the crash of employment and demand, as American factories produced too many unsold goods while retaining too many cheap laborers. Herbert Hoover tried to fight the Great Depression with 19th-century values of frugality and hard work, and it didn’t work.
Franklin Roosevelt began the fourth cycle (1932 – 1980) by creating jobs, any kind of jobs. The Democratic Party, originally a southern farmer’s party, turned into an urban labor party. But the ultimate solution to Roosevelt’s problem was the Second World War which energized American factories and gave employment to millions of Americans, including women.
The barrack turned Christian Americans into a band of brothers who were skilled, disciplined, and patriotic. Their family members bought the war bonds, and after 1945 the bonds were transformed into a new technology: Consumer credit. Demands (floated by advertisements) kept factories alive, and victorious Americans could fulfill all their craves with consumer credits.
The war also gave rise to the technocrats, who moved from the Second World War to the Cold War. Technocracy didn’t care about your faith or (European) heritage, just your expertise. After two centuries, efficiency replaced frugality as the moral principle of America. Even the housewife learned to operate machines instead of creating food and clothes from starch.
The problems began in the 1970s. Perhaps it’s the fall of Nixon. Perhaps it’s the Arab oil embargo. But like how America beat Europe in production in the 1900s, West Germany and Japan had beaten America in production in the 1960s. After all, consumer credits were spent on Japanese cars and German sound systems. Frankfurt and Tokyo had also produced better technocrats than Boston and Chicago did. Jimmy Carter experienced how Roosevelt’s playbook of the tax increase and cheap money didn’t work.
Ronald Reagan went the opposite way by reducing taxes and welcoming the microchip, which moved computers from labs into office desks. American corporates shut down their American factories and moved them to Asia. The Asian factory bosses, meanwhile, sent their children to Stanford and MIT. A Pacific-oriented economy worked well in the 1990s but not in the 2010s, as the American middle class could no longer afford a middle-class life. A more equitable world, a world where India, China, and Mexico are no longer poor, isn’t fun for American college graduates.
I just summarized the introduction of the book, but it’s enlightening to see that American history – the locomotive of global history since 1945 – moves in cycles. Things do get better but through rises and falls. We’re at the final part of the Reagan cycle, and a new cycle will begin around 2030. The 2024 president will give Reaganite solutions that will no longer work before the next president will find a new solution aided by new technology.
What’s disturbing about Friedman’s theory is the end of the institutional cycle because the previous institutional cycles ended with history-defining wars. Friedman, being a man who often predicted future wars, didn’t want to predict World War 3 in 2025. He instead predicted the twilight of the technocrats and the universities, the fashionable opinion (and probably the hope) of the Substack tribe.
For our common sanity and safety, let’s hope American institutions can change without any war taking place. In 1861 Washington D.C. simply reacted to the secession and in 1941 Washington D.C. simply reacted to Pearl Harbor. The initiative is simply in Beijing’s (or Moscow’s, or even Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s) hands to decide if COVID will be the worst thing of the 2020s or not. Washington D.C. won twice before, but always at a great cost.
Friedman hints biotech, from cell regeneration to cyborgs, is a possible new technology that will drive the next 50 years. Sounds cool 10 years ago, but now we are worried about how biotech and cyborg aspirations are tied to the dehumanization of women.
By taking these years as a dark decade that comes naturally, hopefully, we can have a more positive outlook on life in the future. In other words, survive for the next ten years, but the storm will eventually pass. Now if only 2020s music and comedies are as good as the 1970s…
21st-century American historians have elevated Grant and demoted Jackson based on their values for African Americans.