Are we nearing America's third great crisis?

American history has been marked by crises of all sorts. But the Civil War and the Great Depression dwarf all the others. Are we due for a third crisis of comparable proportions?

It might even be worse. The Civil War and the Depression were pretty much homegrown and homebound. The next one could be foreign and domestic.

To be sure, we have fought and won major wars, both hot and cold, in the not too distant past. World War II overlapped with the Great Depression. But that conflict actually contributed to ending our long-running economic crisis. A major war today would only worsen already-serious problems at home. It also would be a war for which we are increasingly unprepared, especially psychologically.

The timing of the Civil War and Great Depression permit American history to be divided roughly into thirds, linking each segment with decisive shifts in our political and partisan order.

For the first third of American history, the country was essentially governed by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats, who believed in states' rights and vigorous expansion of a mainly agrarian American civilization. Of course, Washington, Hamilton and the Federalists got the ball rolling, but Jefferson and Jeffersonianism took over quickly and dominated the country, save for two brief "Whig" interludes, until the Civil War.

By and large, these Democrats governed successfully. Certainly, a comfortable majority of voters thought so. The country grew and prospered. But there was a major flaw, or cancer, as John Adams saw it. That pathology was, of course, slavery.

It took a Civil War to abolish slavery. It also took a new political party. The Republican Party came into being on the eve of that war and wound up governing the country for the middle third of our history, save for the Democratic interludes of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. Supporting the industrial revolution was the Republican era's focus; the business of America was business.

This is not the place to debate the causes of the Great Depression, but one of its results was a resurgent Democratic Party and Democratic dominance for the last third of our history.

Politically, this one-party control has not been as complete as in the earlier eras. But the administrations of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and two Bushes did little to upset the new order established by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. The welfare/entitlement/administrative state has only grown larger, no matter which party has controlled the White House.

Still, it's fair to conclude that once the crisis of the 1930s was weathered and the world war was won, the country once again grew and prospered under policies and terms largely set by Democrats. But once again trouble looms in the form of a major flaw. That would be a welfare/entitlement/administrative state that cannot be sustained and must be tamed and reduced. If it isn't, the country faces a major comeuppance.

Unlike slavery, the modern state does not require abolition. Instead, like Gilded Age capitalism, it demands serious reform and, yes, piecemeal eliminations. By any reasonable measurement it is unsustainable.

Big government's defenders tell us that they simply want the U.S. to join the rest of the industrial world and catch up with European social democracies. But European countries after World War II built their modern welfare states without having to rebuild their militaries. We had their backs. Who will have our backs when we face the double crises of determined and well-armed enemies and back-crushing domestic debt remains a mystery.

The future is necessarily cloudy, but at the moment this much is clear: We are nearing the end of the road that the country embarked upon with the New Deal.

Bill Clinton was right, if prematurely so, some 20 years ago when he announced that "the era of big government is over." It wasn't, but it soon will be, one way or another. Either we will elect a president able to lead the country in a very different direction, or else serious circumstances, foreign and domestic, will force our hand.

Barack Obama came to the White House heralded as the next Lincoln or perhaps the next FDR. As he nears the end of his presidency, and the country nears the end of the New Deal era, the better comparison for Obama might be to James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover, the largely forgotten predecessors of those transformational presidents.

Rather than face the gathering crisis over slavery, Buchanan dithered. His hesitancy allowed the final collapse of the Jefferson-Jackson consensus, a Civil War, and the near destruction of the country.

Rather than face the crisis of capitalism, Hoover essentially retreated. The result of Hoover's tepid response to the crash was the end of the hegemony of the party of Lincoln and the rise of Roosevelt's New Deal Democrats.

Obama's successor, Republican or Democrat, isn't likely to be nearly so fortunate.