The American and French Revolutions overthrew the era of kings. The new era would pursue democracy, equality, and liberty, but two different versions. Ledbetter traces the evolution of the two versions - what he calls 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 names the sequence of war-depression-war between 1914 and 1945 a single pivotal whole, a Thirty Year Event, which slammed the door shut on classical liberalism. Still, the Western values of democracy, equality, and liberty marched across the globe in league with globalization, giving rise to ethno-nationalism in the developing world, a dangerous infection now washing back on the West. The internal contradictions of a new age, bereft since the Thirty Year Event of its classical liberal roots, are manifested in unsustainable debt and endemic crony-capitalism.

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.