Robert McNally
On the 250th anniversary of the start of armed colonial rebellion against British rule, a timely backdrop for considering long cycles in US political history and their implications for America’s present circumstances and prospects.
Roughly every eighty years, the United States reinvents itself following a decisive meta-crisis: the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II.
These three prior decisive meta-crises resolved core national disputes by forcing binary choices between opposing ideological factions: patriots versus loyalists, abolitionists and unionists versus secessionists, and internationalists versus isolationists.
During the decades before each meta-crisis, Americans tried to have it both ways, striking compromises to delay resolution between unreconcilable ideas. But ultimately, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the nation was compelled to become “all one thing or the other.”
A crucial but often overlooked point is that, before these decisive crises, the winning and losing factions were minorities, usually viewed as fringe.
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