Life in the United States has changed dramatically every 80 years since the country’s founding. There was about 80 years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the end of the Civil War (81 years 3 months and 25 days if you want to be autistic about it). It was about 80 years from the end of the Civil War until the end of World War II (80 years 3 months and 24 days from the end of the Civil War if you want to be precise). And it has been exactly 78 years (and one day, this essay was supposed to go up yesterday for cool points but I failed) between the end of World War II until the date of this essay going on line. If the 80 year pattern holds, we are on the cusp of a profound change in America.

In the context of this pattern, the profound change is the appearance of something brand new and never experienced before by Americans. Superficially, these changes are obvious. In the case of the Revolutionary War, the brand new thing was the creation of a new country. In the case of the Civil War, there was suddenly no slavery in the United States whereas before it had been a major economic force. And after World War II, America went from being a country that had no “entangling alliances” and a small federal government to being a nation that was embedded in a worldwide network of alliances with a massive federal government. But the superficially obvious changes conceal deeper changes that lay the ground work for the next crisis and attendant profound change.

The Crisis Of The Revolutionary War

This process of crisis resolution leading to another crisis down the road is easiest to follow if we start at the very beginning of the United States as a nation. Looking at the forces that lead to the Revolutionary War, we can see that its root was in the strong demographic growth of the colonies driven by a fertility rate that amazed European observers (slightly more than 7 children per woman on average which meant that it was common for woman to have more children then that). Mathematically it was clear even at the time that if the colonies kept growing at that rate they would overtake the mother country in population (in fact it took about 80 years from the time of the revolution….). Many observers in both England and America realized that a large fast growing population separated from the mother country by a large ocean was going to need some kind of new political accommodation. But what that political accommodation was going to look like or when it was going to happen was something that no one could predict prior to the war.

The growing demographic strength of the colonists brought with it a commensurate increase in economic power. This growing economy caused a divergence between the interests of the colonies and the economic interests of the mother country. For some in the colonies, the principle divergence was question of control over commerce between the colonies and the outside world. It was economically advantageous for the mother country to control this trade but it was economically harmful to the colonies. But for others in colonies, the biggest economic divergence was the question of being allowed to expand the colonies into territory reserved by Great Britain for Native Americans. From the perspective of Americans with big families, expansion was a way to provided good farms for all their children but from the perspective of Great Britain expansion was just a way to cause an expensive war with the Indians so that the colonist could breed like rabbits.

This divergence of interests and growing colonial economic might lead to the Americans to start lobbying for what they regarded as the “rights of Englishmen”. That is to say, they wanted a say in how they were governed. This lead to a moral debate with some arguing that the benefits provided by Great Britain in terms of defending and supporting the colonies entitled Great Britain to authority over those colonies while others arguing that slaves derived those same benefits from their masters and nobody should be kept in slavery against their will. When this debate started, it was not the intention of most of the people arguing for the “rights of Englishman” to create an independent country. But a cycle of American demands and English repression lead to a war that created a new country.

When looking at Revolutionary War period for insights on how the American cycles of profound change work, it is important to remember two things. The first is that though it was very possible to see how deep demographic, economic, and even moral forces were pushing for some kind of change, it was impossible for anyone to predict how that change would play out. The history of Canada, Australia, and South Africa all show that there is no fixed pattern as to how to break away from the mother country. If King George had not been so pig headed or if France had followed the prudent advice of Turgot and not gotten involved, things could have turned out very differently. The demographic and economic forces at work still would have produced some kind of change but what it could have looked like is anyone’s guess.

The other important thing to note about the Revolutionary War period is how the resolution of one crisis laid the ground work for the next. This is most obvious in the case of slavery. Both Jefferson and Washington were acutely conscious of the hypocrisy inherent in the contrast between their moral arguments and the fact that they owned slaves. More broadly, the hypocrisy of the South as a whole was on display for all to see at the constitutional convention as they argued that their slaves should count as people when it came time to determine the relative political power of the states but not count as people when it came time to determine who got to vote.

But even apart from the case of slavery, the Revolutionary War left open the question of what constitutes valid governance. After the war, it was firmly imbedded in the American mind that to be governed without consent was no different than slavery. But what constituted valid consent? Simple majority rule was not enough for the Founding Fathers or for most of the Americans that followed after them. They all felt that simple majority could be just as tyrannical as the rule of one man. So again, what was valid consent? The constitutional convention was supposed to resolve that question, but as events would show, the question remained open.

The Crisis Of The Civil War

Of all the crises that accompanied profound change in America, the Civil War was the most anticipated by its contemporaries. In the lead up to the Revolutionary War most of the people who started the agitation did not realize that the path they were on was leading to independence. When World War II came along, many people thought it was random disaster imposed on them by mad men who had gained power elsewhere. But in the case of the Civil War, almost everyone saw it coming a long way off.

The fact that everyone saw how slavery was tearing the country apart long before the Civil War has obscured how the start of the industrial revolution played a large part in tearing America apart. What is often forgotten is how the start of the industrial revolution in Great Britain saved the slave plantations in the south from economic oblivion. If it had not been for the start of industrial revolution coinciding with the American Revolution, it is possible that the slavery problems that bedeviled the United States could have been avoided.

When America first became a nation, the plantations in the South were not doing well economically. As a result, many of the founding fathers thought that the South would go the way of New York State. At the time New York State had slaves but it was clear that slavery was in the process of ending in New York State. So the founding fathers could not see why that process would not be the same in the South as a whole. And given the economic forces in play at the time of the Constitutional Convention, it was reasonable to hope that the South and the North would converge socially and economically. But the industrial revolution that was then just beginning in Great Britain would change all that.

Three years after the end of the Revolutionary War, the first power loom was created in Great Britain. Ten years after the Revolutionary War, Eli Whitney applied for a patent of his cotton gin. Prior to these two inventions, Cotton had almost no role in the economic life of the South. But as a result of these two inventions cotton rapidly took over as the most important product to the South. It took about 20 years after the invention of the cotton gin for cotton to really get going. But when it got going its growth was exponential. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850.

This rapid growth in the production of cotton created profound demographic changes. The most immediate and obvious change was it greatly increased the demand for slaves. After the Revolutionary War ended, slaves in the south numbered around 700,000 and many slave run plantations were having issues with profitability. Sixty years later in 1850 (a date we will come back to) there was 3.2 million slaves in American and cotton had made the fortune of most of the wealthiest men in American. It also had the effect of driving the poorer white farmers off of all the good land. Some of those went either to the free states (Lincoln’s father supposedly left Kentucky because he could not compete as a farmer against slave owners) or into the mountains (this was why what is now West Virginia, the mountains of Tennessee, and the mountains of North Carolina would turn against the Confederacy).

At the same time that slavery was being saved from economic oblivion by cotton in the South, northern commercial interests were struggling to compete against the flood of cheap British imports due to the British being the first to industrialize. For the North, this flood of cheap British imports meant that they saw no alternative to industrializing just as the British were doing if they wanted to maintain their commercial interests. It was commonly believed in the North that tariffs were needed on imported goods to give America industry a “fair” chance. The South was happy to be a commodity supplier to the British and saw tariffs primarily as a roundabout tax on cotton.

In other words, when the US started as a nation, the founding fathers hoped that America would converge and become more similar. The Jefferson hope in particular was that that entire nation would become one of small famers and free labor and that the moral issue of slavery would go away on its own. But contrary to all the hopes of the founding fathers, the impact of industrial revolution that started around the time of American Revolution was to increase the economic divergence between the northern and southern states. And contrary to Jefferson’s hopes, both the North and South would move away from the Jefferson ideal of small free farmers albeit in totally different ways. The South would create the cotton plantation system and the North would create large factories.

These economic divergences lead directly to the critical demographic divergence between the North and the South that would tear the entire country apart. A small part of this divergence was due to the economic success of cotton. In the South, large slave run plantations producing cotton would buy up all the best land. In the North, the best land remained in the hands of family farmers who had lots of kids. But the Northern desire to industrialize was the major driver of this divergence. This is because immigrants starting pouring into northern cities to do industrial jobs that the long established farming families would not do.

Up until about 1820, the population growth in America was almost exclusively derived from the fertility of American woman with immigration playing on minor role. In 1820, immigrant numbers started to become meaningful, but it was still just a trickle compared to what it would become. By 1850 (the same year the slave population hit 3.2 million) over a million immigrants were coming into America every year. And almost all of the immigrants were going to the North to work in the new dirty jobs that Northern industrialization was producing.

The combination of cotton driving the poor whites off the best of the South’s land and North’s industrialization pulling in huge numbers of immigrants caused a dramatic divergence in the demographic balance between the South and the North. At the time of the American Revolution, those states then in existence (obviously more would come after) that would later become the Confederacy had a population of just over a million. Those states then in existence that would remain loyal Federalists had a population of around 1.5 million people. In other words, when the US first became a nation, the North had a little over 1.5 times the population of the South.

In the aftermath of the revolution, the South managed to keep the parity in the number of “slave” states and “free” states as it was when the country was founded but they totally failed to maintain demographic parity. By the time of the Civil War, the parts of the South that would rebel had a population of around 9 million (including over 3 million slaves that could not be relied on to fight for the South) and the North had a population of 23 million (almost all of them free). This meant that the North went from a population advantage of 1.5 times the South to an advantage of 2.5 times the South in only 80 years. This was a very rapid divergence and it was the fear of this divergence overwhelming them that lead the Southern political class to increasingly talk about the necessity of secession in the years leading up to Lincoln being elected.

A fierce moral debate about industrialization attended all these economic and demographic changes. In modern times the moral focus on slavery has obscured this broader debate but if you read the original sources you will see it was a pressing issue of the time. It is true that slavery was a big part of this debate but at the time the pro-slavery crowd would always bring industrialization into the debate any time slavery was attacked on moral grounds. Their counter argument was often that industrialization could not exist without slavery because of its dependence on cotton (early industrialization centered on cloth production). Moreover, they argued that slavery was morally superior to industrialization because the plantations were only enslaving black people but the northern industrialists were enslaving white people. This simple caricature of the southern arguments does not do them justice. Many of the southern arguments against industrialization were sophisticated and accurately predicting many of the problems that industrialization would bring. But the above caricature does accurately represent the critical areas in which typical southern thought about industrialization was in error.

In the first place, the South failed to understand the significance of the fact that people were voluntarily crossing oceans to work in Northern factories where as no one voluntarily crossed the ocean to pick cotton. Since they really believed that Northern factory workers were no better than slaves, they discounted the Northern urban masses as being incapable of being good soldiers on the grounds that their slaves could not be made to fight so why should the “Northern Slaves” be any different? This caused them to severely underestimate the amount of combat power that the North could bring to bear.

But the biggest error the South made was their belief that commodity producers had the whip hand over the industrialized. One the surface, this made sense. You can’t make things if you don’t have inputs. In reality, it is much easier to find alternate inputs then it is to create the ability to make things. This was understood by the more farsighted of the southern politicians who wanted the south to industrialize as well but they were overruled by the majority of the southern wealthy class who were happy with being slave masters/commodity suppliers to the industrialized.

In retrospect, the common southern belief that the world could not get along without a crop that they themselves had only been growing in large quantity for about 60 years was an amazing delusion. As we look at how the 80 year cycles have worked in America’s past, we should not forget how delusional otherwise smart people can be to avoid looking at the fact that their way of life is at risk. Many southern writers were almost prophetic when it came to looking at the future of industrialization. But as soon as slavery entered the topic, they became blinded by the need to convince themselves and others that slavery was good and necessary. As a result they headed into a war that would transform their society with widespread confidence that they would win quickly and decisively.

The Civil War was the first widespread war in which industrialization played a major role. It demonstrated for the first (but not the last) time that the industrialized would crush the non-industrialized. This lesson was repeated all over the world and finally culminating in industrialized Germany with one arm behind the national back defeating the larger non-industrialized Russia in World War I. In other words the American Civil War was the start of the long successful military march of industrialization all over the world. But as the South had accurately predicted, industrialization came with its own problems. Those problems would lead to another crisis and profound change in the United States 80 years later.

The Crisis Of World War II

In the popular consciousness, there is no direct connection between industrialization and World War II. But it was the profound social and demographic changes problems caused by industrialization that changed the political order in American and the rest of the industrializing world. And it was industrialization that drew the world ever closer in a network of trade and competition for resources. The ferment of these two forces would culminate in World War II and another profound change in America.

The South might have been wrong about equating being slave and being a factory worker, but they were right about their being a big social difference between owning your own farm and working for a firm so large you were merely a number to those running the show. The factory worker daily experienced a profound power imbalance that was not experienced in the same way by the rural land owning population in American. Furthermore, the urban factory worker was subject to economic forces that the rural populations had been insulated from (at least to a degree). As a result the urban populations began to push for changing the political order in America as a whole to deal with the problems and concerns that they faced.

At the same time that social order within American was being changed, industrialization was also changing American’s relations with the rest of the world. Although trade has always been an important part of human economic activity, industrialization caused trade between nations to become more important than ever before. This increase in the importance of trade meant that American became more and more impacted by things in the wider world. In turn, American had a greater impact on things in the wider world whether they wanted to do or not. This process of ever greater integration was accelerated by the technological innovations that came along with the industrialization.

When these forces finally lead to change, it happened almost overnight. For example, in the late 1920s, the federal government’s share of GDP was less than 5% and outside of various wars it had never gone past 5% in the history of the country. Moreover, in the 1920s, the US government was firmly isolationist and even though previous US governments had been at times more willing to work with other powers (such as World War 1) the US had never entered into permanent military alliances with other major powers. Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances” was broadly respected across the political spectrum with an almost religious reverence for all of America’s history leading up to World War II. 20 years after 1929, American was enmeshed in permanent military alliances all around the world and the Federal Government expenditures would never drop below 15 percent of GDP even when America was not at war (these days Federal expenditures are about 25% of GDP). In other words, 80 years from the end of the Civil war, the permanent peacetime baseline of Federal expenditures tripled almost overnight and never changed back. On top of that, the US now had NATO, a commitment to defend Japan, and a number of other treaty obligations whose nature American had never before agreed to.

This tripling of Federal Government peace time expenditures is a quantifiable way of showing how much the political order changed overnight. But the change was more profound than merely the amount of money being spent by the government and its makings were rooted in demographic and technological change that had been taking place in the 80 years since the end of the Civil war. In order to understand how the cycle of crisis works in America, it is worth taking a deep look at why this change came about suddenly even though the forces at work had been advancing for the entire 80 years since the Civil War.

Southern apologists for Slavery had long pointed out that Industrialization was as incompatible with the Jefferson notion of democracy as slavery was. Their basic argument is that a factory worker could never be truly free and men who were not free would turn democracy into a sham. But in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, this was not obviously true. To be sure, slavery had been overturned and the Federal Government had established its supremacy over the states and the trauma of the civil war would take a long time to work through in the South. Yet outside of these things political order of the US did not change much for the average farmer in the north (which was most farmers in the US) pre and post Civil war except that they became better off in almost all respects and their nation became more powerful. More importantly, most Americans were still small scale farmers at the end of the Civil War notwithstanding the massive growth in industrialization (in part this was because the American farms were still producing babies at a pretty good clip and that balanced out the immigrants to a certain degree).

But all throughout the post-civil war area, this demographic reality was changing. And because it was changing, there was growing demands to change the political order because the factory workers themselves did not feel like they were truly free even if the farmers were more or less content. As long as the majority of Americans lived on farms and did not experience the problems of industrialization, this urban desire for change did not go anywhere in particular. The key to changing the American system was not any new ideology, it was the fact that in the 1920s that the urban population in America finally outnumbered the rural population. Once that happened, it was only a matter of a few short years before the political order changed to accommodate the desires of the industrialized.

This demographic change meant a shift in power from people whose economic and family life centered on the farm and local community to a people whose economic life was divorced from their family life. It meant a shift in political power from people whose local community might number a few thousand to people who might work in a factory that employed thousands and lived in a city that might number in the millions. Most importantly, it meant a shift in political power between people who felt strongly that the power of the federal government had no place in their lives to a people who were desperate for the federal government to come and balance out the economically unbalanced relationships that they were subject to.

The small family farmer was never going to embrace the government owning the means of the production (and this was true all over the world and why communists had to eliminate this class of people wherever they took power with the notable exception of Poland where they let the small holders keep their farms). Even for the non-landowning person in rural America, economic transactions were largely between people who knew each other really well. It was foreign to someone to seek the Feds to get involved in an employment dispute when the boss was likely to be a relative or at very least someone who was known for a long time. From the typical rural point of view, asking the Feds to get involved in day to day economic activity would be like asking a stranger to get involved in a family quarrel.

On the other hand, for those in the industrialized society, it was not obvious why it was better for an industrial baron to be calling the shots then the federal government. At least one got to vote for the president, nobody had any say (or at least they felt they did not) in who the industrial baron was. This difference in economic power was heightened by American’s increasingly fractured ethnic structure. The industrial boss was almost always an Anglo-Saxon in cultural background. The workers on the factory floor would often be Eastern European or Italian.

As long as most Americans were Anglo-Saxon farmers, the industrial barons had the upper hand politically as long as their industrial power did not adversely impact farmers. So on one hand you see that railroads were one of the first industries to be heavily regulated by the Federal Government because farmers were adversely impacted by the power that railroad companies could wield. On the other hand, prior to the 1930s the Federal Government almost always took the side of the industrialist during major strikes. This was because farmers had little sympathy for the unions as they viewed any victory for the unions as adversely impacting their own rights as employers. But as we have already seen, this alliance was doomed to be overthrown by industrialization’s own demographic success visa the agrarian lifestyle.

In retrospect, it is obvious that you can’t rely of the votes of the famers to maintain the existing political order while at the same time supplanting them demographically. But like the slave owners of the south, the industrialist could not bring themselves to see the demographic consequences of their own economic success and attendant massive importations of labor. As a result, they were blindsided by the results of the Great Depression.

Today, many people forget that there had been many economic depressions and crashes in the post Civil War era. But they had all taken place in economic system where most people were largely agrarian and thus even though the factory workers had suffered greatly, they were not enough of the population to effect massive political change. The “Great Depression” was the first depression to take place where the majority of the US population was urban.

In the “Great Depression” industrialized America suffered greatly. If you look at American employment as a whole, you will see that one out of four Americans were without work at the peak of the great Depression. But this figure, horrible as it is, actually downplays the sufferings in urban American because that figure looks at all of American and about 40% of Americans were still on the farm. If you look at the non-farm unemployment rate to correct for this fact, you will see that 37% of the urban population lost their job at the height of the Great Depression. Even that figure is hides the extent of the pain as female employment actually went up during the great depression. This was the result of high cost male breadwinners being replaced with lower paid females entering the workplace for the first time. These figures also only counts those who had no work and do not factor in those whose hours were sharply reduced or whose wages were otherwise cut. The more you start to drill down into the statistics, the more you start to see how horrible the Great Depression was for the low skilled urban masses and why they were so extremely motivated to change the political order. And as previously noted they now had the demographic means to do so.

But it would be wrong to reduce the profound changes that culminated in the end of World War II with a simple story about how most Americans came to live in cities and work in factories. Like the divergences between the North and South, there were a lot of changes in technology that lead to those demographic changes. And those technologies brought about a lot more changes to American then merely changing the nature of their job and where they lived.

For example, part of the profound demographic change in America post Civil War was brought about by the invention of the steam boats. Whereas pre Civil War the immigration was largely English speaking (think Irish) or Germans with skills, the post civil war proliferation of steamboats greatly reduced shipping costs and enabled boatloads of poor Italians and eastern Europeans to come across the Atlantic. But this technological change worked both ways. American could not have gotten involved in Great Power wars in Europe and Asia without the same technological innovations that enabled so many immigrants to come to America.

To put it simply, American could have easily had as large of a population at it did in 1917 using only the technology available to the Song dynasty in China. What America could not have done without industrialization was sending millions men overseas to fight a war in Europe like they did for World War I. This was a direct result of innovations in steamboat technology that first occurred during the American Civil war.

It is important to remember that American’s relative isolation for so long was not due solely to a moral choice. Prior to massive industrialization, American had roughly the same ability to intervene in Europe that the Chinese did. That is to say, they were irrelevant regardless of their demographic numbers. And by the same token, even powers that overmatched America in its early years (like Great Britain) found that while it was easy to defeat America in this or that battle, it was hard and expensive to transport over the oceans an army large enough to occupy American and ensure that those victories were permanent. This geographic protective barrier was at first eroded by the long march of the industrial revolution post Civil War and then almost completely destroyed by the invention of things like the jet engines, ballistic missiles, and the atomic bomb that all happened during World War II.

So the long march of industrialization not only changed the demographic makeup in American, it also overthrew the long standing geographic facts that kept American more or less isolated from the world. The negative consequences of the lack of geographic isolation went both ways. For example, the US exported its economic problems all over the world at the start of the Great Depression and made it a worldwide problem. On the other side of the ledger, American trade activities earned it enemies regardless of what it did. For example, Germany attacked American shipping because America would not stop trading with Great Britain during World War I where as Japan attacked American because America stopped selling Japan certain key resources during the lead up to Pearl Harbor.

As a result, the crisis of the Great Depression/World War II was an international crisis in ways that Civil War and the Revolutionary War were not. To put it in simplistic terms, American suffered an economic crash and shut down trade with outside world. This in turn disrupted worldwide trade leading to economic chaos across the World. This led the rise of Adolf Hitler (who believed that Germany must control more land/resources to thrive as an industrial power) and the rise of those in Japan who felt that Japan must control more markets and resources or they would forever risk being cut off from trade. These expansions ideologies would lead both powers into conflict with the US closing the circle.

In one sense, the crisis of the 1930s and its resolution with worldwide war was an easy crisis to see coming. Karl Marx made a religion out predicting the crisis that industrialization would bring and even those most strongly opposed his views lived in fear of the revolutions that were always threatening to spring from the industrialized masses. But in another sense, it shows how unpredictable the responses to such crisis are. No one regardless of their political views or how much they understood that industrialization was going to change things could have predicted 1950s American from a position in 1920s America or even 1930s American. As with the other American crisis we have looked at, it was very possible to see a crisis coming and many people did. But how it is going to work out in practice is something that nobody could forecast. It is a brave new world on the other side of a crisis and using what you see around you now to try to predict it is a fool’s errand.

What Does This Matter?

As we draw to the end of the this review it is worth taking a step back to see if this makes any sense or if is just an exercise in cherry picking? After all, America has had a great number of wars and crisis of various sorts. Why should the Revolutionary War count but not the Mexican-American War? Why should World War II count but not World War I? A simplistic answer to these questions would just be to appeal to the body counts.

Up until the Civil War, the Revolutionary War was in a class all its own in terms of body counts that Americans experienced. Neither the War of 1812 nor the Mexican-American War came close. In fact, depending on which estimate Revolutionary War dead you go by (Some people give figures as high as 70,000), you could add up the deaths of the War of 1812 and Mexican-American War and still not come close the total that died. Even if you go by the lowest numbers for Revolutionary War dead, it is still pretty much a tie in terms of death toll for deaths in wars prior to the Civil War and the Revolutionary War itself. On the better metric of losses as a percentage of population, 1% of the US population died during the Revolutionary War. That would be a war with millions of dead people if it were to happen in today’s context.

The Civil War needs no justification as to its place in American history if the heuristic is the number of dead. In absolute terms it remains the single largest loss of life of any American War to date. Even in relative terms, it tops the Revolutionary War with about 2% of the population dying while on duty during the Civil War. To belabor the obvious, all of the American conflicts leading up to World War II added together (including World War I) would not come close to matching the death toll in the Civil War. It is scary to think that by the standards of some countries histories, 2% is getting off easy.

On the absolute loss of life scale, World War II seems like almost as much of a no-brainer as the Civil War. You could throw in all American losses from all post World War II conflicts and throw all the American losses from World War I just for good measure and you sill would not equal the losses that American experienced during World War II. But on a relative scale, World War II has a far lower percentage loss of life then either the Civil War or the Revolutionary War. Only .3% of the US population died placing it significantly lower than even the Revolutionary War in terms of relative losses but still placing it as the third highest relative wartime loss of life in American history.

An answer the question significance more in line with the arguments of this essay is the fact that these three were culminations of social forces in way that the other wars were not. If you had imposed a 5 year cooling off period, the War of 1812 probably would have never happened. If you had tried to do the same thing for the Revolutionary War, the demographic and economic forces in play would have still brought about some sort of dramatic change/crisis. You can argue that the Mexican-American War was brought about by social forces that would have lead to a fight with between the two countries regardless if a delay was imposed if you want. But if you look at what those forces were, you will see that they culminated in the Civil War. And you can say a lot of things about the issues raised by American participation in World War I, but in the end everything you say will have to acknowledge that all of those issues were resolved by World War II and that World War I was just a warm up.

To explore all these things in depth would require more space then would be profitable in this essay. But it is unlikely that picking the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and World War II as being the most significant crisis points in American History will be controversial among those who know their history. What is more controversial is whether there is any significance in the 80 year figure or whether it is just a coincidence of history. At first glance there does not seem to be any particular reason why crisis should fall along that fault line and this maybe should give us some feelings of relief as we approach the 80 year mark in our own time. This sense that the 80 year figure is meaningless seems all the more credible when you remember that the 80 years is from end point to end point. In other words, at past crisis points, American had already been undergoing serious trauma by the time they got without a couple of year of the 80 year point. That level trauma is not in effect today.

But if you move past the presently experienced effects and try to understand why the past crisis started to fall at the 80 year mark, it is starts to get more worrisome. It appears that the crises fall around the 80 year mark because they are driven by demographic change. Just looking at on surface view, it seems to have taken about 80 years for demographic change to work its way through political and economic structures. To take just one example, the politicians who held American together prior to the Civil War were all men who had been born around the time of the American Revolution. For men like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun the term founding fathers was not purely metaphorical. Their fathers were the generation that founded the United States and they worked hard to keep it together. But as soon as they were out of the way and a generation for whom the term “founding father” was purely metaphorical took over then politics in the North and the South got a lot more radical.

We can see the same thing in America today. The baby boom generation politicians for whom “the greatest generation” means Mommy and Daddy has a much different outlook then the younger politicians on both the right and the left (Trump notwithstanding, but you will note the conservative politicians who support him most fervently are almost all from younger generations). We are already seeing a much different type of discourse as a result of this change and it will get even more so as the boomers who are hanging on even past the point of senility finally depart from the scene. It is possible that we are running a little late because advances in medicine are preventing the type of demographic switch over that has trigger past crisis.

Regardless, our relief and or are alarm should be based not on the 80 years but on whether we see the building of demographic and social forces that threaten the existing social order. It is those things that bring crisis and bring it they will even if they are a few years late. But these things are better left to a future essay to explore.

For now, it is sufficient to note that past American crisis have all largely been predicated in advance by at least some of the people cotemporaneous to the times, but the outcomes of those crisis were outside the scope of what anyone expected. It is also important note how demographics and technical forces intersected to create these crisis and how some people who are otherwise insightful can fail to see a particular aspect of the coming crisis that touches upon their well being (think of the Southern plantation owners and industrialist). We have seen that even if you did not look at the forces around you but simply counted down from the last great crisis, you would have decent guide to the fact that major change was coming simply by seeing how close we were the 80 year mark. In the next essay, we will look at what we might learn about our own time from those factors.