George Friedman — The Storm Before the Calm

good evening everybody for those already joining we're just going to give people a minute or two to find their virtual seats and then we will begin our program in just a second or two technically a minute or two good evening and welcome to your library i'm david leonard president of the boston public library and host for our arc of history series tonight's conversation is both part of our arc of history repairing america series and one of our author talks tonight i'm coming to you live from the central library in boston's copley square from the bates hall reading room where visitors have pursued research and study and in their interests since 1895. a few points to orient you to tonight's program if you are joining us live we are broadcasting via zoom and out to our youtube channel the live transcript or closed caption system is available via zoom and you can toggle that on and off at your leisure if you are a participant or viewer we'll keep your microphones and video turned off we will use the chat box in zoom to share supplemental information and if you would like to ask a question you can use the q a button in zoom and we'll get to as many questions as possible in the second half of the program tonight's program is also being recorded and will be published on the bpl website following the program our bookstore partner tonight is again trident booksellers and cafe and while we would of course love you to borrow a copy from the library or your local library wherever you are you may also get a copy more quickly and they purchase a signed copy by visiting trident's website using the code bpl ship for free media mail delivery the repairing america theme provides us with an opportunity to engage with issues facing our country and try to bend our arc of history a little more directly towards justice for all it also gives us the opportunity to give voice to issues leaders experts and commentators who have not always been afforded such opportunities tonight's conversation allows us to look a little bit beyond our normal themes and issues take a look at history and the concerns of the day and see what might be ahead now we all i believe know that 2020 and early 2021 have provided us with unprecedented challenges as a species and as a nation public health and the economic impacts of it are first at hand our nation is grappling anew with concerns of racial equity and at times police violence our politics is portrayed as being more diverse than ever and also divisive than ever and of course all of these issues are interrelated but are there broader patterns at work here are there systems of scale that we should be paying attention to beyond the current moment our role too in the world is unclear as we reach a resetting and re-ranking of geopolitical leadership what will be the way forward will these patterns recur or develop in a new way dr george friedman is founder and chairman of geopolitical futures which specializes in geopolitical forecasting prior to this friedman was chairman of the global intelligence company stratfor which he founded in 1996. he's the author of six books including the new york times bestsellers the next decade and the next hundred years and he lives in one of my favorite american cities or just outside it near austin texas george welcome to the program and i'd like to hand over the podium to you for about 10 minutes to set up the premises of your book and i'll get us familiar with your your thinking and your approach and our conversation will pick up from there well thank you uh people living outside of austin don't want to be considered austinites but that's a parochial problem but then all american problems are parochial we are built that way i started writing his book in a bar in 1975. uh we were drinking some really cheap bourbon with two friends and they were bemoaning the fate of the country they'd never seen such in 1967 the 82nd airborne occupied uh detroit to put down a gunfight in 1968 martin luther king was killed bobby kennedy were killed at the convention in 1968 mass riots broke out it was chaos beyond belief many people were injured 1969 also was kent state when national guardsmen shot down a group of anti-anti-war uh demons a group of anti-war demonstrators um it was also about that time when uh we were in an economic crisis of what had been unexpected proportions of interest rates running at about 18 when you bought a house unemployment high it was a time of enormous stress and not to mention it of course the president united states uh was forced out of office when it turned out he'd been a criminal well these things happen and one of the things that was striking is that everybody said we had never lived in such a time before that the president was forced from office that the economy of the shambles that race was a crucial issue and so on so the next day having no longer been able to think i went almost said okay what was when did this ever happen before and i thought of the 1920s the depression was starting the big one yui long the ku klux klan um a range of social problems that were going to dis define and devastate the country that was a period with extraordinary pain 50 years before that rutherford b hayes who you've probably never heard of but is extremely important because he introduced the gold standard and kicked off the industrial revolution in the united states well he stole the election now there used to be some debate over this but at this point historians are pretty sure you know he stole it by manipulating the uh electoral college now that was unheard of and still unheard of but when you look at that okay you see a pattern emerging 50 years before that andrew jackson ran against uh john q quincy adams john quincy adams clearly stole the election by forcing it into the house of representatives where he controlled the votes to force them out then jackson came back and during this time uh was a time of enormous economic upset because the united states owed huge amounts of money to its own public and europe from the revolution and had no way of paying it back and because hoards of westernizing pioneers wanted land and couldn't buy it because the banking system was so rigged against them there was no chance so i noticed something interesting first is that we always think we live in a worse time nothing could be worse than what we had seen in 1975 rarely is it the worst time we keep doing it to ourselves secondly every 50 years we wind up in a situation where we have a massive shift in the way we operate prefaced by this kind of crisis so after andrew jackson takes over this is the period where we settle west this is a period where we transform the united states into an eastern uh rural and urban area into really one of the most extraordinarily profitable productive areas of the world after rutherford b hayes in this incredible crisis we move into the period of industrialization that transforms the world electricity comes and transforms the way we live in cities railroads are there and transform how we trans is enormous a shift taking place uh then we come into the period after the chaos of let's say franklin roosevelt the president who comes in immediately after the crisis has the job of calming things down well they had a very hard time calming things down it was not until after world war ii they calmed down and then we ended a period of enormous prosperity at the period of 50s 60s this was enormously prosperous time well after richard nixon who was clearly a failed president we had gerald ford who wasn't there long enough to fail but didn't do pretty well either then we had jimmy carter who tried to apply roosevelt's solution of cutting taxes for the poor to everyone and to do that meant that he reduced the amount of capital available for investment and as a result this was the time that general motors chrysler ford went through their first major crushing crisis what happens after this is a break a new president none of these presidents knew what they were going to do when they took office they were forced by events to do them and that was ronald reagan who did the unthinkable of cutting taxes on the rich in order to find investment capital in order to have money to rebuild the infrastructure of our economy and also to invest in things like microsoft or apple who kicked off the transformation of american society by having the money available to do had he not done this outrageous thing the ability to invest would have been constrained and america wouldn't have grown but it did so i looked at this thing again in 19 in sorry 2015 because i realized that we're about to enter the end of the cycle that the period that we had been in had run its course and it was time for a really bad president to emerge and i started writing again in 2015 and what i said was that the 2020s particularly the early 2020s were going to be a time of incredible pain unease and instability which we got good not adding to it leave that aside so we have a pattern and other patterns that we can talk about later that define how the united states works the question is how can i do this it's important to begin by understanding the united states is unique it is an invented country it is a country that did not exist uh really at the time of the revolution there were maybe a million people here and it was a country that was defined by a committee the kind of the constitutional congress constitutional gathering and it created a system that was inherently resilient it would go through periods of difficulty but would resolve for one cushion reason the government was not all that important the founders did not believe that you could trust government because people who wish to be governors usually want power and people who want power usually shouldn't rule so they surrounded him with two parliaments a supreme court with enormous power federal judges all over the place and created a system of paralysis and because of this paralysis sometimes self-uh self-enforced we were able to constantly evolve ourselves with let's say new technologies with electricity with the automobile with the microchip we moved ourselves forward in productivity with those things some of which came from the government but none of which are truly developed by the government and so we are now sitting here and we've gone through the first phase of this crisis the one that rested from 1916 2016 to 2020 and we're not through yet the probability if previous ones are followed is we will have a president of little impact general ford if you will followed by a president who wants to turn the clock back followed by a major crisis that turns creates a new president a new era of the united states now other things come in and other things affected but i argue that this is the case not because of some theory because it is an empirical fact that this is how it works and what i'm struggling for is an explanation of how it works that this happens that the great depression ends in great prosperity or the crisis of the 1970s ends in great prosperity this is both paradoxical and true and so what i wrote this book for is to explain somehow how this could be true and how it is that this is no accident this is a necessary part of the kind of system that was constructed a machine and thanks so i've um i've long believed that one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human um is that we recognize patterns we can see systems and it strikes me that um certainly the first two parts of the book the first two two of three large sections really make that make that point strongly you you are beginning with an analysis of what it means to be american what is the american character and then you are threading um two patterns that have recurred through at least modern history from 1776 onwards one that unpacks institutional systems and one that looks at the socio-economic cycles is that a fair read of of of the work in the project yes and what i've talked about now was the social and economic sequence and i haven't yet talked about institutional okay so um would you like to give us a little uh insight into that sure the united states has an institutional cycle that shifts every 80 years amazingly i don't know why but the way the united states was founded there was tremendous power in the states and relatively little power in the federal government eighty years after the founding we have the civil war and out of the civil war comes a redefinition of the institutions of the united states where the federal government clearly asserts and claims rights over the state to determine a range of things in this case things like emancipation 80 years ago 80 years later we wind up in world war ii and world war ii required the federal government to take over not just the states but society and the economy it took over uh how we lived because of the war but also inserted a class of people experts who had never been seen in government really before their politicians were not seen as experts but journalists if you wish but they knew how to do certain things uh and they were able to build bombers and they were able to design tanks and atom bombs and all this okay well why did that happen because the united states develops and the way it was organized before doesn't work anymore so a new organization has to happen and a new organization does happen it is the organization that we have today but the argument is that that organization is failing again please notice that the others all began with war [Music] this one also began with war desert storm not desert storm i'm sorry the war in iraq where it was realized that the federal government really didn't know what it was doing in foreign policy so the question occurred what else does it do well the essential problem is that these wars are planned by experts and experts have a fundamental defect they know their thing beautifully they're not aware of what they're doing on either side so this was a government of experts that had failed in the war and the complexity they built into our system was enormous the social security act i believe consisted of 15 pages and transformed the country healthcare was 15 000 pages and no one has read the whole thing we're pretty sure we know what it says and the complexity that grows but there's one other thing that happened we can no longer petition the government something that is contained in the first amendment and is not taken seriously one of the rights we have is to petition our government that means that if you feel that your social security check is wrong you can go in and petition the government by talking to clerk but the experts who wrote the rules did not give that clerk the right to make a decision so you have the right to petition it but you should not have any expectation of being heard unless you're a large corporation in which case you have lobbyists so this system is not working and you saw it in covet one of the things about covid that was there that was important is the experts in medicine provided medical solutions the experts in social life tried to present other solutions covet created a range of problems for us one of which was medical it all emerged from there but each medical solution carried a cost a good part of the public felt massively disenfranchised because they felt that the choices that were being made by the experts were not the choices they would make they may be right they may be wrong but the view was that the government itself no longer functions in the interest of the people but of their experts and we're now moving into the next phase 80 years after in which we have to take a look at our government one more time because the government of experts that won world war ii and gave us this vast prosperity in the past 80 years when they had to handle the crisis that hit us at that moment both in iraq and in covid really just couldn't handle the complexity because the complexity did not require experts acquired breath and that's where we are now with two crises at the same time and i think i i remember reading in the book that one way to understand this distinction is asking whether a part of government is really just set up to execute the rules or is it set up to respect what the intent of those rules and policies and laws may have been to begin with and it seems to me that you're suggesting that one good thing that may come out of this crisis is that we can move more towards the intentional execution rather than simply by the book and by the rules and more important the unexpected consequences the agility to be able to take to do something about unexpected conference to have someone whose job it is not just to be in head of medical but the head of covent and the head of covet responsible for education responsible for all sorts of other things so in the social crisis that we have today uh part of it is this institutional crisis and there are those who are very comfortable with what has been done as a huge part of the american public who very much is appalled by it right naturally since we're americans we hold each other and contin complete contempt so naturally those who think that dr fauci is not a good man naturally they regard anybody who does do that engage in some sort of conspiracy anyone who has a dispute to have with this system is regarded by the other group as being know-nothings and dangerous and you know people so when the governor of texas ended all rules he had very good reasons why he felt he had to do this it was called democracy and the people who supported this didn't feel that the risks that were being imposed were that bad well we can have a long discussion of it but the discussion that was supposed to be part of american life is now aborted by ex-cathedra announcements by the government so so are are you giving us really a diagnosis of the current moment because it's a clash of institutional this institutional cycle and a clash of the socio-economic world or the socio-political world in some ways well what i'm looking at is this the solution to world war ii was a massive intrusion of the federal government into what had been private life okay the united states is much larger much more diverse than it was it's found at beginning of that period the ability of a government to do that effectively with all of the different variables well you see the unhappiness in there um we go back to the beginning now of the founding which really didn't have a lot of confidence in government and so at this point what happens is that even the government is paralyzed by expertise you know if the doctor says this is what you've got to do you're going to do it and you're irresponsible if you don't fair enough in most cases a good idea but what if you overlook something uh how does that get into it it gets into it by battling and that gives us a sense of you know clovit is interesting because certainly i had no idea that it was coming but it gave us a chance to take a look of how we handle extraordinary problems in our time and the problem here is we create a massive division in the society because there are multiple ways to do it and when you say there are multiple ways to do it you're demonized when you say this is the only way to do it you're demonized so we're at that point um let's pull back up a little bit because i think uh one of the meta points if you will one of the bigger points here is that even though we're going through these cycles um the core of what it means to be uh an american nation with a modern american nation um obviously there were there were peoples here uh before the current period um the land was here before the current period but um i think you're you're saying that the experiment is essentially working because these patterns are are are are repeating themselves well first of all think of our lives today and think of our lives 100 years ago of course for some 100 years ago was good but we have an enormous number of possibilities and capabilities from technical to intellectual so on a range of things so in that sense clearly this is working now if you built an engine it would have to cycle an engine does not run at full blast it does not run in one stage it goes through cycles needed to stabilize it needed to do whatever it does founders created an engine and that engine was designed to bring prosperity that was the biggest issue inevitably the way you did it before has to change the idea that i've got a model for how to develop a country and that's going to be it well the founders never thought that and so we necessarily run to the end of a cycle we've used up the period we've used up the period where the automobile is god everybody is waiting for it we've used up other periods okay and as we use up these other periods we naturally go into social unrest social anger social there are those who want to continue that cycle but it can't be continued so we go through this process and during the process it looks like the country is immolating itself it looks like this can't go on what's actually doing is cleansing itself because we are more than anything else a technical country we were created as an invention we invented ourselves we invented our population all the immigrants and slaves and everything we invented them for good or bad we invented our government was not unlike it before we even invented our geography the erie canal which is not appreciated enough was an enormous transformation of geography how we use the mississippi river well that changed europe the way we can talk about so these things these transformations uh were machine-like they were set in motion and you can see that they would cause tension and you can see they see they cause friction right through the microchip where we now have the friction of was allowing twitter to exist a bad mistake well it wouldn't have happened without the microchip the microchip emerged from world war ii as a necessary thing i held a mic hp hand calculator in 1972 in my hands at cornell and i said who the hell's going to buy this at 200 you know i had no idea what i was holding in my head my future the future my country the american character is built out of the american necessity we are invented and invented to run in a certain way and like any machine we have cycles and we go through them and necessarily when we go through those cycles we engage in massive social conflict do you think that the notion of progress is in opposition to this analysis of our history as a progression of cycles and i'm particularly interested in you know i can get the the institutional to and fro that you're you're talking about uh certainly there have been periods of more or less um social unrest or progress around civil civil rights but if we look at the whole history of you know either 400 years or 250 years it's only fairly recently that women get the votes that um uh a quality equality act is before the congress right now um that the civil rights movement in general has you know throughout the 20th century some milestones that appear to be you know movement in a certain direction so i'm just just interested in whether we can have this notion of progress within this notion of um of cycles and patterns over history progress has become a value judgment it is not simply a description of what is happening it is an evaluation of whether it's good or bad okay uh these cycles may or may not be progress depending on how you look at it in fact the characteristic of the cycles is when they're happening there's great debate over whether the country is being destroyed by it or improved by it everything is not incorporated into cycles obviously there are a range of things from art to the perpetual crisis of blacks in america that that's not part of it it's something different i could talk to that i mean the united states did something extraordinary slavery was common in africa slavery was common in many countries the largest slave owning country was brazil not the united states but the united states did something extraordinary when they met for a declaration of independence they wrote we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal they then went to the constitutional convention and they found that southerners would not give up their slaves as they were the foundation of their economy and the north understood that without the south as part of the country it couldn't work because then the british or the french would come form alliances within therein the founders at the constitutional convention i think that includes the southerners you perfectly well that the slaves are humans but they did a they wrote a clause that said they were three-fifths of a person in the sentence other countries have slavery many countries have slavery it's not unique in history i don't know of many who had in their founding instruments something that stated that the slaves were subhuman this was the extraordinary thing that founders did more so because of what they said the declaration of independence more so because what they knew now every cycle brings this up the civil war uh the the depression that brings up the question of the ku klux klan and everything else the time before 1960's 1970's with the black panthers uh coming to the fore this is the constant theme of every cycle always insoluble it's always insoluble because that decision that forced decision the blacks perpetually in an institutional structure of inferiority yeah it's always good to say let's go on but it's not and that's one of the important things to understand that stands outside the cycles they're embedded in the cycles they show up in the cycles they show the hand most crucially but we have never we've addressed the question obviously after the civil war about the humanity of blacks but really in that kind in that constitution it was written wonderfully but included the notion of the inhumanity of blacks and that was a huge change and that's why you say do we make progress on that well that's separate and that's why i wanted to bring that up no i think that that's helpful clarification and today we would use the term perhaps systemic racism to look at the structural or institutional challenge that remains on that on that front but i think to to suggest that the question of progress is a question about value and judgment which is distinct from an analysis of patterns and cycles through history is is um is is interesting um if we could just change uh topics to the role of the presidency in the institutional cycles that you see we've mentioned and you certainly have mentioned several presidents that are examples of different sides of the cycle um i i'm i think i i caught a phrase in the book that says that our system is designed with a weak presidency but one with a strong bully pulpit um could you say more about what you mean by that and how it fits in the system as a whole institutionally the president has very little power without getting both houses of congress aside or a court order or something so unlike a prime minister who has a overwhelming majority and is therefore virtually a dictator in a european country dar presidents are built to be weak they are primarily there to build coalitions to bring people together to move them around that's their primary job and that's what the good ones do but the president is also our king i say that only partially we have who do we look to as our leader and who is our moral voice and who speaks for us well many americans would reasonably say no one i speak for myself and that's charm or ugliness of america however you want it okay but the bully pulpit is that a president can stand up and be heard and there's no other american who has that power to be heard so he can shape things in certain ways he can be despised i mean how great they react to what he says is is up to the people okay but we have a leader who's weak that's a problem because this man who can speak can't deliver he now has to sit down and make deals all sorts of corrupt deals with various people to get this done on the other hand voice is not the voice of god and that's what the founders wanted to avoid and so we created a very strange system of government americans don't understand how strange this system is um where the president has just announced that he is going to cure cancer next week okay now then where is the money going to come from what about the rights of various groups that are going to be taken to congress which are the area first or not they're going to go to the supreme court okay the president will be constantly overwhelmed by this health care president obama spent years trying to make it and by the time he was done it didn't look like anything he had in mind well that's right the desire is not that the president with the head president has in mind rules the idea is that that the people rule and we are a large but obnoxious people someone said that is yeah we all speak we don't speak with one voice the president speaks with one voice but sometimes he loses the election and at this moment in time we also have a senate and congress that is very closely divided and you know certainly the pundits would suggest that there's very little evidence of real bipartisanship which [Music] is allegedly at a different level of tenor than it has been at some point um so does that does that give us a a weaker congress or does that give us um something that true is an example of the system working as designed it was exactly what why they have two houses the president wanted to make it very hard to pass the just let the founders wanted to make it very hard to pass legislation how much harder can you have who else has two parliaments um they they wanted to protect the public and the private life against government projects and you know they've gotten they pay the price but the important thing to bear in mind you know of they didn't want partisanship a bipartisanship they at the beginning talked about it but they had the federalists and the democrats jeffersonians and they fought cats and dogs and it paralyzed things that was good the only place we ever had true bipartisanship was during the cold war when we used to say that foreign policy that debate ends at the uh and we did have it we had a general consensus that there was an enormous danger and that the president was responsible for managing it and so on when the cold war ended we kind of lost that okay where foreign policy kind of sloped back into nothingness on the one hand or an area of debate okay so understanding the intent of the founders this shouldn't bother anybody right and honestly in in light of the 9 11 tragedies um there was for better or worse a sense of unity in uh in respect of that so it's almost like it requires an existential threat to um unify uh opposing sides within our government and that's exactly what they wanted in the event of an existential threat uh the president is commander-in-chief there should be a declaration of uh declaration of war which we've gone by and that we went by because of harry truman harry truman wanted to go to war in korea he didn't know if he was going to get the votes or not probably not so he said remember the united nations we agreed to that therefore the united nations goes to war weak we go to war and since then there has never been another declaration of war despite of long periods of war and this is another institutional problem because by not having that there's not a signal to the public that this is different now okay and the public doesn't get a chance to agree or disagree through their senator as a congressman over whether it happens and so we had the unity in world war ii but we really never had it after that because a crucial element of the constitution was discarded now the the book ends um really within the before before the election i think you finished it before the the election so um we don't in the book have your thoughts on uh what happens next um uh you know it wasn't clear at the time of i think you're writing in the introduction that whether trump would get a second term or not but you do articulate that there's a sequencing to the next sets of presidents in terms of the type of leader the type of accomplishments that that that emerge and i'm just wondering if if you is it too soon to know if if we're getting a ford or coolidge in in this post-trump biden administration well first i think it's very important to understand that the election solved nothing this country is deeply divided and worse mutually contentious those who support biden don't understand they can't understand those who support trump and vice versa so what came out of the election was what was there before a country divided now the next president has to be someone who tries to calm the spirit he does that by doing little so when gerald ford announced his great american nightmare is over okay he then proceeded to do little he'll do little because he can't do much 50 50 split in the senate normally by the normal numbers the democrats will lose control of the house in the next election maybe it'll happen maybe not but you look at so what kind of president we're going to have i mean this could be the most activist you know get something done guy he can't so the best thing to have is somebody who lived with getting little done and the look at you look at what happened with carter and with ford okay and you look at what happened when you wound up with coolidge and hoover and stuff you see the kinds of presidents that take place at the transition point they're not activist presidents and if they are they're crushed by the realities so the expectation that i have simply based on what happened in the past is that biden is going to be a president who will speak greatly and carry a small stick i mean he does he's got a small stick um and over time his disappointment in him will cut into didn't do more and the fact that he couldn't do more is not going to be in anybody's mind and so an election will be held which sometimes in this case means a republican will come in after him because he didn't get anything done and that republican can't get anything done plus he has no idea what to do you know the situations require something really different and you've got to have a guy there who really wants to do something different and we won't have him and then the situation gets so difficult so tense that something has to change and then the next president comes in and he does he comes in ronald reagan had no idea what he was going to do when he took office but the office forced it and so that that's what i see you know happening this is going to be like the 70s a not particularly happy time so so by by tracing this model out your um suggestion is that it will be 2026 or 2030 before we have a more major shift that um that that starts the next cycle or delivers prosperity or fill in the blanks well that recognizes that the current system is no longer working and starts allowing the machine to evolve okay and that'll be 20 i think 2028 by past i'm going off of past stuff here yeah 2028 would be the likely time and he will come in like reagan and really roosevelt who had no idea what he was going to do with the corpus um he'll come in confused and then pressures will emerge in him and he will have the one virtue of having the ability to act because he was brought in with the congress that wanted to and so we'll see now there's one other dimension that and i'll start taking audience questions after this question but um there's something about the current moment that i think you're stating is unique because we have these these two cycles and um both of them are at this moment looking for the transition to their next stage pretty much at the same time both on the institutional governmental focus level but also on the socioeconomic societal level as well it is the first time that's happened in american history one could say that it should make everything worse but i have no evidence to do that it's just about as bad as ever i think they also have things in common on one side the socioeconomic crisis really requires in all cases that the government let go and let apple be apple you know whatever that is okay on the other side the institutional change is going to demand that the government be more flexible and more open and that the experts be put in their place and other governors oversee them that kind of goes together so i'm a guest since we've never had this before i don't know uh and i guess i say it's going to work out um but that's or could just rip everything in pieces and have you looked at other countries or other democracies to see if there are similar analyses or is this to you to as far as you you know or have thought about a uniquely something that's unique to the american democratic experiment most countries have a long history and they've had various types of government they didn't invent a new government they you know bought it something that was known to bear right the united states did two things one it invented a full mode of government that didn't exist before in a country that didn't exist before tabula rasa it had a clean place to do it with i'll be interested in seeing if israel has a cycle and the reason i'll be interested is it also was an invented country okay with this population moving and so on but for most of the countries if you look at europe i mean france is france and france doesn't have this built into the system the french president has much more power so i think this is unique to the united states it's saving grace if you will um let's take a few audience questions and if anybody else would like to queue one up please use the q a option within within zoom um this first question takes us back to the great prosperity of the post-world war ii era and ivan is asking us um does that really come about because of the self-destruction of europe that there's basically a vacuum created and that that is what enables america to to step in well since europe is a great customer of the united states we didn't exactly want them to collapse and we did a great deal to resurrect them yeah marshall but i think the other thing to understand is that what world war ii was did was solve the unemployment problem suddenly there was lots of employment and they saved their money they bought their bonds they came out of there to one of the most extraordinary things was the gi bill the gi bill created a middle class the gi bill said you can if you've been in the army you can go to college and do whatever you want and a class as class of professionals emerged where previously professionals had been a different source this is a mass movement of professionals they built the suburbs and they changed the country so i would argue that uh the internal process of the united states metabolized world war ii in a way it didn't know anywhere else we're one of the countries we came out richer and ended his depression um the next question which is also goes to this notion of how do we know where we are in the cycle when we're living through it and um also this this allows i think your analysis to step back from either the beauty or tragedy of individual historical events but the question is how will we know when we're on the other side of this current 50 or 80 year cycle well historically when the moment becomes unbearable there is no solution obvious there will be a new president and the new congress and you so on because democracy and things will change so in the past these periods of transition were about a decade long okay so you started with the crisis sometime in the late 60s and then by 1980 you get reagan if that's the case we've got a ways to go we're we're just rock you know in i'm sure trump was just a taste of what it would be like politically it may be different but trump represented that class in the country that has suffered the most under the old system he spoke for the industrial working class who had lost their jobs they claimed to china or whatever it doesn't matter whether it's true or not and he spoke to them and arrayed against him were what i'll call the technocrats who were making using the microchip to transform society and putting these people out of work so that crisis is there today biden can't solve it the next president at certain point that crisis cracks and you change so far every time it's broken through but where you should look at yourself is think about 10 years think about donald trump and you'll see that we're kind of at the beginning so so it so among the different social ills to select it's the economic disenfranchisement of the previous manufacturing workers that you see as the trigger um trigger for for this period we're in sure so roosevelt destroyed small town america in a way didn't destroy it it was still there but it was no longer the heart the urban industrial uh the microchip was the foundation of the new era the reagan era if you will it was the foundation and had a massive negative effect on olden old industries it always happens incidentally i should point out that the microchip is no longer high tech microchip is now 50 years old same age as the car was in 1965. and you you can do that with technology and look at it and say look you know basically product individual productivity is falling it's no longer surging on it there are still massively great things to be done with it but it transforms its work has been done and so in the next cycle something else comes along and the shape of america takes place this is how the machine works is there and this is another anonymous question but is is there something that we as a society should be doing to reduce harm during these periods of transition or chaos yes there is but nobody agrees on what it is one of the characteristics of our time is you've got half the country demanding that trump's policy be followed the other half the society say my god of anything we do don't do it this is a time when there is no consensus and there's no engineering project you just work your way through it and the problem is that how do you cushion this how could you have cushioned the economic crisis in 1970s those who remembered there was real arguments on what to do as there are today and one of the characteristics is of its autonomousness is the paralysis of of the citizenry in debate with each other when we talk about politics these days it's loathing of the other side which we have seen in at different points in history as well yeah i mean that's that's not that's not new it's just unpleasant right but it really comes from very deep interests and very deep needs and a lack of mutual respect which is what you get at this time and so let me ask this question um from krista there are also others who have suffered economically and in many other ways that trump most definitely did not speak for um how do we ensure those voices are part of the the diagnosis if you will of the current moment well it depends on their sizes i mean he the problem is voices here get lost in the cacophony they're poor but he spoke to a certain class to say one way that reagan spoke for the professional suburban class and roosevelt spoke for the industrial working class okay so each there's a there's a powerful class that emerges not necessarily the richest but the most powerful so in this sort of situation a lot of things get lost there has to be a coalition but it's very hard to do it this is a in a certain sense this is a tragedy of america but out of the tragedy comes the next thing so if you value the microchip worlds pity the loss of jobs uh in the 1970s which there were a lot they emerged together and it's this you know what i'm saying is that celebrating america per se you that's what i want to understand i'm saying it's a fairly impressive machine but it hurts um let's take the next question here um so long question here um in several wars passed uh the u.s started mobilizing late um this tends to be the case uh when say for example a dictator can build an army quickly while our congress or britain's parliament has you know more democratic interests at heart and then then ultimately moves um what are your thoughts on how the conflicts with china which to date are largely economic um you know how how does all of that uh put together and does the paradigm change or does the current paradigm continue okay well now i'm out of the book but in my field i regard china as an inherently weak country it has an alliance facing it of japan south korea taiwan the philippines indonesia vietnam india and australia it has absolutely no ally okay so even the soviet union so i look at this the way i looked at the cold war the russians at least had the buffer it's not the enthusiasm of poland and the eastern bloc the alliance that we have by the way they have 34 they have 14 trillion dollars in gdp alliance has 33 trillion dollars in other words it is economically larger hostile to china and it creates a situation where there are choke points for chinese vessels to get out now the terror of china is we're going to blockade their ports we don't really want to but if we did we'd strangle them but i don't regard the chinese challenge the way others do i you know if i take a look at the forces of raid against them okay and the reason that china hasn't actually done something militarily is because it doesn't want to it's afraid to so the question of is the united states prepared to deal with the chinese well here's the way i would put it we spend as americans too much time thinking about hardware we thought the soviet union was incredibly powerful because it counted all their tanks nobody counted their drunken men they just counted i say they were literally uh we found out that they were drunk they were not serious the chinese navy has never fought a battle the only battle china ever fought and see was 1895 and they got killed by the japanese war is far more than hardware it is commanders and troops that are ready for war or have institutional memories as the united states has about wars and how to handle them the chinese are cautious because they've got some hardware but do they have troops that know how to take casualties they they don't they're not sure and so i would argue not to dismiss your question because i think america has frequently been behind we're okay at the chinese yes um and i'm going to resist taking us into too much of the global um power conversations because the book is really focused on um american uh democracy and the experiment and the notions of system um that your analysis allows us to to look at here um kovitz started um as you were finishing the book and this has been certainly a huge challenge for for us we've lost um so many lives um do you have a good government response to covet that or what that would have looked like in your mind yeah but nobody like it it's like this there are many deaths most occurred statistically in those 65 and over it was essential that those 65 and over be protected and money spent to make sure that they were protected but as you go down the line the death rate is much much lower so the idea that we close down the entire society to take care of these millions of deaths has to take into account who who are those subject to it now there's no doubt that closing down all of society was an appropriate response i mean it was certainly more secure than what i'm proposing but i see a range of consequences so for example families violence has soared okay you can imagine why children have not seen uh other children these are important things but not medical so yes i do think there was another approach to be taken it had higher risk but at the same time it took care of some of the peripheral issues so i would but nobody likes it when i say this well again it's uh it's always difficult to be doing historical analysis as one lives through it these are many questions that i think we'll be perhaps even better prepared to pick up in in years to come are there lasting impacts of kohit for the for the u.s for american democracy yes i think we'll never have this response to a disease look we've had diphtheria we've had polio we've had others okay in the polio crisis when i was a small child my parents were terrified that i get it but life went off we went to the beach you know and so on we have a need in america for this notion of zero risk even though we don't have zero risk every time you get in your car you take a risk right well there's something that emerged in the last 15 20 years as part of the cycle has zero risk i can't we gotta mitigate it all risk there's got to be a definition of tolerable risk now as that's dr falchi there is no tolerable risk anything you can get rid of you get rid of now what is a tolerable risk well that becomes an interesting question but we have to remember something our response to covet has never happened in the united states despite of many diseases okay it didn't happen they didn't shut down the whole country now i know why they did but i'm not sure it was an ideal choice okay um oh i've just lost one more question um yes and certainly historically when we refer to the president we use he because we've only had male presidents this question is do you think in this next cycle we have the possibility of electing a female president i'd be very surprised that we didn't i mean there's no reason not to have female presidents nancy pelosi scares me but she is one hell of a spirit house i mean women are the issue was never women caught female competence the issue was a very deep trans-american view of the relationship between men and women and they see no reason i mean i'll bet good money that we'll have a female president good um um sharon asks if you would comment and i think we hinted at this although we didn't actually um tackle this uh specifically um but the events of january 6 that the capital um are what sort of symptom are these telling us in terms of where we are in the cycle um i mean the transition is this is this institutional cycle coming to an end is this socio-political cycle coming to an end is it a little of both well i would argue that that event has to be taken light of say portland yesterday where there were riots we had become violent but if we remember in the 1960s and 70s riots broke out many cities frequently on race issues but in other issues as well if you go back to the bonus marchers ex-soldiers of one of their bonuses that were crushed by the army that was there so violence in the united states is not unique right what was unique and stunning to me was attacking the capitol for the united states um there are many things that happened past year that stunned me the murder by police of people the professor friend i have was giving a speech and when he came out he was hit in the head by blunt instrument because somebody disagreed with him we're in a bad time okay and each side will pick the other side's violation of decency as central and much worse than before so one of the things i got from a lot of readers was uh when talking about capital why aren't you talking about uh the violence in seattle well because i wasn't talking about fiance but but the point is step back see the violence see that it's endemic on both sides take a look at the last two cycles okay i the one before i've read the behaves was the civil war so i want to throw it at it this is time we get violent um the last section of your book talks about forecasts for the future and picks up a few themes that we should be thinking about um as we move forward into into whatever comes next um i was particularly struck that technology and education um shape really the opportunity and challenge that you see ahead and i'm wondering if um if you would close with a few thoughts around technology and education as challenge and opportunity going forward well if we take a look at each cycle it's driven by a technology there are other parts to it so this cycle they were ending now was driven by the microchip it enabled everything else the other cycle the roosevelt cycle it was before then uh that radio was driven by the automobile the one before that was driven by electricity the one before that by railroads the dominant technology is the one that's needed that socially is needed when we had factories and cities we need electricity so people could see at night and work there and when we started creating the uh the the middle class the prof the professional middle class we needed cars to get them to serve the suburbs where they created a new land use pattern so we needed all of these so when you look at what we look at next we have to see what do we need well the thing that we need the most is medicine and the reason i say that is not covered necessarily with this people living much longer than they did millennials are having much your children that means as they get older and fewer children are born we're going to have a political problem the old guys are going to vote all sorts of goodies for themselves to be paid for by the young and more than that right now being over 80 means you're probably sick alzheimer's so we've got to keep these people working it's not it's not a problem to be old it's a problem to be old and sucking up resources so that we need a medical system that can deal with a group of diseases otherwise we're hosed but clovid gives us another example the way we deal with pandemics is not necessarily ideal so where the money goes this time i don't know how it will flow this isn't medicine microchips may add to it or something like that education uh is critical your harvard university uh used to give out interviews uh people would interview potential candidates and they'd ask questions like is this the kind of person you'd like to room with is this the kind of person that you'd like to have lunch with you know a question of that i thought was a scot for zero novel that i had wandered into is this your kind of guy education is too expensive it is extremely inefficient and it it abhors the concept of being vocational but yes at these prices we need our kids to go out and do things so this will also be a transformation uh we really can't afford this because loans from the federal government are not going to be as easy to get and the price has to be shifted more important it has to align with the human necessities and what we've learned here and we see coming forward is we're going to have to have a lot of vocational training in and around the medical field which would hold you so maybe our technology needs and opportunities and our education needs and opportunities converge as we go forward dr friedman thank you so much for joining us this evening this was a very engaging conversation and i know we weren't able to get into the pros and cons or sides of every individual event in history or current affairs but our goal tonight was to look at through your eyes uh the systems and cycles and patterns that we see to better help understand who we are so the book is um the storm before the calm and it is subtitled america's discord the crisis of the 2020s and the triumph beyond thank you for joining us and now a word or two about our upcoming programs and before we do that here is where you can find out more about dr george friedman and geopolitical futures on facebook instagram twitter and linkedin next up in our author talk series are these following three programs um on the hospital life death and dollars in a small american town little continuation of part of our ending thoughts this evening last call a true story of love lust and murder in queer new york and terror to the wicked america's first trial by jury that ended a war and helped to form a nation three very different and diverse topics on your agenda march 22nd april 10th and april 13th and then next in our conversation series on repairing america uh please check out the following three lectures and conversations with nomie prinz sima yasmin and deborah lee you'll find more information at bpl.org once again thank you all for joining us our apologies for not getting to all of the questions um until next time thank you for joining us please be safe and be well you

Channel: Boston Public Library

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Length: 80min 12sec (4812 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021