America, Decade by Decade

The falsifiable predictions of the coherence model: what American social order should look like if constraint pressure truly governs its moral trajectory.

America's 1900-1919 baseline: high institutional trust, religious participation, and family stability — the last clean readout before mass media.

The two decades from 1900 to 1919 are the final structural expression of Victorian moral standards in America — the last clean readout before mass...

The decade spanning 1930 to 1940 was a period of profound moral and institutional reassessment, defined entirely by the Great Depression.

If you want to know what peak American coherence looked like, you look at the 1940s. Not because Americans in the 1940s were uniformly virtuous. They weren’t.

The 1950s look, from a distance, like the most coherent decade America ever produced.

The long decline from 1900 to 1965: how inherited moral capital masked a steadily falling coherence factor across American institutions.

The years 1960 to 1967 marked the definitive end of the stable, high-trust moral consensus that had defined the post-World War II era.

The five years from 1968 to 1973 were not a stretch of bad luck.

If you wanted a snapshot of where American coherence stands in 2024–2025, you could pull a hundred Pew, Gallup, and CDC dashboards and watch the slope...