(A reply to John Fabian Witt’s “How to Save the American Experiment”)
1. We’ve Been Here Before
John Fabian Witt’s recent essay, How to Save the American Experiment, lands with a resonance that feels uncomfortably familiar. He reminds us that the turbulence of the 2020s—political violence, disinformation, and economic inequality—mirrors another American decade that teetered between democracy and authoritarianism: the 1920s.
He’s right. America has been here before.
Then, as now, the country reeled from war and pandemic. Then, as now, fear metastasized into conspiracy and intolerance. And then, as now, the national mood turned cynical, weary of “great causes” yet haunted by a sense that the civic fabric could tear for good. Witt’s historical parallel isn’t just an observation—it’s a warning that the spiral we’re in is part of a deeper rhythm, one that returns when the institutions that sustain collective trust no longer feel responsive or real.
This essay builds on Witt’s insight, but from a different angle. Hidden Circuitry of the Four Turnings describes that rhythm as a neuroeconomic cycle: societies oscillate between dopamine-fueled eras of hope and cortisol-fueled eras of fear. When that feedback loop breaks down, the result is what Strauss and Howe called a Crisis Turning—a civilizational stress test that forces renewal or decline.
We are in that test again.
2. The 1920s and the 2020s
Look closely and the parallels sharpen into focus.
The 1920s began with riots and repression. A pandemic had just torn through cities, inflaming public mistrust. Immigration restrictions, deportations, and propaganda drives followed. An exhausted public rewarded a candidate promising “normalcy,” and elites imagined the turbulence had passed. Yet beneath the surface, the country was brittle: inequality soared, disinformation festered, and the public withdrew into apathy or escapism.
Now, a century later, our own “normalcy” politics sounds eerily similar. Post-pandemic polarization, AI-driven misinformation, climate anxiety, and chronic distrust have replaced the roaring factories and radio demagogues of old. The details differ, but the structure is the same: an over-stimulated, under-trusted society unable to regulate its own emotional circuitry.
In both eras, the core malady was not moral weakness or ignorance but disconnection—between citizens and information, labor and value, reward and fairness. And in both, that disconnection set the stage for either collapse or reinvention.
3. The Erewhonization of the Economy
In the 1920s, America’s economic dynamism masked deep fragility. Factories roared, but wages lagged behind productivity. Consumption relied increasingly on credit and speculation. When the feedback loop between ordinary people’s purchasing power and industrial production broke, the Great Depression followed.
Today’s version of that feedback failure is what writer Eric Lee calls the “Erewhonization” of the economy. Named for California’s ultra-luxury grocery chain, it describes a system that survives by serving only the affluent few. Lee cites data from the Federal Reserve showing that nearly half of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10 percent of earners—an economy literally powered by the spending of the wealthy while the rest retreat under rising costs.
The pattern is visible everywhere. Entry-level cars are disappearing from showrooms. In 2019, roughly 38 percent of new cars sold in America cost under $30,000; by 2025 that share had fallen below 14 percent. Automakers like Kia and Chevrolet have quietly discontinued their most affordable models, choosing higher-margin SUVs instead. The “death of the $20,000 car,” as Cars.com put it, is no accident—it’s strategy.
The same drift appears across consumer goods. Marketing analysts call it “premiumization.” Companies increasingly design for the rich because only the rich can buy. The broad mass market that once defined American capitalism—where a factory worker’s family could buy the product he built—is fading.
This is what Hidden Circuitry would predict in the late stage of a Crisis Turning. When reward signals (dopamine) concentrate at the top and stress signals (cortisol) dominate below, feedback collapses. Institutions stop mediating value between classes. Economies stop optimizing for stability and start optimizing for extraction.
An economy that no longer needs most of its citizens is not only unjust—it’s neurologically unstable.
4. Hidden Circuitry: Why We Should Have Expected This
The Hidden Circuitry framework views history as a self-regulating organism, driven by neurochemical cycles of trust, fear, and reward. After each crisis, dopamine rises: optimism, idealism, and experimentation flourish. Over time, as that optimism ossifies into overconfidence, dopamine overshoots. Institutions inflate with ambition and bureaucracy. Eventually, frustration and cynicism trigger cortisol’s ascendancy—fight-or-flight at the societal scale.
That’s where we are now.
The data on consumer concentration, polarization, and institutional fatigue are not random symptoms—they’re the chemical signature of a civilization under cortisol dominance. When that dominance persists too long, the body politic either breaks down or resets. The 1930s represented such a reset. The question is whether we can manage one now, consciously, without waiting for catastrophe.
5. How Renewal Began Last Time
Witt reminds us that the 1920s did not end in fascism. Out of its chaos came the New Deal and the civil-rights foundations that followed. What saved America was not a single leader but a swarm of civic innovations: the Garland Fund, which bankrolled the early NAACP and ACLU; the rise of industrial unions that democratized the workplace; the creation of new public narratives about shared dignity and economic justice.
These were not government decrees. They were institutional experiments—the “grand experiments” Witt calls for again today. They reconnected millions of ordinary people to the machinery of power. By the time the Depression hit, the scaffolding for recovery already existed. The crisis did not invent renewal; it activated it.
6. The Next Wave of Experiments
If Witt asks where those experiments are today, the answer may lie in frameworks like the First Foundation.
First Foundation is not a single organization but a pattern language for rebuilding civic resilience—guidelines for designing institutions that can survive disinformation, polarization, and capture. Patterns such as Rotating Stewardship Council, Resilience to Capture, and Narrative Conflict Management show how to design for adaptability and trust rather than hierarchy and fear.
These patterns echo the spirit of the 1920s reformers: pragmatic idealism, civic experimentation, and a refusal to let cynicism have the last word. Just as Sidney Hillman and W.E.B. Du Bois built bridges between labor and rights, modern designers can build bridges between civic tech, local governance, and community trust.
Witt is right that political parties, trapped by short-term incentives, cannot easily innovate. That’s why civil society—universities, nonprofits, local networks, citizen labs—must do what the Garland Fund once did: prototype the institutions of the next era.
7. From Reflection to Renewal
The parallels to 1928 are not cause for despair—they are instructions. We stand again at a moment when the old circuits are overloaded and the new ones are barely wired. The next few years will decide whether America completes its neurochemical reset or corrodes into permanent dysfunction.
But the precedent is on our side. When the last cycle reached this point, Americans didn’t merely survive; they reinvented democracy.
Witt asked where the experiments are.
Here’s one.
And there will be others—if we build them in time.