The United States faces several converging transitions which have come to a flash point culminating in the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump. The United States faces demographic, political, economic, and social transitions each of which have the potential to cause major societal upheaval. In combination, the synergistic effect could have unpredictable global impacts that would lead to feedback cycles influencing the lives of ordinary Americans.
Demographically, the United States faces the passing of the veterans of the World Wars (i.e., the “Greatest Generation”) and the exit from the workforce of the Baby Boomers. This demographic shift is consequential in the United States, because with it passes on the living memory of the transition from an isolationist nation to a nation serving as the linchpin of the global order. The Greatest Generation and Baby Boomer generations stewarded the United States’ leadership of the post-World War II Westphalian world order, the conception and construction of the modern communications, transportation, energy and electric power, military, industrial, and flood defense infrastructures. These technological advances combined with the global geopolitical prominence of the United States ushered in an era of national prosperity that spread to Western Europe, Asia, and is now continuing to influence development in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Politically, the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers achieved this transformation of the Western standard of living without bankrupting the nation. Almost the entire stock of modern infrastructure was built and financed by the Greatest Generation. Almost the entire social safety net was conceived, created, and financed by the Greatest Generation. Many of the social and environmental reform legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, was conceived, promulgated, and enforced by the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers. In short, the modern political infrastructure was established by the generations which are beginning to lose influence on American life.
These demographic and political factors helped the United States establish economic hegemony, not only over the Western hemisphere, but essentially globally. The United States became the world’s reserve currency, and hosts the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. In exchange for upholding the world order established by the Greatest Generation, the world accepted United States economic hegemony and dominance. The people of the United States have enjoyed the privileges of global leadership in exchange for discharging the responsibilities of guarding the world order.
In 2017, it appears that we the people of the United States have rejected not only the responsibilities, but also the privileges of global leadership.
Ironically, the world order of the United States has established a global stability and security that facilitates more fluid exchanges of people, goods, and services across national boundaries, thereby extending the community with whom Americans find themselves in competition. These increases in competition mean that although the United States as a nation continues to reap the greatest rewards from discharging its global responsibilities, the painful effects of global economic shifts will be unequally shared at home. At the same time, the increase in economic and political complexity of even the most ordinary Americans’ life has made it more difficult to forecast the consequences of political choices. While hoping to make a choice that restores the economic prosperity of 1950s and 1960s America, America has made a choice that threatens everything unique about the United States.