I’ve always harbored doubts about futurists who claim American history is steered by predictable social and economic cycles. I’m reminded of a book that undermines the pyramidologists, mostly Victorian explorers, who took thousands of measurements at Giza — returning to England and playing with them for a decade. A modern laptop would have reduced their labors to a few minutes and discovered hundreds of relationships that mimic geometric and mathematical constants. Touted as proof of alien or divine influence in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, similar results can be produced by measuring the Washington Monument.

Consequently, I was skeptical when I picked up George Friedman’s, “The Storm Before the Calm.” Friedman is the founder of Geopolitical Futures, a forecasting company that works mostly with private businesses. Before that he served as chairman of STRATFOR, a global intelligence clearing house. He also penned the bestsellers, “The Next Decade “and “The Next 100 Years.” Published in 2020 before the last presidential election, “The Storm Before the Calm” has been receiving recent attention for its surprisingly accurate predictions regarding the political turmoil afflicting the United States. Friedman postulates a pair of American crisis cycles: an 80-year governmental and institutional realignment repeatedly linked to wars and a recurring 50-year socioeconomic restructuring. For the first time, they are arriving simultaneously at the end of this decade.

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I’ve always been more of a “black swan” believer, looking for unexpected disruptions rather than searching out patterns. One conclusion I’ve reached is that we tend to overlook the perspective of historical figures since the advent of the industrial and technological revolutions. We forget they perceived their lives and world as being slick and modern and as advanced as civilization would ever achieve. They were dead wrong, of course. Change just keeps hurtling at us — trains, automobiles, planes, radios, nuclear bombs, television, space travel, personal computers, email, Twitter and now, artificial intelligence. It’s all proven so glamorous we forget to attend to the obligations of family, romance and friendships. How can they be as important, exciting and world-changing as whatever new tech gadget will appear next?

My grandfather, Byron Howard, was born in 1881. He was released from the Naval Academy in 1901, after losing hearing in one ear following a mastoid infection. He then traveled to Boise, Idaho from Maryland by train and rode on to the School of Mines in Moscow, Idaho by stagecoach. In 1903 he departed for the Klondike gold fields where he would remain until 1916, returning to Minnesota as a mining engineer on the Mesabi Iron Range. He lived with us when I was attending high school. I remember his discovery of Alvin Toffler’s bestseller, “Future Shock,” which upset him considerably. Toffler’s prognostications left him concerned my brother and I were destined for a dismal future. I never bothered to read the book then but recently located a used copy, at least in part to discover what Toffler may have gotten wrong. My grandfather had experienced more change in his 90 years than I imagined I would ever witness.

Friedman argues the major institutional failure causing our growing political friction is the complexity of the federal government and a societal surrender to technocracy and the cult of expertise. This formulation caught me somewhat by surprise — I suspect because I’ve spent much of my working life enmeshed in this technocracy. He believes we are fast approaching our fourth institutional cycle, the first running from the Revolution through the Civil War, the second extending through our victory in WWII and the present cycle dominated by technological innovations. Our fourth lies immediately ahead, but Friedman envisions choppy political seas as we transition to a more humane arrangement between bureaucrats and voters. Friedman predicts the candidate elected in 2024 will experience a failed presidency only to be replaced by the man or woman who restores calm and launches another era of prosperity. I can imagine far grimmer scenarios.

Friedman has a point, however, about how the complexity of governance has grown so opaque that the Affordable Care Act, as an example, ran more than 2,000 pages, replete with provisions that were actually contrary with one another. This was the byproduct of “too many cooks in the kitchen,” each drafting their tiny piece without any coordination, which prompts me to consider the failure of last year’s 58-page Proposition HH advertised as the solution for reducing property taxes. In fact, it only shrunk the size of expected increases. All this legerdemain came across to voters as a bait-and-switch maneuver. This November’s 38-page substitute will ask Colorado homeowners to choose between a complicated rate-braking formula, which wisely includes Republican input, up against brief, understandable property tax caps offered from right field think-tanks.

In a brief encounter with one of the 2024 legislation’s senate sponsors, I pointed out legislators were at a disadvantage as they were once again proffering property tax relief only in so far as it slows the degree of increase and then markets this as tax savings. “It could have been worse!” makes a dubious campaign slogan. The sponsor’s response was, “Voters need to decide whether their elected legislators should be writing property tax laws, or should it be Phil Anschutz?” It’s true Anschutz has been a career donor to Republican causes and candidates (as well as owner of this paper), but it’s unlikely he has a granular command of Colorado’s property tax conundrum. Homeowners feel no sense of responsibility for, nor the legitimacy of the phenomenal run-up in residential home values. It can even be suggested that decades of wiser land use policy would have headed off our housing shortage in the first place.

Addressing our current political crisis, Friedman observes, “Conflict will build into one between expertise and common sense. Expertise will make the valid claim that the issues are complex and need to be managed by experts… (while) common sense argues expertise… neglects citizens’ experience so profoundly that it only creates the illusion of a solution.” Does that sound familiar?

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.