Verwandte Artikel zu The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the...

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

Friedman, George

 
9781101911785: The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101911786 ISBN 13: 9781101911785
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

*One of Bloomberg's Best Books of the Year*

The master geopolitical forecaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Next 100 Years focuses on the United States, predicting how the 2020s will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

In his riveting new book, noted forecaster and bestselling author George Friedman turns to the future of the United States. Examining the clear cycles through which the United States has developed, upheaved, matured, and solidified, Friedman breaks down the coming years and decades in thrilling detail.
     American history must be viewed in cycles—particularly, an eighty-year "institutional cycle" that has defined us (there are three such examples—the Revolutionary War/founding, the Civil War, and World War II), and a fifty-year "socio-economic cycle" that has seen the formation of the industrial classes, baby boomers, and the middle classes. These two major cycles are both converging on the late 2020s—a time in which many of these foundations will change. The United States will have to endure upheaval and possible conflict, but also, ultimately, increased strength, stability, and power in the world.
     Friedman's analysis is detailed and fascinating, and covers issues such as the size and scope of the federal government, the future of marriage and the social contract, shifts in corporate structures, and new cultural trends that will react to longer life expectancies. This new book is both provocative and entertaining.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. George Friedman is Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a company dedicated to forecasting the course of the international system (www.geopoliticalfutures.com). He is an internationally recognized strategist on global affairs and appears frequently in the media, and is a New York Times bestselling author of The Next 100 Years, Flashpoints,The Next Decade, The Storm Before the Calm, America's Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. Prior to founding Geopolitical Futures in 2015, Friedman was Chairman of Stratfor, the geopolitical intelligence publishing and consulting firm he founded in 1996. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

The American Regime and a Restless Nation

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, right after adoption, a woman waiting outside the old Pennsylvania State House asked Benjamin Franklin whether the nation would be a monarchy or a republic. His answer was “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The Constitutional Convention invented the American government. It was an invention in two ways. First, it created a government where none had existed. Second, it created a machine, the machinery of government, which had sprung from the minds of the founders. Unlike other governments, it had no past. This government came into existence through design, architecture, and engineering.

The machine was built on two principles. First, the founders feared government, because governments tended to accumulate power and become tyrannies. Second, they did not trust the people, because the people—in pursuing their private interests—might divert the government from the common good. Government was necessary, and so of course were citizens, but both had to be restrained in such a way that the machinery of government limited their ability to accumulate power. The founders had created such a machine.

The founders were trying to invent a machine that restrained itself, thereby creating a vast terrain in American life that was free from government or politics. They sought to create a sphere of private life in which citizens would pursue the happiness that had been promised in the Declaration of Independence. The private sphere would be the sphere of commerce, industry, religion, and the endless pleasures that were the domain of private life. The most important thing about the machine they invented was the degree to which it was restrained from intruding on the things they held most important, the things that were not political.

It is one thing to invent a machine and another to make it run without extensive maintenance. The solution for this invention was to make it inefficient. The balance of powers that were created achieved three important things: first, it made the passage of laws enormously difficult; second, the president would be incapable of becoming a tyrant; and third, Congress would be limited by the courts in what it could achieve. The founders’ remarkably inefficient system of government did what it was designed to do; it did little, and the little that it did, it did poorly. The government had to protect the nation and maintain a degree of internal trade. But it was private life that would create a cycle of creativity that would allow society, economy, and institutions to evolve at remarkable speed yet not end up tearing the country apart, save for some near misses. This is why Benjamin Franklin left the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia both confident and cautious. He knew that the regime was designed to balance powerful and dangerous forces, and he knew that it was a new and untried form of government.

This was not simply a matter of the legal phrases contained in the Constitution. It was even more a matter of creating and enshrining moral principles, some only implicit and others clearly stated. Limits on society, both public and private, can be imposed not by political fiat or documents but by rendering the extraordinary moral vision as merely the common sense of the nation. The moral principles were complex and sometimes at odds with each other, but they had a common core: each American ought to be free to succeed or fail in the things he wished to undertake.

This was the meaning of the idea of the right to pursue happiness. The state would not hinder anyone. A person’s fate would be determined only by his character and talents. The founders did more than separate the state and private life. They created an ongoing tension between them. Visit a meeting of any local public school board, where the realities of the government meet the needs of the people. The desire not to have increased taxes—but to deliver increased services—confronts a government that constantly seeks to expand its power and funding, without committing itself to any improvements. The pressure accumulates on the democratically elected members of the school board who are caught in between. This is the microcosm of the tension, which leads from the local level to Washington.

The Republic, in principle, was not wedded to any particular place or people. The founders saw it as the form of government and society that was the most natural and moral. It could have been an ideal form of government anywhere. The Republic could have failed in the United States, yet whether it was in existence elsewhere or nowhere, in the eyes of the founders it would still have remained the most just of political orders.

This meant that the regime was unique. It was not connected solely to the people who lived in America. It was theirs if they kept it and belonged to others if they chose to have a regime like this. That made the United States radically different from other nations, which are rooted in a common history, language, culture, and place. For example, France and Japan are deeply tethered to their past. America is rooted in an invention, a form of government designed with a moral and practical end, but not, in principle, rooted in the American people. Hence Franklin’s warning. The very concept of the American republic is artificial, unconnected to the past.

The regime is called the United States. The country is called America. The regime and the country are linked by the country’s accepting the principles of the regime. It need not do so in order for America, the country, to exist. Americans could have chosen to switch to a different form of government—a monarchy, for example—and the country would have remained America. But we would no longer have been the United States, in the full institutional and moral meaning of the term. The United States of America is the place where the principles of the regime govern the country. This is a very different understanding from what exists in most other countries, and it has profound, and sometimes not recognized, consequences.

You can say that you are a citizen of the United States, but you cannot say I am a “United Statian.” The language doesn’t permit it. Your natural relationship is to America, your homeland. Saying you are American is easy. But your love of the land and of the people, and your relationship to the United States, are very different things. One of the constant challenges of the Republic is to keep the two aligned, for our natural inclination is to love our home, and loving the Republic is an intellectual exercise. The two need not be one, but the American founding is designed to make certain that there is no unbridgeable distinction. Mostly it works. When it doesn’t, there is tension.

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin formed a committee to design a great seal for the United States. Given that the United States had been plunged into war by the signing of the declaration, this would not have seemed a priority. What these three men knew, however, was that the United States was a moral project and moral projects require icons, things that define the moral mission and carry with them a sense of the sacred. It took years to produce the Great Seal. In 1782, Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, was asked to take this project to conclusion. He did, and the final product now rests in several places, as sacred in American life as the Republic’s principles. The most important place you will find it is nearest to the hearts of Americans: the dollar bill.

Inventing the government was the preface to inventing a nation. Governments can be machines, but nations have to...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101911786
ISBN 13 
9781101911785
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland