How “The Next Era of American Greatness” Begins

Statistically speaking, the final two minutes of a football game never take two minutes.

With timeouts, fake injuries, incomplete passes, fake injuries, and then all the fake injuries deployed to stop the clock, those last two minutes can stretch to as much as 20 minutes… though 10 to 15 minutes is more common.

I point this out not because of any particular need to talk about all the clock-stopping fake injuries in the final two minutes of a football game, but to instead offer up an analogy on slow death.

Not death in a mortal context.

Death in a political and societal context.

Trigger warning: If you’re greatly offended by talk of American decline, I would urge you to close down this email and maybe go make a calming chamomile tea. Otherwise, you won’t be happy with today’s message.

If, however, you want insight into tidal changes that are coming and which are historically and socially necessary, then you will want to keep reading.

Either way, please understand that today’s dispatch in no way aims to denigrate my homeland. As I’ve written many a time, I love my country. My America—the America I came of age in during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s—was a spectacular place.

It truly was Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.” I love that America. I long for that America. But that’s not the America I see today.

Which leads me to this dispatch: What comes next?

And more relevant to what we do here at Field Notes… “How do I prepare?”

What comes next is a new kind of American socio-political system… in a country that could very well be geographically smaller due to states seceding. (That’s a different topic for a different day.)

What’s happening right now in America seems unique—a period very different than any of us have known in our lifetimes.

It is not.

Some history:

1776: The Revolutionary War destroys monarchy and installs democracy.

1861: The American Civil War replaces a collection of loosely connected states with a unified nation of states under a true federal government, and reshapes the country’s economy and profoundly restructures society by way of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that the war directly spawned. (All dealt with equality and human rights.)

1945: The end of World War II births Pax Americana and the rule of the dollar, and it ushers in social safety nets (such as Social Security) that see the world’s largest middle class emerge.

Mathematically interesting is the fact that those events all succeeded one another within 80 to 85 years.

And we are now exactly 80 years past the end of World War II.

I have been writing to you for several years now with the message that I suspect we see a social, fiscal, monetary, or political crisis emerge in the 2027/28 timeframe that structurally reshapes and redefines America going into the 2030s.

To be clear, the 2030s will mark the renewal. A rebirth. A bright age for whatever version of America emerges.

But incredibly dark days will mark the runup to that new age…

An unraveling, now at play, that in many ways looks a lot like fascism. (Fascism, I will note here, is not where we end up. It’s just the path America has to walk to get to where we’re going.)

I know fascism is a word with which many people will disagree, some probably angrily. But step back and consider America today in terms of the dictionary definition of fascism:

• Ultranationalism: Check. “America First!” “Make American Great Again!” Mass deportations. Demonizing immigrants for crimes they commit in numbers that are teensy relative to homegrown Americans.

• Authoritarianism: Check. Trump has clearly established his political brand around the idea that he alone is the sword and shield who can defend America from the world, and he does so by exerting powers the Constitution explicitly does not afford him.

• Militarism: Check. America has been an increasingly and aggressively militaristic society in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

• Suppression of opposition: Check. Trump is using the courts and executive orders to try to quash any dissent in the media, among politicians, and by attacking Constitutional rights of assembly, free speech, and protest.

• Economic control: Check. Trump has imposed illogical tariffs on friend and foe and is constantly calling Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell “low IQ,” an “average mentally person,” and a “very stupid person, actually” in his attempts to pressure the Fed into lowering interest rates, even though lower rates might not be the wisest course for an economy lurching toward stagflation (if we’re not already there).

I have to stop here and ask that you do not read that as any kind of political jab at Trump. I am just chronicling verifiable facts and fitting them into the matrix that defines a society’s political system.

And I will say that Trump, per se, is not the issue.

Trump is the angry fist pump of an increasingly large swath of Americans who are done with the 0.1% who are steering the economy and politicians, and who are using their power to dismantle the American middle class by funneling workers’ wealth into the ever-greedy maw of an exceedingly small class of uber-elites.

In short, the hoi polloi are raging against the machine, and Trump is simply the blowtorch they’re using to burn the place down.

But like those last two minutes in a football game, it has taken the better part of the last 25 years to reach the conflagration stage we’re now seeing and which will lead us into the next iteration of America.

And what might that look like?

You can bet that millennials, gen Z, and gen Alpha are going to unceremoniously usher out America’s laissez-faire brand of capitalist individualism. In its place they will bring about something more communal. Not socialism. But something socialism-adjacent, wrapped in red, white, and blue.

Maybe something like communitarianism…

A return to a federal republic in which DC is no longer overlord but rather a low-powered aggregator of laws that govern common needs such as interstate commerce, border control, defense, interstate highways, and transportation.

States, even smaller city-states, will very likely emerge as the centers of power locally and regionally. Think: Miami, in the form of Singapore, as its own, separate political entity serving as gateway to and financial hub for the Caribbean basin. Or Atlanta remade as the once and future Capital of the South.

Basically, “community” in its purest sense of the word (people caring for people) but broadly reimagined as cities, states, and maybe smaller, particular regions that function symbiotically based on shared political, social, and religious values.

That once defined America in her early days.

Today, the diversity is too great.

The distaste for and distrust of Washington, DC has eroded any sense of America as a unified community. It’s a bunch of waring communalists unwillingly bound into a dysfunctional whole by duct tape, spit, and some Bubblicious bubble gum (grape flavor, of course).

In many ways this touches on what I mentioned moments ago about secession, only without the secession.

Nevertheless, it still means radical and fundamental changes to the US economy, American power, and the dollar’s role in the world. And that’s where I’ll pick up in tomorrow’s dispatch.

Stick around—more to come…