To paraphrase “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” the bandit said “we don’t need no stinkin badges” often quoted as expressing a lack of respect for authority. Now each day brings radical change to a world order created after WW II to increase standards of living and reduce major power military conflicts. The United States created that world system built on trade, openness, education and democracy. Like all human achievements however, it was not a perfect system.
To make radical changes quickly in a democratic society requires a change in the form of government organization and, as Dick Cheney proposed in the George W. Bush administration, this would require a unified office of the presidency that eliminates checks and balances. This appears to be the direction we are headed today.
In the book “The Fourth Turning” the author predicts that approximately every 40 years history has shown that the United States makes a dramatic turn either toward openness and engaging with the rest of the world creating opportunity and higher standards of living or toward isolation and internal strife like the closing of the Gilded Age. The question before us now, is the current mood of the country the ending of a 40 year cycle that began in 1980 or is it the beginning of a new 40 year cycle that will accelerate.
