I often find that the best way to understand what is really happening around us today is to imagine a historian in the future looking back on our time and think about what they would say really mattered and why.
A historian teaching a university course on American history in the year 2100, roughly 80 years from now, would explain what’s happening in America today in the same way one teaching in 2025 would explain what happened 80 years ago with the beginning of the post-war world in 1945.
A historian today would focus on the big-picture moves that restructured America and the world at that time — the ones that made the biggest impact over the long term. We ended a world war, divvied up the world between communism and capitalism, and created new institutions such as the United Nations. On the domestic front, the New Deal political coalition set up free college for all GIs, guaranteed home mortgages to build out the suburbs, and built a national freeway system.
We still see the big things, but we have largely forgotten the ups and downs of the daily news of that time, the struggle and negotiation around every iteration to bring about those fundamental system changes. And we also have forgotten all the trauma of that time, all the collateral damage that comes at these key transitions in history. We have forgotten the myriad little things.
Pax Americana is coming to an end, the US military budget is unsustainable, and the bureaucratic welfare state is way past its prime.
In the end, if you take that long-term perspective, you have a clear idea about what mattered in the long run for America and the world at that juncture in history around 1945. We could use a little of that clarity today in 2025.
So, let’s adopt the big-picture, long-term perspective of a historian in 2100 to try to better understand what’s really going on today and what’s probably going to happen in the near future. In doing this thought experiment, we have to pull ourselves out of the frantic daily news cycle, forget what pundits on the right and left are arguing about, and ignore the many memes on social media.
If we do that, we might gain some insights that are counterintuitive to the conventional wisdom and particularly contradictory to the beliefs of the vast majority of people in Blue America, who really do not like what President Donald Trump is doing to the nation right now.
What I’m going to do in this essay is reframe Trump’s actions to show how they could have a positive impact on America in the long term.
I will not do this from the perspective of a MAGA true believer or a Republican who backed him, because one of the unintentional long-term consequences of what Trump is doing may well be driving his party into the political wilderness for a generation or more.
I’m also not going to take the conventional perspective of a Democrat or any of their many factions because I think the United States probably does need to dismantle the old Pax Americana and the bureaucratic welfare state — and the Democrats would never be able to do it.
I’m going to take the perspective of an American historian in 2100 as a proxy for an American living today who just wants his or her country to get through this historic juncture and emerge as a nation where all its citizens can thrive in the 21st century and that once again plays a role in creating a better world.
The difficult task of dismantling the systems that defined America for 80 years
If I channel that historian in 2100, he or she would distill the big-picture story of the challenges facing America at the historic juncture of 2025 as roughly this:
The Pax Americana with America as the global policeman enforcing order in the international system was coming to an end. That system had a great long run of 80 years, starting at the end of World War II, but could not go on much longer.
The United States military budget in 2025 was $850 billion — more than the military spending of the next dozen countries combined — and America was saddled with chronic budget deficits that could not sustain that kind of spending.
The bureaucratic welfare state that had been the backbone of post-war society in America and throughout the West was also fiscally unsustainable and way past its prime in effectiveness. The large aging populations of these developed economies were putting mounting pressures on the budgets of entitlement programs, which were devised for the smaller numbers of elderly long ago.
The view looking forward only got worse. Going into 2025, the federal government already held more than $35 trillion in debt, and it was adding another $2 trillion to the deficit that year. This chronic budget imbalance could not go on without something big changing.
Our historian in 2100 might then shift from the daunting challenges to their solutions and the political developments that led to positive change.
One big change that had already arrived by 2025 was artificial intelligence. This new general-purpose technology had reached the point where it was ready to be deployed in many new ways through the economy, society, and government. These were the early days of shifting work to intelligent machines, but those who understood the potential of the technology could see how many fundamental system changes could scale up in the next 25 years.
The old systems of government of the last 80 years needed to be dismantled in order to free up resources and create the space needed to build these new 21st-century systems. (The same held true for the old systems of carbon energy needing to be dismantled to clear the way for clean energy, but let’s stick to the government for now.)
The Democrats, as the party of greater government intervention, were never going to summon the political will to lead the charge on dismantling the US’s big, bureaucratic government. Government workers, and the unions that organized them, were a core constituency of the party. The Dems, whether they were bleeding-heart liberals or left-wing progressive champions of the poor, were never going to be able to trigger the transition, knowing the trauma it would create.
For that matter, traditional Republicans over the last 40 years had not been able to summon the will to dismantle much of anything, despite their small government rhetoric and worry about debt and deficits. The party was also as committed as ever to beefing up the military and expanding its commitments around the world.
Donald Trump finally provided the wrecking ball — on his second try.
America needs to finally end the roughly 50/50 political stalemate that has paralyzed the country for the last 25 years.
America had experienced 15 years of mounting populist fury at the old systems and the elites who benefited most from them before the dam broke. This anger came from the left in the form of young people overwhelmingly supporting presidential candidate Bernie Sanders despite his socialist label. And the anger came from the right with working class whites sticking with Trump despite all his flaws.
In the critical election of 2024, a slim majority of all Americans chose Republican Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris. Why? I think an underestimated reason is that voters knew that America needed to finally move on from its old, failing systems and that only Trump would have the audacity and the stomach to dismantle them.
Does that mean that Trump, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement are victorious and will now rebuild America in their image? Does that mean that the Democrats and the progressive movement are vanquished and will be sidelined for a generation or more?
The truth is arguably the opposite. When you look at what’s going on through the lens of long-ball politics, you can see that Trump might be solving one other huge challenge that America needs solved right now.
America needs to finally end the roughly 50/50 political stalemate that has paralyzed the country for the last 25 years. We try the increasingly divergent political formulas of Blue America, then Red America, then back again, and back yet again.
We need a long-term 60/40 political coalition that can more fundamentally reinvent America over the course of the next 25 years so that it can thrive for the rest of the century.
Trump is in the process of creating that political opportunity — for the Democrats and Blue America.
The long-term political consequences for those who do the dismantling
Throughout American history, populist movements have been great at dismantling and destroying things. They’ve also been horrible at building anything of lasting consequence — let alone new systems that will define the next era.
One reason is because populist movements are all about channeling anger at the existing systems that do not meet the needs of the common person and at the elites who run those systems. Burn it all down.
Once in power, though, populist movements rarely have the internal capacity to create new systems, ones that actually could meet people’s needs. What they mostly do is harken back to some really old systems that arguably had worked in the past.
In Trump’s case, he is an absolute master at channeling anger at existing systems and the elites who run and benefit from them. But now that he’s in power, he’s dredging up really outmoded ideas from a truly bygone era, like tariffs, as solutions to today’s problems.
Trump, his MAGA administration, and the current crop of Republicans now in Congress are not going to come up with the new systems that will reinvent America in a way that allows it to thrive in the 21st century. The odds of that happening are miniscule.
However, they almost certainly are going to create the space for some other political force, some other movement, some other set of leaders to pull that off. I expect that will come out of Blue America, with new movements and a new generation of leaders looking forward with truly transformative ideas.
The political consequences for whoever dismantles America’s old systems are going to be profound, and I mean profoundly bad. The president and the party who dismantles those bureaucracies, as healthy as that process might be in the long run, will make enemies of all those who lose their jobs or benefits.
Soon, everyone will feel the consequences themselves or know someone who had their Social Security adjusted downward or their Medicaid coverage curtailed or their science research canceled.
When the old idea of tariffs, which last worked effectively in the late 19th century, fails in the 21st century, then the number of enemies will mount. Farmers and small business people and Wall Street and the tech titans will all feel it.
This is why all populist periods in American history are followed by progressive periods. After the anger from populism registers through the voting booth and the dismantling gets done in the initial wave of change, we need to build the next systems.
This rebuilding phase takes another generation of elites. These people will have the education, the knowledge, and the technocratic skills needed to devise and scale the next-generation systems that will be up to the new challenges of the times.
This is what happened in America after the great surge of populism that followed the crash of 1929 and lasted through the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the war, America entered an era of great progress with an explosion of innovation in government policy, as well as throughout the economy and society, that lasted for 25 years.
This roaring progressive era lasted from the New Deal through the Great Society in the 1960s. The Democrats of that time mostly held huge majorities in Congress, and even when Republicans such as President Dwight Eisenhower occasionally held the presidency, they still operated within the progressive framework, which they called the “liberal” framework at that time.
America could drive that level of uninterrupted progress for 25 years because roughly 60% of the population came together in a political coalition that backed that kind of transformative change.
How were liberal Democrats able to hold that 60% coalition and dominate American politics through that whole era? One big reason is that they were able to demonize the other side.
Republican President Herbert Hoover was in charge during the financial crash of 1929. He and the Republicans in control of Congress passed the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 that raised tariffs on 20,000 imported goods and drove the economy deeper into the Great Depression.
Hoover became the symbol of the failure of those old conservative ideas and the old systems that he defended to the end. He became the political punching bag for the Democrats for not just one generation but two. It would be 50 years before another Republican, Ronald Reagan, could become president while proudly espousing those conservative ideas again.
The application of those historical lessons going forward in our time
I’m cautious about predicting anything too specific about the future when events are rapidly changing around us week by week. This would be an easier call by the end of Trump’s first year. But if we check in with our historian in 2100 he or she might say something like:
What Hoover did for the Republican Party and conservative movement of the 1930s, Trump did for the Republican Party and conservative movement of the 2020s. He destroyed the brand for a generation or two. It took another 50 years for his kind of right-wing conservatism to be taken seriously again in American politics.
By that time, America had gone through another period of great progress and had been fundamentally reinvented for the new realities of the 21st century. The next generation of American progressives coming out of Blue America took advantage of the political space that opened up in the wake of the great dismantling and tried a wide variety of innovations that iterated the new way forward.
They did this without having to constantly defend against the rearguard action of right-wing conservatives, who were mired in the political wilderness for decades of rethinking and rebuilding.
By 2050, the general consensus was that Trump had made America great again — just not in the way he had intended. Trump did dismantle the old Pax Americana and the old 20th-century bureaucratic welfare state, but he also dismantled the political efficacy of the Republican Party and conservative movement for a couple generations, too.
Trump unintentionally laid the foundation for the next era of American greatness to begin — not by looking backward to resuscitate the past, but by allowing others to look forward and reinvent a much better future.
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