" There is nothing new about this. The kind of mutual rage and division we see in America today is trivial compared with other times in U.S. history—the Civil War, in which 650,000 died, or the 1960s, when the Eighty-Second Airborne was deployed to fight snipers in Detroit. Abraham Lincoln was called illiterate and an ape. Richard Nixon was called a criminal, which he turned out to be, even though he blamed it all on the media. Some presidents like Lincoln, Nixon, and Trump are reviled by some and loved by others, but the reality is they are not powerful enough to be causing the problems—nor in control of the underlying currents they are riding. "

― George Friedman , The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond