The American and French Revolutions mark the beginning of our era. They overthrew the age of kings and replaced it with an era of democracy, equality, and liberty, though two different versions. Mark David Ledbetter traces the evolution of the American Way and the French Way into ideologies such as free market capitalism, socialism, fascism, globalism, and the vaunted "Third Way" of Sweden.
Ledbetter consolidates the sequence of War-Depression-War between 1914 and 1945 as a single pivotal whole, a Thirty Year Event which slammed the door shut on classical liberalism.
The internal contradictions of the new age, bereft since the Thirty Year Event of its classical liberal roots, are manifested in ethno-nationalism in the Third World, and unsustainable debt and crony-capitalism in the First. Unsustainability threatens to bring the epoch to either an end or a rebirth as people and nations dance obliviously on the edge of the widening gyre.