our political crisis will end in 2035
27 years after the great recession, a new political paradigm will emerge
As recessionary nostalgia begins to crest, newly middle-aged millennials are beginning to question whether or not the Great Recession was really so bad…
We’re in that fuzzy middle ground right now, a decade and a half and change out, where it's easy to paper over the worst of it: houses foreclosed on, retirements ruined, careers ended, careers that never began. Instead, we focus on the stomp-clap-hey music, the Levi’s "Go Forth" campaign, Beyoncé and Jay-Z vibing with Solange at a Williamsburg Grizzly Bear concert, skinny jeans, boat necks, horizontal navy stripes, broad-brimmed brunch witch hats, latte art, third wave coffee shops, Mad Men, Girls, prestige TV, hipsters, Brooklyn, Portland, farm-to-table, mason jar, Edison bulbs, Valencia filter, hashtag of it all.
Today we stand on the precipice of another recession. For young college graduates, it's already here. But unlike in 2008 or 2012, there's no Obama, whose mythic rise took the sting out of a collapsing economy. A large portion of the electorate genuinely believed his presidency heralded the dawn of a post-racial America and that a cadre of too-smart liberal technocrats would soon restart the economy, universalize healthcare, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. In short, fix the United States of America.
It’s a bit of a footnote now, but this sense of renewal was buoyed by tech. Obama was the Facebook president. With the rise of social media, the new economy Bill Clinton had promised in the nineties was finally coming true. The internet had finally found its product-market fit. By 2012, this second wave of tech investment, goosed by the Obama administration's economic policies, was already starting to make some millennials rich. There was a growing sense that the malaise of the recession wasn’t permanent, even if the mass affluence of coastal superstar cities like New York and San Francisco was not yet reaching rural America and the Rust Belt.
At the margins, among students and the unemployed there was discontent. What's new? Challenger ideologies from the left and the right percolated on Tumblr and 4chan respectively. In a few years, we would call this 'wokeness' and 'the alt-right.' But for the urban, white-collar workforce a clear trajectory of progress seemed obvious.
Millennials like their boomer parents believed in Whig history or as Obama famously put it: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." They believed in the self-evident meritocratic nature of American institutions and that our values were so obvious they did not need to be stated. Popular phrases like "diversity is our greatest strength" and "we are a nation of immigrants" more or less summed them up. And they believed that technology, especially the internet, was a positive force in the world: democratizing culture and removing gatekeepers. Innovation—even disruption—was creating a more egalitarian culture in real time.
The near future had its challenges. The early 2010s were not a time of utopianism. Issues like climate change and inequality, both social and economic, needed to be tackled. But precocious college grads saw themselves as up to the task. If America needed new models, technology was going to give them the tools to create them.
What a difference a decade and a half makes.
Exhausted by ten years of Donald Trump, remember he descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy in June 2015, progressive millennials no longer believe the digital crucible of social and cultural experimentation will fix America. The internet is an addiction, not a new model of collective belonging. Conflicts over race, gender, and sexuality are at a permanent impasse. At best, opposing sides see one another as lost causes; at worst, as existential threats.
What are American values? No one quite knows anymore.
I often go back to a poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center, in 2023. The study has been tracking five values—patriotism, religion, having children, community involvement, and money—on a scale of 'very important' to 'very unimportant' since 1998. In 2023, for the first time, no value was ranked 'very important' by a majority of Americans. Money, the laggard of the pack, the last time the survey was conducted in 2019, was the only value to increase in importance with 43% of those polled rating it 'very important.' The importance of the other four values plummeted. 38% of Americans think patriotism is 'very important'; 39% for religion; 30% for having children; and 27% for community involvement.
In fraught times, America’s new identity as an economic zone is not particularly inspiring, especially as the United States teeters on the brink of another recession. If all that binds us together is money, what happens when the money runs out?
In a review of Nadia Asparouhova’s recent book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:
…the key insight that [Peter] Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.
It is within this context that money has eclipsed all other American values. Money represents security; protection from an unpredictable economy, an unraveling political system, a polarized culture, and a world no longer at peace. Most of all, money represents protection from each other. More than anything, Americans fear one another.
In a crack-up scenario, everyone wonders who the scapegoat will be.
Venture capitalist and network-state prophet Balaji Srinivasan recently predicted who he thought it would be:
2020: blue and tech against red
2024: red and tech against blue
2028: blue and red against tech
Increasingly, both left and right perceive Silicon Valley with suspicion bordering on hostility. The left believes tech oligarchs in thrall of Yarvinite fascism are in the process of orchestrating a neo-feudalist coup, positioning themselves as the ruling class of this new world order. Meanwhile conservatives suspect that the 'Tech Right' rebrand was a libertarian psy-op, that tech remains a pro-migration, globalist coalition dedicated to plundering the American economy via outsourcing and H-1B visas.
Neither is the official position of the Democratic or Republican party respectively, but both represent a growing sentiment among each party’s base, especially the youngest members of that base.
It comes as no surprise that Elon Musk has had the steepest drop in popularity of any public figure in recent, perhaps living, memory.
The right’s hope that Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration would be a technocratic corrective to the MAGA talent pool seems naive in retrospect. The 2024 right-wing hope that a counter-elite would wield tech like a deus ex machina was just as unrealistic as the 2012 progressive belief that Facebook would save the world.
Both left and right hoped tech would return the United States to the positive-sum paradigm of the twentieth century, economic growth and technological innovation really did improve everyone’s lives. Disappointment over the fact that this is no longer the case has been the catalyst for all political conflict dating back to the financial crisis in 2008.
This doesn’t mean tech hasn’t delivered growth or that this growth hasn’t been shared. I don’t want to be overly disparaging. It created a new class of millionaires across America and supercharged the mass affluence of our upper middle class. But it did not solve the affordability issues around housing, healthcare, and education. And it seems poised via new innovations in AI to make our burgeoning unemployment crisis worse.
Incidentally, these are the same issues people believed they were electing Barack Obama to fix in 2008. Our traditional elites in finance and government have done no better. But for a tech-based counter-elite to actually triumph, it must display not only the competency necessary to fix big problems but also a compelling vision—and equally compelling values—for how to do so.
These are big demands, but tech in 2025 seems uncertain it can meet them.
On Monday, Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe posted:
Two conversations this weekend make me think that there’s a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile.
Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks:
• Davos expert morality is stale and discredited.
• It's also apparent that the "just be super based" Counter-Enlightenment is not really an answer. (Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it doesn't work.)
• EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people.
• There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics.
Overall, "what is worthy and valuable?" feels like it’s becoming more central.
The American people report having no values, while our presumptive counter-elite tries to crowdsource theirs. (This post was paired with another soliciting proposals for the company’s publishing arm, Stripe Press.)
So while people latch onto signals—Mamdani's victory in New York, the rise in prominence of Nick Fuentes, Musk and Trump breaking up, Musk and Trump getting back together—none provide any clarity about the actual trajectory of the country.
The safest bet is whichever problems America faces today, it will also face in 2026, regardless of who wins the midterms. In all likelihood, it will also face those problems in 2028, regardless of who wins the presidency.
There is a theory that the United States of America has existed under three distinct constitutional regimes. The first was defined by the Constitutional Convention, the second by Reconstruction, and the third by the New Deal. Each era spans roughly 80 years, with each paradigm working out its shape over 27 years of crisis.
Constitutional orders, like celebrities, have their own 27 club.
The first constitution is prefigured by conflicts between the colonies and England after the end of French and Indian War in 1763 and becomes coherent with the final ratification of the Constitution in 1790. The second begins with the Civil War in 1860 and ends with the close of Reconstruction in 1877. The third begins with the stock market crash in 1929 and culminates with the United States asserting itself as the new global superpower, displacing the British Empire during the Suez Crisis of 1956.
If our current predicament begins with the implosion of the world financial system in 2008, we should expect the fourth incarnation of America to cohere sometime around 2035.
We can all breathe easy about the presidential election in 2036.
