🔄 America’s fourth reinvention

As the old world crumbles, who will build the new one?

Hi, Azeem here with a special guest opinion piece.

Nowhere are today’s global rifts more visible than in the US. To help make sense of this moment, I’ve invited one of the sharpest macro thinkers on system change,

Peter Leyden

, to share his perspective on why America’s future could be brighter than the fractured present suggests.¹

Peter is a veteran futurist. He came to San Francisco at the dawn of the digital revolution to work with the founders of WIRED magazine, and has spent decades at the front edge of technological and societal change. Peter now writes

The Great Progression: 2025-2050

newsletter, where he explores in further depth the ideas presented here.

Enjoy Peter’s essay – and do forward it if you find it useful.

Azeem

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America’s fourth reinvention

By

Peter Leyden

America is entering its fourth great reinvention. Each time in the past, the pattern has been the same: a wave of transformative technologies arrives and the old order cracks apart in conflict. After a bruising struggle, new rules, institutions and operating models take hold, reshaping the deep structures of the economy and society.

The Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression were all moments when Americans tore down an exhausted model and replaced it with one fit for a new age. We are there again today. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are acting as a demolition crew in Washington, smashing institutions that no longer fit.

The problem is, they are not builders.

In San Francisco, technologists and systems thinkers are sketching the outlines of the next American operating system, built around artificial intelligence, clean energy and biotechnology.

I focus here on technology because it is the accelerant: the force that speeds up and magnifies change.² Technology opens the door to reinvention, but it does not dictate what walks through. AI can be a tool of empowerment or surveillance; clean energy can heal the planet or scar it anew; bioengineering can widen inequality or cure disease.

Invention is relatively easy. Steering it is hard. The old order is collapsing; the contest is over what replaces it.

What happens when fundamental systems change?

Interior of Magnolia Cotton Mills spinning room. Wikimedia

A wave of general‑purpose technologies sparked each of America’s three past reinventions, and each lit a political firestorm before settling into decades‑long booms. Steam engines and mechanized mills in the early Republic multiplied human muscle with coal power and sent the economy surging. Railroads, Bessemer steel and the telegraph shrank the continent, creating a national market overnight. After World War II, the internal‑combustion engine, petrochemicals and nuclear science underwrote suburbia, the interstate highway system and a rules‑based world order.

Every time, the economic consequences of new technology collided with entrenched systems. Patriots faced loyalists. The Union fought the Confederacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal internationalists battled America First isolationists. These were not gentle transitions. It took a Civil War and 750,000 dead to uproot an economy built on slavery and clear space for free‑labor manufacturing.

We should expect similar passions today, though we have so far avoided comparable violence. The red line now is carbon. Oil states back Trump so fiercely because clean energy threatens to dismantle their world, just as slavery’s end dismantled the South.

Yet history also shows what comes after the struggle: an era of widespread innovation and broad‑based prosperity. First, the early Republic boom brought canals, turnpikes and the cotton‑gin productivity leap. It also ushered in the first great American economic expansion. Second, the Gilded Age. US steel output overtook Britain’s, and continental rail coverage hammered freight costs. It brought the second great economic expansion and the idea of the American dream.

America overtook Britain in steel production during the Gilded Age. Source: Pei et al.

Lastly, after the conflict of the 1930s and World War II came the Golden Age of Capitalism. Here we had an average growth rate of 4%, the interstate highway system and a Marshall Plan world order that lifted all boats.

In each case, these reinventions were enabled by a new generation of builders often labeled “progressives.” Regardless of the era or the party they were identified with, they were pro‑tech, pro‑economic growth, pro‑change and pro‑innovation – in other words, pro‑progress.

Not every upheaval reaches that scale. Reagan’s revolution in the 1980s revitalized the postwar order but did not replace it. And reinventions can unravel. Reconstruction’s promise of racial equality was violently reversed; the Progressive Era’s reforms were rolled back in the 1920s. Renewal is never destiny. It is a possibility, one that depends on the old order being cleared away and the new one being deliberately built.

Today’s demolisher

Created using GPT-5

The best way to understand Trump and the MAGA movement is as a demolition crew. They are tearing down old systems, not building new ones. Trump is out to dismantle the bureaucratic welfare state, abandon the Pax Americana and strip away constitutional constraints that have framed American politics for eighty years.

How did we get here? Look at the big picture of the last quarter‑century. An $850 billion Pentagon budget, larger than the next seven nations combined. More than $35 trillion in federal debt, swelling by $2 trillion a year. Medicare and Social Security, designed for a 1940s‑sized elderly population, now strain under a baby‑boomer bulge twice as large. The Cold War security machine and mid‑century welfare state were pillars that served for decades; now they are relics.

Source: The Economist

For much of the 21st century’s first quarter, voters watched politicians from both parties paper over these cracks. Anger festered. Young progressives rallied to Bernie Sanders after the 2008 crash and Wall Street bailouts. White working‑class voters, promised that globalization would “lift all boats,” instead saw factories shutter and wages stagnate, and so turned to Trump. Left and right alike smelled the same rot: systems that served their custodians, not their citizens.

Out of this anger came the populists, and Trump arrived with a wrecking ball, tearing down the Pax Americana abroad and the welfare state at home. Trade pacts? Rip them up. Pull back unilaterally from foreign commitments like NATO. Civil‑service protections? Freeze hiring, gut agency budgets, and outsource what’s left.

The point to keep in mind is that American populists focus on one thing: channeling anger at old systems and tearing them down. They do not build what comes next. Progressives do.

The system builders

To put it charitably, today’s progressives are in a transition phase. For the past 40 years they have mostly been squeezing the last juice out of earlier ideas: rewiring the New Deal into the Green New Deal, pushing civil rights into new frontiers from race to gender to sexuality.

The new 21st‑century progressives likely to emerge will echo earlier eras: pro‑tech, pro‑growth, system‑builders at heart. Like Lincoln’s Republicans or Roosevelt’s Democrats, they aim to channel the values of equality and opportunity into the 21st century using transformative technologies: AI, clean energy and bioengineering. These technologies aren’t inherently progressive. The challenge is to bend these forces toward humane ends.

You can already glimpse the rebuild in San Francisco. Don’t be fooled by high‑profile tech titans who jumped on the Trump train. Much of the Bay Area’s innovation economy remains left of center and offers prototypes of the new progressive movement. The idea of universal basic income, for instance, re-emerged in tech circles in the last decade when early AI pioneers foresaw job displacement. Many in tech are now deeply involved in next‑generation progressive causes: the YIMBY housing push and the abundance movement, which asks how to expand prosperity in a high‑growth economy rather than fight over slices of a static pie.

Source: Stanford Basic Income Lab

Much of the energy isn’t about the tools themselves but the systems around them. Coders sit alongside economists, strategists and intellectuals in a constant churn of meetups, salons and summits. The debates are fundamental: should AI wealth be pre‑distributed by taxing tokens? How do young workers climb when AI removes the bottom rung of knowledge work? Should education be rebuilt around AI tutors that follow students for life? We are already seeing these questions reshape Californian politics. Environmental laws once championed by progressives are being dismantled to make way for housing and clean‑energy infrastructure.

California has often been America’s future; it is playing that role again. The story unfolding here is largely missed by outsiders, especially the media on the East Coast and in Europe. In Washington, the Old World is fighting for its survival through the very figure tearing it down: Trump. But while attention is fixed on this spectacle of destruction, the next story – one of reinvention – is already emerging in San Francisco. If you want to see the future of America, there is only one place to look.

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Peter Leyden is a tech expert on AI and other transformative technologies, and a thought leader on a more positive future. He is the author of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, to be published by HarperCollins, as well as a Substack series of the same name. Peter came to Silicon Valley to work with the founders of WIRED to start The Digital Age and later founded two of his own media startups as he followed the front lip of technological change.

1. The views expressed in the guest commentary are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Exponential View.

2. History shows reinvention is never only about machines. The Revolution carried Enlightenment ideals; the Civil War was a moral reckoning with slavery; the New Deal was forged in response to global economic collapse.