What’s the Crisis?

The key to getting America back on track is identifying the mysterious crisis that’s tearing us apart.

Why is America in crisis? After decades of peace, prosperity, and stability, why is everything suddenly coming apart?

This is the most important question of the moment, and it’s one too few Americans have yet to seriously contend with. You can’t fix a problem you don’t first understand. I have some insights based on my work on political realignments.

I also think I have an answer.

WHAT’S A NATIONAL CRISIS AND GREAT DEBATE?

Political realignments center around national crises. As I explained in The Next Realignment, we create political parties during national crises as vehicles to debate and solve dangerous new problems. These “new” parties often keep their old brand names, like Republican or Democrat, but are new in the sense that they represent new ideologies, coalitions, agendas, and ideas. The last time this happened was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the crisis of the Great Depression, for example, Franklin Roosevelt launched his revolutionary New Deal agenda, birthing an entirely new version of the Democratic Party around a new ideology—the one we call New Deal liberalism. In response, opponents of Roosevelt’s ideas moved into the rival Republican Party and gave birth to another new ideology—modern American conservatism. National crises don’t just create new political parties, however, but also destroy old ones. When our New Deal parties emerged, their previous versions—created in the last national crisis during the Populist and Progressive Era—died. Those parties, created to solve the problem of another time and place, had become fragile, hollow, shells of their former selves without the tools or ideas to deal with the new crisis. The Depression shattered them to make way for something new.

The creates a continual political cycle of destruction and rebirth. We create two political parties with distinct ideologies during a crisis. Those parties exist for decades, maintaining the basic political framework but gradually becoming weaker as new problems emerge while the problems we created them to solve slowly fade away. Eventually, a new crisis arrives and they collapse in an epic fireball. This creates two new versions of our parties built around the new crisis.

• Each American era is, in essence, a unique Great Debate over a particular crisis.

• Political realignments are the moments old Great Debates die and new ones begin.

• National crises are the disasters that kill the phoenix, allowing a new version to emerge with a bright new vision designed for the future.

If want to know more about this cycle of realignments, you can read or listen to some of my other work on the topic.¹

This cycle has played out many times in American history. We’re currently living through what scholars consider America’s fifth distinct party system. Each began with a national crisis, creating a new Great Debate over how to solve it.

• America’s first great national crisis was how to build our new republic. Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had a Great Debate over two rival visions for how translate our new institutions into reality.

• Our second national crisis was how to extend democracy to the people as America pushed into the frontier. Jackson’s Democrats and the Whigs had a Great Debate over how America should reform to become a true democracy as people spread across a continent.

• Our third national crisis was slavery. Republicans and Democrats had a Great Debate over ending slavery and how to rebuild America without it after a civil war.

• Our fourth national crisis was the disruption of industrialization. Republicans and Democrats had a Great Debate over how to reform our institutions for a new industrial world.

• Our current system formed over the crisis of modernity the Great Depression ushered in. It was a Great Debate over reforming and centralizing America’s institutions for a more complex world.

It’s obvious our Fifth Party System is coming to an end. We’re at the cusp of another realignment.

Therefore: what’s the crisis? What’s the dangerous new question now tearing America apart? What’s our next Great Debate?

THE CLASH OF NEW IDEOLOGIES AND IDEAS

Our era is one of incredible disruptive change:

• There’s historic economic transformation as the industrial era transitions into a new post-industrial world.

• World-changing technology is springing up everywhere like AI, automation, social media, and the infrastructure of surveillance, all of which will have impacts we don’t yet understand.

• The collapse of the Cold War world brought about a more unstable world of superpower rivals and dangerous regional powers.

• Unprecedented cultural transformation is changing the nature of our relationships, social structures, families and work.

• Power, both public and private, is centralizing without visible and transparent levers of accountability.

• Technology, culture, and media are cutting through national borders changing the nature of governance and control.

• Most alarming, there’s a staggering decline in faith and trust in democracy, markets, American institutions, Enlightenment ideas, and America itself.

Nothing in our playbooks prepares us to deal with any one of these revolutions, much less all of them at once. Our current parties have no idea what to do about any of these problems. Our classic twentieth-century political ideologies offer no clear guide.

These challenges, however, are not the crisis. They’re merely it’s symptoms. The crisis is something larger—the reason these challenges working together have disrupted the stability of American society. What do they represent, and how are they undercutting America’s foundation? The crisis is the disease these symptoms caused.

None of the current answers on offer are sufficient.

• The establishment essentially claims nothing is fundamentally wrong. America’s leadership class appears to believe the crisis is just about a few bad people disrupting the system. Their solution is therefore to simply remove the bad people, allowing leaders to get back to their work. If everybody will just step back and get out of their way, giving them the power and control they need to rid us of all the bad people, they claim they can restore stability and fix things back to how it was before. I don’t think so.

There are, however, other emerging groups proposing answers in opposition to this establishment consensus. Each offers a different diagnosis of the crisis and proposals for addressing it.

• The Moderate Reformers claim the problem is mostly outdated systems and economics. These people are mostly on the center left, with some from the dissident right, and include the supply-side progressives, those worried about broken institutions, and campaigners to increase state capacity. They disagree with the establishment that the system is fine, but believe the answer isn’t to throw it out. It’s to reform it. They believe the key is to wipe away disruptive cultural politics and outdated fights over distribution and power. This will allow us to produce more things again. If we make America more productive and efficient, everybody gets richer, there’s more for everyone, and stability will be restored.

• The New Socialists claim the problem is capitalism. This group is more radical, rejecting core Enlightenment ideas like market capitalism. They believe the crisis is an outdated and inherently exploitative economic system empowering powerful out-of-control titans of greed. Their solution is to end “late-stage capitalism” and exchange it for a more benevolent new socialist economy.

• The National Populists claim the problem is a professional class that abandoned the working-class. This group has an uneasy relationship with an Enlightenment democracy they believe empowered an elite with a global vision disrespecting national sovereignty that exploits and rejects working and rural people. They believe this elite is the crisis, and the solution is to replace them with people and policies that honor and reward working-class and rural people the current elite has left behind.

• The Social Justice Reformers—the people many called the “woke”—claim the problem is social and cultural structures built around injustice. They have an uneasy relationship with Western institutions and ideals, which they believe constructed social structures that inherently promote economic and social hierarchies that are unjust. They believe the crisis is these social, government, and economic institutions constructed around unjust ideas, and the solution is to construct a post-modern society that upends traditional social and economic hierarchies, particularly surrounding identity, gender, and race.

• The Traditionalists claim the problem is modern ideas rejecting universal truths about human nature. The traditionalists have an uneasy relationship with modern culture and question structures and institutions that allowed it to take hold. They believe the crisis is an unwise elite undercutting pillars of stability that a good society requires. They include both Christian traditionalists and new secular traditionalists, who believe in a more energetic modern version of traditionalism that pushes back against social ideology.

These are just the current prime contenders, and I’m sure more will develop over the next few years.

I suspect every single one of these groups has something important to reveal, a piece of the critical puzzle. Some have compelling ideas I agree with, and that I believe can and will be part of future agendas. Others, particularly those directly challenging Enlightenment liberal democracy, I take serious issue with. All of them, however, I suspect has a point. They identify real problems we must grapple with, even if not the correct cause or solution. The problem is none of these approaches is complete alone. Each addresses only some discrete part —social problems, economic problems, one subset of issues, etc.—of a far larger and more difficult problem. I doubt any of them could, standing alone, unite half of a very diverse America around a compelling national agenda that could solve our entire daunting list of national problems and survive for a generation or more.

I look at this differently. I know the key isn’t to identify some specific problems you hope to solve. It’s to identify our era’s crisis, and from there launch a new Great Debate addressing it. I think I know what that crisis might be.

A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY

I think the crisis of our era is about a collapse of democratic legitimacy because America’s core promises are no longer being kept.

Legitimacy is the promises a society makes to its people. When a society keeps those promises, people see it as legitimate. Citizens work hard, obey laws, volunteer for wars, and generally cooperate with their society and government. When a society doesn’t keep it’s promises, it’s legitimacy collapses. Citizens stop pulling in the same direction, institutions grind to a halt, trust collapses, and everything starts falling apart. Legitimacy is like political electromagnetism, a powerful but invisible force holding societies together until people break it and it starts driving them apart.

America makes several promises to its citizens.

• It promises you influence and control over power that affects your life: Democracy.

• It promises you institutions with integrity operating with full transparency: Social Equality.

• It promises you opportunity and social mobility with a level-playing field to pursue your dreams: The American Dream.

These three promises are the core of the American idea. They claim Americans aren’t subjects, but free citizens. They don’t have rulers, but are participants in self-rule. They claim anyone in America has a fair and equal chance to become whatever they dream to be without having to seek the approval or consent of neighbors. They claim prosperity and a life of meaning is available to all. These promises are why America has succeeded, and now people feel they’re not being kept.

This connects all our problems. It’s what all these dissident ideas in different ways are trying to grasp. America is failing to keep its key promises, causing a catastrophic collapse in trust and faith in the American project and idea, which is why it’s starting to come apart.

This is what America’s next Great Debate is fated to be about. I’ll be writing more in my next piece about what this means—why legitimacy is important and why our era’s crisis is to restore America’s legitimacy and trust.

What do you think is America’s crisis? Join the community in the comments.

1. You can read the full article in the book, or in a more condensed form in this article in American Interest. You can also listen to the argument in this series on YouTube. Or you can search out other articles, radio, and podcast appearances online.