What’s Been Lost: Why This Time is Different
I’ve been referencing historian Peter Turchin’s 50-year cycles of integration and disintegration for the past eight years, along with Howe and Strauss’s 80-year cycle described in their book The Fourth Turning. Turchin’s visibility increased after his then-controversial prediction of a historic inflection point in 2020 turned out to be true.
In Turchin’s cycle, the last period of discord arose in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the Fourth Turning cycle, the last crisis was World War II (1941-1945).
If we compare these previous periods of discord/crisis to the present, two things stand out:
1. The buffers of credit that were available in those eras no longer exist today.
2. The social trust in institutions that enabled a coherent systemic response to those crises has eroded.
Only those who lived through the era of discord 1965 – 1974 can truly know how crazed and insecure the entire social-economic-political order felt. Reading about the shoot-outs, assassinations, riots, kidnappings and political crises (Watergate, Nixon resigning) doesn’t really communicate the sense of the world falling apart.
The entire history of the disintegration is rarely told. The book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, documents the oft-overlooked mass scale of domestic disorder: hundreds of bombings pockmarked the late 1960s and early 1970s, what would now be termed domestic terrorism.
These were rarely high profile events, as they became too numerous to stand out. Only the truly bizarre events (kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, etc.) received attention.
As for World War II, the upheaval is often blurred by a nostalgia for the social unity demanded by a war for the future of civilization.
What’s often overlooked in the history of the war’s immense mobilization was the government’s anticipation of wartime profiteering by unscrupulous business interests, and future president Harry Truman was tasked during the war with rooting out profiteering. By most accounts, his commission did good work, and while it would be impossible to snuff out all profiteering, good-faith efforts limited the abuse.
Equally noteworthy were the business leaders who performed war work at cost, without adding any profit.
The war effort was a voracious consumer of trillions of dollars (in today’s money) of capital, and this capital was largely borrowed from domestic sources buying War Bonds. Since consumption was restricted to ensure war materials received top priority, and virtually anyone available for work either served in the military or was hired for war production, paychecks generated savings that were invested in War Bonds.
Social trust was high: people trusted the government, scientists and experts, and the leadership elites were willing to serve alongside average citizens. This was not just for show. With his older brother (Joe Kennedy, Jr.) already serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, John F. Kennedy bribed a doctor not to evade service in World War II but to qualify for combat service in the U.S. Navy despite his disqualifying health issues.
Joe Kennedy, Jr. was killed in a dangerous volunteer air mission, and JFK risked his life in the South Pacific theatre.
Fast forward to the 1960s and early 1970s, and social trust in the government and institutions was severely eroded by multiple failures, secret programs and cover-ups. The list of authoritarian excesses is long, and rather than serving the shared interests of the citizenry, the actions of institutions were often insider CYT (cover your trail of misdeeds and illegal actions).
Simply put, self-interest replaced serving shared interests. This was typically covered by the artifice of “we covered up the truth that put us in a bad light for the good of the nation.” Uh, yeah, sure.
Despite this severe erosion of public trust, enough social trust remained to slowly repair the damage to institutional credibility and the social fabric. The US Senate’s Church Committee, launched in January 1975, was able to restore some transparency and re-establish fundamental guardrails on the secret and often illicit activities embedded in the US intelligence / law enforcement agencies.
“Created in response to explosive revelations of the U.S. Army’s program of domestic surveillance and an article published in the New York Times on December 22, 1974, by Seymour Hersh exposing assassination attempts on foreign officials by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the committee launched a series of investigations into American intelligence agencies including the CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Senator Church represented Idaho in the U.S. Senate from 1957 to 1981, and was a key figure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His willingness to investigate the intelligence community, which often put him at odds with members of his own Democratic party, and his experience serving as an intelligence officer in the Army during World War II, made him the ideal candidate to chair this bipartisan committee. Senator John Tower, a Texas Republican, was made Vice-Chair at Sen. Church’s request, and he also chaired some of the hearings. Senate leadership carefully appointed the remaining nine members to ensure a bipartisan effort.
At times, Senator Church faced criticism from his own party for what they viewed as concessions to the Republican members of the committee, but he refused to apologize for pursuing unanimity among committee members. In the end, all 14 reports issued by the committee were supported on a bipartisan basis, and the inquiry won praise for its sustained bipartisanship.”
Senator Church commented, “The trouble is, the watchdog committee never really watched the dog.” Of his committee’s work, Senator Church said on NBC’s Meet the Press on August 17, 1975:
“Now, why is this investigation important? I’ll tell you why: because I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Here is a partial list of the programs revealed by the Church Committee: COINTELPRO, project Mockingbird, Project Minaret, Project Shamrock, HTLINGUAL, Project MKUltra, and Project MKNaomi.
COINTELPRO: Covert operations by the FBI to infiltrate and discredit domestic organizations that it considered “subversive,” such as civil rights activists, feminists, environmentalists, protestors of the Vietnam War, and communists.
Project Mockingbird: CIA recruitment of journalists to spread propaganda through the media.
Project Minaret: NSA monitoring, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies, of communications of individuals on its “Watch List,” which included Senator Church, fellow Church Committee members Walter Mondale and Howard Baker, as well as Otis Pike, chair of the House committee investigating the intelligence agencies (known as the “Pike Committee”).
In summary: there was just enough social trust in institutions left in the early 1970s to work our way out of the disintegration phase and slowly assemble an integrative phase.
The Supreme Court made critical rulings in the Watergate crisis that were widely viewed as coherent with the US Constitution, the nation elected a non-insider president (Jimmy Carter) and Congress assumed its constitutional role of limiting the excesses of the federal government.
Unfortunately for us in the present, social trust has eroded, and we now live in an era of low social trust.
This has consequences. One analogy is that institutions act as referees in hotly contested political-cultural battles. Elections offer one avenue of change, and institutions such as Congress are designed to seek middle ground, or failing that, express the wishes of the majority within the guardrails of the Constitution.
If the populace no longer feels the refs are fair, or willing to impose limits on opponents’ conduct, then society slips deeper into the disintegration zone, where people feel that public and private institutions have failed by putting self-interest ahead of the public’s interests.
On the fiscal front, the situation is equally bleak. As this chart illustrates, the Federal government’s ability to counter a deep recession by borrowing and spending trillions of dollars is now limited by extreme debt levels.
Those who track the history of government debt generally draw the line in the sand at 100% of GDP, so 120% is already in the red zone. History is rather decisive: any attempt to add trillions in additional debt at these levels has zero chance of working as intended.
Note the debt-to-GDP ratio actually declined during both the stagflationary 70s and the 90s Internet boom. It soared from 60% to 100% in the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) “save” of the Federal Reserve, which inflated the money supply and pushed ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing) to boost borrowing.
But private debt matters, too. If households and enterprises have borrowed up to their capacity to service debt, their ability to “borrow their way to prosperity” will also be constrained.
Here is total debt, public and private (TCMDO). In Q2 1975, total debt was $2.5 trillion. If this had tracked inflation, it would have reached $15 trillion by Q2 2025. ($1 in Q2 1975 is $6 in Q2 2025.) (https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)
Let’s say that debt can double the rate of inflation if it’s being invested productively. That would put today’s total debt at $30 trillion.
But total debt isn’t close to $30 trillion; it’s $104 trillion and climbing, suggesting 70+ trillion is “excess debt.” As for all this borrowed money being invested productively–given “waste is growth” planned obsolescence and rampant asset appreciation / speculation, it seems obvious that most of this borrowed money was consumed by ephemeral products and services or squandered chasing asset bubbles.
What’s been lost: social trust and the financial buffers of credit.
Why this time is different: we have neither social nor financial buffers to help us through the disintegration phase.
I wish there was a positive spin on this, but the only positive here is to face the facts and prepare accordingly.
CHS NOTE: If your curiosity and interests range far and wide and you favor independent analysis, welcome home. Perhaps something here may change your life in some useful way. Writing is my only paid work/job, and I am honored by your readership and financial support.