Don't Despair, we have been here before!!!
By George Friedman - February 27, 2020
My new book has finally been published. Of all the books I have written, this one took the longest. I conceived the principles around which it would be built – the idea of cycles guiding the United States – in a bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, sometime in the winter of 1975. I know it was winter because it was cold. I was drinking with two friends from the U.S. Army War College, also known as Carlisle Barracks. It was the base from which George Washington reviewed the troops moving west to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The rebellion was about the authority of the federal government and the Constitution, and it was at the beginning of our first cycle, when institutions and society were in danger of collapsing, and the republic in danger of failing as it was born.
This wasn’t the subject of our despair that night. Richard Nixon had gone, Gerald Ford was a non-entity, Vietnam had been lost, and the U.S. military was held in contempt by many. There was a Soviet exercise underway (just another exercise that armies have) and we elevated it to a world historical event. The Soviets knew we were weak and, knowing of our weakness, would inevitably strike. Our despair was deep, deepened further still by extremely bad bourbon, the kind that leads to weeping. We reinforced each other pointing to other signs of collapse until the other two left, leaving me with the thought that the waitress looked much better than she did when we had come in, and what my father had said to me a few days before: “There is no decline, defeat. Boy, you have no idea what that looks like. This is just God tickling you. Be a man instead of a [expletive].” My father’s inspirational speeches were unorthodox.
I was caught between two drunken lieutenant colonels and was then someone who would have written the book on despair. My job was to abandon all hope and feelings in general and try to evaluate what was happening. I asked the question I had been taught to ask: Have you ever seen this before? I thought about it deeply, then went home to write on an IBM Selectric I had spent a thousand dollars on. What I did was mapped out American despair and rage, moments like this when the economy was collapsing, the enemy was readying, and men like me had sat in bars drinking themselves silly.
My focus had been on Minsk and not on Minnesota, but as I stared at the patterns of American history (and truthfully never gave the Whiskey Rebellion a thought) I started to see something. Oddly enough, I saw the crisis of 1824-28. I saw the chaos of the 1870s, the Great Depression of the 1930s. I saw the founding, the Civil War and World War II, and the deep order in our republic. Whenever I can see the pattern I become euphoric, and I went from despair to triumph and thought to myself, “We are due for a shift in 1980.” (I’m really not making this up.) I then put away the notes and never thought of them again, until after 2008 when I began to see that same despair.
I now have several computers, a book agent and a publisher. I am also a half century older, and it is odd to be living through a cyclic change for the second time. Odd because it’s like going to a movie for the second time. Odd because the soul is transformed after 50 years, and having seen that much of the wisdom of my father’s admonition has turned out to be true, I tend not to panic.
The loss is that I am no longer afraid, since fear can be a gift. My wife and I were taken to lunch on book publication day by my editor, our publicist and his assistant. It was not the Gingerbread Man in Carlisle but a New York restaurant near the Fox studios where I had given an interview to a program called The Wall Street Journal at Large. Over lunch, the two young women who work with my editor spoke of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. I said it was once inconceivable to me that a Brooklyn Jewish socialist who thought that Sweden was a country to emulate could possibly be even considered for nomination by a major political party. This offended them in too many ways to count, but I am, unfortunately, immune to embarrassment when my mouth is living its own life, wild and free.
The point I tried to make was that Trump and Sanders cannot be reined in by party elders because there are none. The establishments that once dominated each party have collapsed because their time is past. Trump did not crush the Republican establishment. It had collapsed under Barack Obama, a picture of irrelevance and self-confidence. The same happened to the Democrats under Trump. Trump crushed Jeb Bush, the poster child of the Republican establishment, as Biden is being crushed today, facing a cluster of people certainly outside the Democratic establishment.
Trump won by being outrageously insulting. His opponents could not fathom that his insults would not cost him his election. So today when you watch the Democratic debates, you see a mass of insults. The goal is to humiliate your opponent, on the assumption that he who embarrasses best will be sworn in. In this sense the Democrats have become the thing they hate the most: Trump. But where Trump was one of a kind, we now have (insert your number here) each trying to be as offensive as possible in pointing out the shortcomings of the other. Where once we heard “I disagree with my distinguished colleague,” we now hear charges that if said decades ago would have been frowned on but now are not.
My point to them over lunch was that the old system had run its course and the malice that had been hidden for some time has sprang up in the guise of people, but that it should not be taken seriously, as in a decade or so all will be well. Then I realized the ugly truth. For me, a decade has become of little note. For them, it looms as large as life. That night in Carlisle when this chapter of my life was born, three solid men worked themselves into a frenzy because our enemies were closing around us. Now, New York publishing industry people insisted that the Trump dragon must be slain, and my insistence that we ought to have a mud wrestling match between Bernie and Donald to decide the outcome was met with those rigid smiles that people get when they must be nice to someone they suddenly despise. And the suggestion that they relax and it will all go away was inconceivable.
And that is why this moment will pass. Because when I was as young as they are now, I wanted to do something, anything. It is the destruction of the past that creates the future, and now my wisdom is reduced to a book. Washington did not let the Whiskey Rebellion slide. I may know in retrospect that it was a forgone conclusion how it would all end, and perhaps Washington knew as well. History is not made by those who keep things in proportion. I can’t escape the fact that Trump against Sanders would be a sight to behold. With all my perspective, watching a debate between those two while drinking bad bourbon would remind us all what America is about.
The publication of this book brings a 50-year cycle to a close. At such a moment I should lapse into silence and contemplate the meaning of life. But I’m not in the mood for the philosophical. I want to see world-class mud wrestling, and ask a serious question: What ever became of that waitress?