December 5, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
To complete our search for Wisdom for America, I found a second historical cycle analysis. This theory, “The Fourth Turning” utilizes Anglo-American history from 1425 until the present. The study shows a repeat of history approximately every 80 years for seven 80-year time periods. Within each 80-year period the study also reveals a similar pattern every 20 years or so, which the authors term as a turning. Interestingly the fourth turn of each of the seven 80-year time periods has resulted in a major crisis—typically war. For America this includes the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II which are approximately 80 years apart. We are approaching 80 years since the close of World War II. Following the “Fourth Turning” or Crisis Era there is an upbeat of strengthening institutions and a new civil order which they term the “First Turn” of a new 80-year period.
The authors published their first Fourth Turning book in 1997. Excerpts from it are contained in the first part of the text and the attached PDF. In it they give predictions for the Fourth Turning of the Millennial cycle which in 1997 they estimated would conclude roughly in 2023. In the excerpts it is interesting to see how their 1997 Fourth Turning of the Millennial predictions turned out relative to what actually transpired. Additionally, the PDF excerpts provide the supporting history behind the last four cycles beginning in 1704 on pages 2 through 5. These two points can be used to gauge your confidence in their future predictions.
The remaining living author Neil Howe published the second Fourth Turning book on 7/18/2023, titled The Fourth Turning Is Here. The excerpts from it not only describes why it is here (under the Crisis Era) but predicts when it is going to end (under Prediction) and how it will end (under Civil War or Great Power War). Then Howe speculates on the first turn of the next 80-year period up to 2040 via two different scenarios – a favorable scenario and an unfavorable scenario. It is interesting but frightening reading but supports the wisdom we have garnered from the previous 21 segments. The author offers no solutions. Most of this segment’s excerpts are from the second book. The total pages from the two books is greater than 800 pages, so the excerpts are a microcosm of the information contained in them.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
To complete our search for Wisdom for America, I found a second historical cycle analysis. This theory, “The Fourth Turning” utilizes Anglo-American history from 1425 until the present. The study shows a repeat of history approximately every 80 years for seven 80-year time periods. Within each 80-year period the study also reveals a similar pattern every 20 years or so, which the authors term as a turning. Interestingly the fourth turn of each of the seven 80-year time periods has resulted in a major crisis—typically war. For America this includes the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II which are approximately 80 years apart. We are approaching 80 years since the close of World War II. Following the “Fourth Turning” or Crisis Era there is an upbeat of strengthening institutions and a new civil order which they term the “First Turn” of a new 80-year period.
The authors published their first Fourth Turning book in 1997. Excerpts from it are contained in the first part of the text and the attached PDF. In it they give predictions for the Fourth Turning of the Millennial cycle which in 1997 they estimated would conclude roughly in 2023. In the excerpts it is interesting to see how their 1997 Fourth Turning of the Millennial predictions turned out relative to what actually transpired. Additionally, the PDF excerpts provide the supporting history behind the last four cycles beginning in 1704 on pages 2 through 5. These two points can be used to gauge your confidence in their future predictions.
The remaining living author Neil Howe published the second Fourth Turning book on 7/18/2023, titled The Fourth Turning Is Here. The excerpts from it not only describes why it is here (under the Crisis Era) but predicts when it is going to end (under Prediction) and how it will end (under Civil War or Great Power War). Then Howe speculates on the first turn of the next 80-year period up to 2040 via two different scenarios – a favorable scenario and an unfavorable scenario. It is interesting but frightening reading but supports the wisdom we have garnered from the previous 21 segments. The author offers no solutions. Most of this segment’s excerpts are from the second book. The total pages from the two books is greater than 800 pages, so the excerpts are a microcosm of the information contained in them.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 22
THE FOURTH TURNING – EXCERPTS
From The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss & Neil Howe (1997)
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE – UNDERSTANDING THE AMERICAN CYCLE
America feels like it’s unraveling. Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within. Wherever we’re headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don’t like or understand. Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we’re heading toward a waterfall. Are we?
THE TURNING CYCLE THEORY:
It’s All Happened Before: At the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm or growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction.
In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that’s what happened.
The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that’s what happened.
The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade (2000 – 2010), eight to ten years from now. Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that’s where we are.
Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes – many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes – many times, over the centuries. A Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another. It can be long and difficult, brief but severe. But, like winter, it cannot be averted.
The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
Thus, might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis: all they suggest is the timing and dimension. America’s next rendezvous with destiny – will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty. How can we offer this prophecy with such confidence? Because it’s all happened before. Many times.
MILLENNIAL SAECULUM TURNINGS:
The American High: First Turning High, (1946 – 1964) witnessed America’s ascendancy as a global superpower. Social movements stalled. The middle class grew and prospered. Churches buttressed government. Huge peace time defense budgets were uncontroversial. Mass tastes thrived atop a collectivist infrastructure of suburbs, interstates, and regulated communication. Declaring an “end to ideology,” respected authorities presided over a bland, modernist, and spirit-dead culture.
The Consciousness Revolution: (Second Turning Awakening, 1964—1984) which began with urban riots and campus fury, swelled alongside Vietnam War protests and a rebellious counterculture. It gave rise to feminist, environmental, and black power movements and to a steep rise in violent crime and family breakup. After the fury peaked with Watergate (in 1974), passions turned inward toward New Age lifestyles and spiritual rebirth. The mood expired during Reagan’s upbeat reelection campaign, as onetime hippies reached their yuppie chrysalis.
The Culture Wars: (Third Turning Unraveling, 1984—2005?), which opened with triumphant Morning in American individualism, has thus far drifted toward pessimism. Personal confidence remains high, and a few national problems demand immediate action. But the public reflects darkly on growing violence and incivility, widening inequality, pervasive distrust in institutions and leaders and a debased popular culture. People fear that the national consensus is splitting into competing values camps.
The Millennial Crisis: (the Fourth Turning of the Millennial Saeculum has yet to arrive).
THE MILLENNIAL FOURTH TURNING PROPHERCY:
Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning. A spark will ignite a new mood. It will catalyze a Crises. In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. It could be a rapid succession of small events in which the ominous, the ordinary, and the trivial are commingled. A Crisis catalyst involves scenarios distinctly imaginable, eight to ten years in advance. Based on recent Unraveling-era trends, the following circa-2005 scenarios might seem plausible:
Time will pass, perhaps another decade, before the surging mood propels America to the Fourth Turning’s grave moment of opportunity and danger: the climax of the Crisis. The molten ingredients of the climax could include the following:
Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be many kinds of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed. With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin. The Crises resolution will establish the political, economic, and social institutions with which our children and heirs will live for decades thereafter.
Source: The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1997).
THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE
From: The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe (7/18/2023)
Our previous book, The Fourth Turning was published in 1997. That was twenty-six years ago. Remarkably, over all those years readers’ interest in our approach has steadily increased and the number of our readers has grown in episodic leaps. Many have been persuaded that the recent courses of American history has vindicated the map of the future we originally laid our back in the 1990s. One sure of new interest came in 2008, when the Global Financial Crisis inaugurated the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. This happened at approximately the time we foresaw that America would enter its “Crisis era” or the winter season. Still others came in 2016 (Donald Trump’s startling takeover of the Republican Party) and in 2020 (the global pandemic years roiled by the growing populism partisanship, distrust, and dysfunction that we had suggested would prevail early in the Crisis era.
The Global Financial Crisis, the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could have withstood but that caused ours to buckle and give way, revealing pillars and beams that had been decaying for decades. Public health, once a basic task that America took for granted, has become an insuperable challenge. Despite our riches and our science, America ended up with Covid deaths-per-capita on par with many of the poorest and least stable counties of the world. U.S. life expectancy, already declining since 2014, fell further in 2020 than in any single year since 1943, when America was suffering major battle casualties in Africa, Europe and the Pacific. It fell again by seven months in 2021.
Not long ago, to be an American was to be a rule-breaking, risk-taking individualist who believed that flouting convention somehow made everything better over time. That still describes many older Americans. It doesn’t describe many young adults. Today’s rising generation, shell-shocked by the pervasive hollowing out of government, neighborhood, workplace, and family is looking for any safe harbor it can find. Millennials seek not risk, but security. Not spontaneity, but planning. Not a free-for-all marketplace, but a rule-bounded community of equals. Older generations have for decades exulted in unconstrained personal growth and in a government that doesn’t ask much of them. They are very attached to “democracy.” Younger generations, meanwhile, are souring on democracy. At last count, Americans today in their thirties are less than half as likely as Americans over age sixty to agree that “it is essential to live in a democracy.” A small but rapidly rising share of young say democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way to run the country. Most of these would prefer military rule.
The same trends are now coursing through most of the world’s developed and emerging market nations: growing economic inequality; declining generational and social mobility; tighter national borders; and intensifying ethnic and religious tribalism, weaponized through portable social media. Charismatic populists are ascending to power – or have already gained power – in southern and central Europe, in Latin America, and in southern and eastern Asia.
Yet, as Americans witness the old civic order collapse, they are moving beyond pessimism. They are coming to two inescapable conclusions. First, in order to survive and recover, the country must construct a new civic order powerful enough to replace what is now gone. And second, the new order must be imposed by “our side,” which would rescue the country from its current paralysis, rather than by “the other side,” which would plunge the country into inescapable ruin. Yes, in the face of adversity, the old America is disintegrating. But at the same time, America is moving into a phase transition, a critical discontinuity, in which all the dysfunctional pieces of the old regime will be reintegrated in ways we can hardly now imagine. The civic vacuum will be filled. Welcome to the early and awkward emergence of the next American republic.
WE’VE COME INTO THE CRISIS ERA:
The precursor to the Millennial Crisis was the 9/11 attack followed by U.S. retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2001-2003). Like World War I, the 9/11 wars were fought with great enthusiasm but little patience – and the public soon soured on their basic objective. In 2005, two years after President G. W. Bush declared “mission accomplished,” more Americans disapproved than approved of the Iraqi invasion. The lofty “nation building” goal was widely mocked as “making the world safe for democracy.”
Not long after the Twin Towers attack, Americans were following the president’s advice to “go shopping” or “go to Disneyworld.” The economy already rebounding from a mild post-dotcom recession, surged ahead. A year later the stock market was rising again. This time Americans latched on to a get-rich device even more democratically accessible that dotcom tech stocks: real estate. As home prices accelerated amid “Flip That House” shows, banks issued subprime mortgages to eager home buyers. The banks then securitized the mortgages and either held them “off the books” or sold them to voracious institutional investors. During the five years following 9/11, both home prices and total real estate wealth rose by nearly two-thirds, making homeowners feel $10 trillion richer than they had been before.
In 2008, it all came apart. This terrifying bust, which became to be known as the Global Financial Crisis, was the catalyst. And it led directly to the most severe global economic contraction since the Great Depression.
In 2016, both political parties set out to nominate a new presidential candidate. The mood was fraught. The economy had hit another post-recession air pocket, and public dissatisfaction with “they say things are going” remained at record highs. The Democrats narrowly missed going with their populist, Bernie Sanders, opting instead for an establishment liberal, Hillary Clinton. The Republicans went the other way. In the ensuing national election, their populist, Donald Trump, narrowly won the electoral college county, and their party managed to retain both houses.
The 2016 election constituted a clear regeneracy for both factions. In national politics, it mobilized party partisans to an intensity not seen since the mid-1930s if not the late 1850s. The left rallied many Democrats into a “resistance” – as if the Trump administration were an occupying army – before demanding action on various executive misdeeds by means for a special prosecutor and two successive impeachments. The right rallied around Trump, who continued while in office to behave and campaign as an outsider. He never stopped fulminating against the “deep state.” He hardly cared about the record-low approval ratings he was earning from voters for his actual governing performance. Even during the onset of the pandemic and global recession of 2020, Trump maintained his adversarial stance. He belittled his own top health officials without, however, dismissing them. He inveighed against hapless federal bureaucrats, even while approving seven Covid-related bills, authorizing those bureaucrats to spend trillions in benefit payments – easily the largest surge in federal social welfare spending in American history.
In November 2020, in an election that was mostly about whether to re-elect Trump – rather than about electing anyone else – American voters turned Trump down. Yet Trump chose to interpret this as a lost battle, not a lost war. Trump, exhorting his followers to “stop the steal,” and not allow an “illegitimate president” to take office, reminded them “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Hours later, many of them stormed the Capitol building with weapons while Congress was in session.
A year later, nearly three-quarters of Republican voters – and a third of all U.S. voters – agreed that Joe Biden’s victory was probably or definitely not legitimate. Nearly two years later, in the fall 2022 midterm election, more than two hundred GOP candidates running for federal or executive state offices said they at least questioned or doubted the 2020 outcome; about thirty said outright that it was “stolen.” Most of these candidates won their races – although, to be sure the most extreme MAGA deniers lost or underperformed in their elections.
Surveys show that political differences now outrank all other differences, including those of income or religion or race, in day-to-day encounters that people wish to avoid. One way to avoid such encounters is to choose a new church, club, or employer whose views match your own. An even better way is to choose a new neighborhood. To most Americans, the outcome feels like a dismal stalemate. We may as well be describing two societies – each having its own sectarian goals, yet both awkwardly yoked to one government.
From the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 to the ebbing of the global Covid pandemic in 2021, America’s biggest challenges were twofold: dismal economic performance and paralyzing civic discord. On February 24, 2022, a great new challenge broke into the headlines: geopolitical conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shocked the world. It was the first time in 77 years that one large European nation has tried to conquer another. Once again, the long-dormant threat of war between the world’s great powers has jumped back to life, only this time with nine nations already armed with nuclear weapons.
Since the invasion, Americans have awakened to see more clearly the consequences of America’s recent disengagement from global affairs. The list of damages here is long and demoralizing. It includes all the dire presidential “red lines” against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea that America never enforced; all the trade and defense agreements with close allies that America neglected, undermined, or scuttled; and all the commitments to governments at war against anti-American militants that America abandoned without warning – most ingloriously, in Afghanistan. Repairing this damage, if America chose to do so, would require re-engaging the world. It might also require the nation to reverse the long-term decline in its spending on defense – and become, once again, the free-world’s “arsenal of democracy.”
The hour may be growing late. Just before retiring at the end of 2020, Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, declared that “this Ukrainian crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup.” Citing the decline in America’s military capability relative to China’s in the western Pacific, he added: “The big one is coming. And if isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested … for a long time.”
As of early 2023, the two political parties remain essentially leaderless, each awaiting the next presidential primary season to see what happens. With parties leaderless, and with neither party fully in charge, the nation feels leaderless as well.
PREDICTION: FOURTH TURNING OF MILLENIAL ERA: The Millennial Crisis is very likely to become a Crisis era not just for America but also for much of the world – perhaps even more than the Great Depression-World War II Crisis that preceded it. What this means from an American perspective is that a saecular anomaly will be less likely. Rather than interfering with or neutralizing America’s saecular timing, the rest of the world will be reinforcing it.
The early 2030s appear to be the most likely years for the resolution of the Millennial Crisis and the opening of the First Turning of the next saeculum. The most likely year for the climax would perhaps be 2030. Such dates or course must be regarded as probability epicenters. The resolution could arrive earlier by three or four years. Or it could arrive later – though here the margin for error is larger since we may be underestimating the dilation of turning length.
CIVIL WAR:
Is America getting ready to engage in another civil war? The question must be taken seriously. Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely. And a growing number of social scientists agree that the United States now fits the checklist profile of a country at risk. Trust in the national government is in steep decline. Check. A heavily armed population has polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. Check. Each faction embodies a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and urban-versus-rural identity. Each wants its country to become something the other detests. And each fears the prospect of the other taking power. Check, check, and check.
According to Freedom House, America has become steadily less democratic since 2008. It currently ranks the United States 61st among democracies, a bit behind Argentina and Romania and a bit ahead of Poland and Panama. Global research centers that track and analyze political indicators by country now categorize the United States as something less than a democracy. One calls it a “backsliding democracy.” Another call it an “anocracy,” that is, something between democracy and autocracy.
GREAT POWER WAR:
World War II did not suddenly explode out of nowhere. It gathered strength, like an avalanche starting to heave with ever-larger tremors, until whoosh – all the world gave way. The early signs during the 1930s weren’t just the outright invasions, but the swelling wave of bloodless annexations, midnight coups, bribed newspapers, assassinated leaders, jailed dissidents, and rigged elections. It was the shadow of brute autocracy spreading over the world.
The same shadow is spreading today. According to one global institute (Freedom House), the share of the world’s population not living in “free” nations has expanded over the last decade from 55% to 80%. According to another (V-Dem), the shared living in “autocratic nations” has risen from 49% to 70%. Almost every year, the number of governments restricting civil liberties, criminalizing dissent, suspending due process, and manipulating elections has greatly exceeded the number moving in a liberal direction.
Identifying the major participants in a coming great-power war, should it happen, is not Black Swan mystery. To list the roster on one side, we need only refer to America’s four primary “adversaries” and “competitors” as they are described in recent yearbooks of the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence. These are: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in roughly that order. All four nations are growing steadily closer together in their trade and security agreements. Their policy statements are showing ever-tighter coordination, as when China now complains of Western powers orchestrating an “Indo-Pacific NATO.” And all together – after adding in another couple of dozen allies, dependencies, and vassals – they dominate the vast supercontinent of Eurasia. Arrayed against them, on the other side, is America, much of the western hemisphere, most of Europe, and the high-income western Pacific Rim.
On the adversary side, virtually every member country is non-free. On the American side, most member countries are free. The adversary side is superior in land area and (assuming India remains nonaligned) in population. The American side is superior in technology, economic capacity, and projectible military strength. That’s a big edge. But the adversary side believes it could prevail through technological breakthroughs combined with a greater collective willingness to plan ahead, take risks, and incur sacrifice. Once again, in all such encomia to “greater national will,” we hear echoes of the 1930s.
The adversary side may have one more hope, which is that the American side disintegrates on its own. The western Pacific Rim democracies may lose confidence in American security guarantees and start cutting their own deals with China. The European Union, having already lost Britain, may lose more members as a result of economic hardship and populist party victories. Western European leaders, tiring of the war in Ukraine, may choose to come to terms with Russia over sovereignty in Eastern Europe – a tempting move that would at once gain them populist votes, pull down energy prices, and boost their economies. Xi likes to compare “China’s order” with the “chaos in the West.” As well he might for it’s a playbook the world has seen before. Leaders of the Axis powers, after several successful invasions in the late 1930s, were themselves astonished by the disunity of their vanquished opponents.
Best of all, for the adversary side, would be for America itself to disintegrate internally. This scenario too is one that Xi no doubt takes seriously. “Time and momentum are on our side,” he proclaimed after hearing of the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. “America’s Main Opponent is itself,” The People’s Daily explained a few days later in a headline. Such hope is not groundless. It is possible that America’s civil conflict could worsen into a civil war. And if that happens, America’s global security capabilities would be undermined, perhaps severely. Almost overnight, the adversary side could find itself free to realize long-sought strategic goals – starting with large regional expansions of their spheres of power – and face little possibility of an American response.
The next great-power war will once again pose terrifying risks to all who enter it. The reason, of course, is the global proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) with rapid and effective delivery systems. Once Iran possesses nuclear weapons (which may happen at any time), there will be ten nuclear powers. Four of them will be on the adversary side – five of them Pakistan joins.
THE NEXT FIRST TURNING: SCENARIOS:
The next First Turning will begin when the current Fourth Turning reaches its resolution, which as we have seen is most likely to happen in the early 2030s. To make the future tangible, let’s choose a date: 2033. Let’s also assume that the recent trend toward somewhat longer generations and turnings continues. We therefore project that this turning will last 23 years. So, we’re looking at 2033 to 2056 as suggestive start and stop dates.
Favorable Scenarios:
From the outset, the most striking feature of this new era will be an overwhelming sense of national unity – a sense unfamiliar to most Americans today. The memory of the Crisis climax will still be fresh in everyone’s mind, along with the lives and fortunes sacrificed in order to ensure that the nation would prevail.
Following the Crisis, loyalty to the new national regime will become the first organizing principle in party politics. Should the Fourth Turing culminate in civil war, First Turning electorates will cast into the wilderness whichever faction led the losing side – in this case, perhaps leading red zone Republicans or leading blue zone Democrats. Should there be a great-power war, the faction which most opposed the war or maintained the closest ties with the enemy could remain under a dark cloud of suspicion.
All legitimate political factions, certainly both major parties will agree on the paramount need to defend and strengthen the new regime – not just to rebuild whatever may have been physically destroyed, but to redesign and modernize institutions across the board. Political discussion will focus on means, not ends.
Following almost any Crisis climax scenario, it won’t just be America that will require rebuilding and redesigning. It will be much of the rest of the world as well in what may be a global First Turning. Once again, following the precedent of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, America will likely be called upon to provide leadership and assistance to that effort. Once again America will be motivated by enlightened self-interest. By investing heavily in a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic post-Crisis world, America will be able to secure the long-term “freedom from fear,” its citizens will be yearning for.
As the next global First Turning opens, the most desperate need will be to calm a world in turmoil – enforcing new peace agreements, setting up provisional governments, resettling refuges, rebuilding destroyed cities. formalizing alliances, and possibly redrawing national boundaries. America will necessarily play a large role in all such activities.
Today, most of these goals – like banning of rogue nuclear states, for example, or an enforceable global budget for atmospheric carbon – seem like hopeless one-world dreams. Come the next First Turning, they could become reality. All that is necessary is for a few great powers to take the lead in proposing these rules and to persuade most countries that they will be enforced. American voters will go along with this expanded global role so long as it serves their long-term interests and does not relinquish their national sovereignty.
By the 2040s, later in the First Turning, the national mood will shift by degrees toward greater confidence and optimism. By then, the new regime will have proved itself by delivering what most Americans long for. They will desire more social stability and will get it – with low rates of crime and social disorder. They will desire more time for family and community and will get both – with resurgent birth rates and proliferating ties to local civic groups.
In national politics, the growing sense of achievement both at home and abroad will push confidence toward complacency, even triumphalism. Partisan differences between parties will continue to narrow. Neither party will express any fundamental dissatisfaction with America’s direction, each disagreeing with the other only on how to push the nation ahead faster. By the early 2050s, for the first time in living memory, the nation will take progress for granted. Americans will take special pride in the much faster growth rate of its economy – which may have been catapulted forward, as so often happens in the First turnings, by the clearing away of economic obstacles during the preceding Fourth Turning.
The U.S. economy, restructured by the 2040s to produce more efficiently what the typical family wants, will deliver dramatically higher living standards. This greater affluence will mainly benefit an enlarged middle class. In the next First Turning, America’s middle class will be further strengthened by the 21st century return of the “social ethic.” Compared to today, individuals will be judged less by how much money or power they possess than by how well they fit in with their family and community and serve their friends and coworkers. There will be a renaissance in volunteering and charitable giving. Participation in local civic organizations will again be fashionable. Many churches will reverse their declining membership by shifting their focus from liturgy to community uplift.
Unfavorable Scenarios:
At the darkest end of the possibility spectrum, we can imagine a war that triggers the unconstrained use of WMDs, most likely an exchange of nuclear warheads. To be sure, this scenario is possible in any turning. Since 1945, by some counts, the world has experienced sixteen “near miss” nuclear war incidents – roughly one every five years. During a Crisis era climax, these odds will certainly grow. Wars will be undertaken for greater stakes. Nations will be more likely to perceive that their survival is in jeopardy. Tensions will rise, along with the possibility of misperception and miscalculation. Leaders may try to “out-crazy” each other to force the other to back down. In the very worst nuclear outcome, the catastrophic loss of life, of industry, and of public services – to say nothing of the damage to the natural environment – would generate misery on a global scale. While both humanity and civilization would survive, the world might require decades, perhaps an entire saeculum, to regain most of what had been lost.
Another unsuccessful Fourth Turning outcome would be one that doesn’t result in large-scale WMD destruction but does result in America emerging as a damaged and diminished nation. Or America could emerge unvanquished and intact, but drastically degraded in its political constitution – for example, by losing free elections, by losing basic civil liberties, or by losing all barriers against central government control over state and local governance.
Most likely, in an unsuccessful outcome, America would suffer an overlapping of all scenarios. We might imagine, for example, a great-power war in which America’s performance is fatally undermined by political divisions at home. Or a civil war in which other great powers intervene and overwhelm. Or, in any Crisis climax that does not go well, a desperate citizenry submitting to authoritarian rule in order to stop what they fear is a descent into anarchy. In the worst of these scenarios, America would emerge torn into pieces or be occupied. In the best America would emerge intact and functional, but also weakened and demoralized.
Should any of these scenarios happen, it would constitute the first Anglo-American Fourth Turning that ends in failure – or, at the very least, that compels America during the subsequent First Turning to dedicate itself entirely to regaining some measure of what it has lost. Such an outcome would surely be unfortunate for Americans. Yet in today’s world it would be unfortunate for other peoples as well. A suddenly weaker and less functional America would pull down the entire world. It would reduce the global rate of tech innovations and economic growth; undermine the enforcement of global rules for trade and legal disputes; leave air and sea lanes less protected, embolden global terrorists and pirates; enfeeble any backstop against global financial, economic, or energy emergencies. Most importantly, it would strip the world’s democracies of the strong security guarantees they now depend on and render many of them defenseless against powerful regional autocrats.
Let’s return now to our imagined First Turning scenario. How would it differ if it were to follow an unsuccessful, rather than a successful, Crisis outcome? Clearly, it would change the state of the world – a great deal. Rather than investing the surplus of unprecedented prosperity, Americans may be struggling to raise living standards back to where they were before the Crisis era began. Rather than leading a coalition of victorious allies, the nation may be struggling to mount a resistance to a coalition of victorious adversaries. In the very worst scenario, it we dare to go that far, rather than erecting gleaming green communities or sending manned missions to other planets, Americans could be choosing hardy crops that survive in radioactive soil and building insulated shelters to survive a nuclear winter.
So yes, success or failure matters. Depending on which way it goes, Americans in the next First Turning would be living very different lives and working toward very different national goals. No question about that. In most of these scenarios, however, the social mood would be similar. Like all First Turnings, the era following failure would still prioritize community, cooperation, political unity, and conventional norms. The focus on building – or perhaps now, rebuilding – cities and economic infrastructure is likely to be especially strong, along with the desire to start new families. All this seems to be the clear pattern in modern nations that have suffered Crisis-era defeat – for example during World War II.
WISDOM:
We should follow ancient wisdom and conform our behavior to the season. If it’s winter, we should act like its winter. We should help our community prepare to be strong in the coming spring while allowing the least possible suffering so long as the storms rage. Though we may not be able to prevent the winter from happening, we are able to make the winter turn out better or worse. But we can’t help at all unless we first acknowledge that winter has indeed arrived. Only then we can see clearly, plan responsibly, and act effectively.
Source: The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe (7/18/2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE FOURTH TURNING – EXCERPTS
From The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss & Neil Howe (1997)
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE – UNDERSTANDING THE AMERICAN CYCLE
America feels like it’s unraveling. Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within. Wherever we’re headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don’t like or understand. Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we’re heading toward a waterfall. Are we?
THE TURNING CYCLE THEORY:
It’s All Happened Before: At the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm or growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction.
- The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
- The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
- The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
- The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.
In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that’s what happened.
The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that’s what happened.
The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade (2000 – 2010), eight to ten years from now. Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that’s where we are.
Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes – many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes – many times, over the centuries. A Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another. It can be long and difficult, brief but severe. But, like winter, it cannot be averted.
The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
Thus, might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis: all they suggest is the timing and dimension. America’s next rendezvous with destiny – will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty. How can we offer this prophecy with such confidence? Because it’s all happened before. Many times.
MILLENNIAL SAECULUM TURNINGS:
The American High: First Turning High, (1946 – 1964) witnessed America’s ascendancy as a global superpower. Social movements stalled. The middle class grew and prospered. Churches buttressed government. Huge peace time defense budgets were uncontroversial. Mass tastes thrived atop a collectivist infrastructure of suburbs, interstates, and regulated communication. Declaring an “end to ideology,” respected authorities presided over a bland, modernist, and spirit-dead culture.
The Consciousness Revolution: (Second Turning Awakening, 1964—1984) which began with urban riots and campus fury, swelled alongside Vietnam War protests and a rebellious counterculture. It gave rise to feminist, environmental, and black power movements and to a steep rise in violent crime and family breakup. After the fury peaked with Watergate (in 1974), passions turned inward toward New Age lifestyles and spiritual rebirth. The mood expired during Reagan’s upbeat reelection campaign, as onetime hippies reached their yuppie chrysalis.
The Culture Wars: (Third Turning Unraveling, 1984—2005?), which opened with triumphant Morning in American individualism, has thus far drifted toward pessimism. Personal confidence remains high, and a few national problems demand immediate action. But the public reflects darkly on growing violence and incivility, widening inequality, pervasive distrust in institutions and leaders and a debased popular culture. People fear that the national consensus is splitting into competing values camps.
The Millennial Crisis: (the Fourth Turning of the Millennial Saeculum has yet to arrive).
THE MILLENNIAL FOURTH TURNING PROPHERCY:
Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning. A spark will ignite a new mood. It will catalyze a Crises. In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. It could be a rapid succession of small events in which the ominous, the ordinary, and the trivial are commingled. A Crisis catalyst involves scenarios distinctly imaginable, eight to ten years in advance. Based on recent Unraveling-era trends, the following circa-2005 scenarios might seem plausible:
- A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons. The U.S. and its allies launch a preemptive strike. The terrorists threaten to retaliate against an American city. Congress declares war. [NOTE: The 9/11 attack occurred in 2001 followed by the Iraq War]
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announce the spread of a new communicable virus. The disease reaches densely populated areas. Congress enacts mandatory quarantine measures. [NOTE: The COVID pandemic erupted in 2020].
- Growing anarchy throughout the former Soviet republics prompts Russia to conduct training exercises around its borders. Lithuania erupts in civil war. Negotiations break down. U.S. diplomates are captured and publicly taunted. The president airlifts troops to rescue them and orders ships into the Black Sea. Iran declares its alliance with Russia. [NOTE: This has not happened, but Russia did invade Ukraine]
Time will pass, perhaps another decade, before the surging mood propels America to the Fourth Turning’s grave moment of opportunity and danger: the climax of the Crisis. The molten ingredients of the climax could include the following:
- Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation).
- Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities.
- Cultural distress, with the media plunging into a dizzying decay, and a decency backlash in favor of state censorship.
- Technological distress, with crypto-anarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos.
- Ecological distress, with atmospheric damage, energy or water shortages, and new diseases.
- Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders.
- Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction.
Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be many kinds of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed. With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin. The Crises resolution will establish the political, economic, and social institutions with which our children and heirs will live for decades thereafter.
Source: The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1997).
THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE
From: The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe (7/18/2023)
Our previous book, The Fourth Turning was published in 1997. That was twenty-six years ago. Remarkably, over all those years readers’ interest in our approach has steadily increased and the number of our readers has grown in episodic leaps. Many have been persuaded that the recent courses of American history has vindicated the map of the future we originally laid our back in the 1990s. One sure of new interest came in 2008, when the Global Financial Crisis inaugurated the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. This happened at approximately the time we foresaw that America would enter its “Crisis era” or the winter season. Still others came in 2016 (Donald Trump’s startling takeover of the Republican Party) and in 2020 (the global pandemic years roiled by the growing populism partisanship, distrust, and dysfunction that we had suggested would prevail early in the Crisis era.
The Global Financial Crisis, the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could have withstood but that caused ours to buckle and give way, revealing pillars and beams that had been decaying for decades. Public health, once a basic task that America took for granted, has become an insuperable challenge. Despite our riches and our science, America ended up with Covid deaths-per-capita on par with many of the poorest and least stable counties of the world. U.S. life expectancy, already declining since 2014, fell further in 2020 than in any single year since 1943, when America was suffering major battle casualties in Africa, Europe and the Pacific. It fell again by seven months in 2021.
Not long ago, to be an American was to be a rule-breaking, risk-taking individualist who believed that flouting convention somehow made everything better over time. That still describes many older Americans. It doesn’t describe many young adults. Today’s rising generation, shell-shocked by the pervasive hollowing out of government, neighborhood, workplace, and family is looking for any safe harbor it can find. Millennials seek not risk, but security. Not spontaneity, but planning. Not a free-for-all marketplace, but a rule-bounded community of equals. Older generations have for decades exulted in unconstrained personal growth and in a government that doesn’t ask much of them. They are very attached to “democracy.” Younger generations, meanwhile, are souring on democracy. At last count, Americans today in their thirties are less than half as likely as Americans over age sixty to agree that “it is essential to live in a democracy.” A small but rapidly rising share of young say democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way to run the country. Most of these would prefer military rule.
The same trends are now coursing through most of the world’s developed and emerging market nations: growing economic inequality; declining generational and social mobility; tighter national borders; and intensifying ethnic and religious tribalism, weaponized through portable social media. Charismatic populists are ascending to power – or have already gained power – in southern and central Europe, in Latin America, and in southern and eastern Asia.
Yet, as Americans witness the old civic order collapse, they are moving beyond pessimism. They are coming to two inescapable conclusions. First, in order to survive and recover, the country must construct a new civic order powerful enough to replace what is now gone. And second, the new order must be imposed by “our side,” which would rescue the country from its current paralysis, rather than by “the other side,” which would plunge the country into inescapable ruin. Yes, in the face of adversity, the old America is disintegrating. But at the same time, America is moving into a phase transition, a critical discontinuity, in which all the dysfunctional pieces of the old regime will be reintegrated in ways we can hardly now imagine. The civic vacuum will be filled. Welcome to the early and awkward emergence of the next American republic.
WE’VE COME INTO THE CRISIS ERA:
The precursor to the Millennial Crisis was the 9/11 attack followed by U.S. retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2001-2003). Like World War I, the 9/11 wars were fought with great enthusiasm but little patience – and the public soon soured on their basic objective. In 2005, two years after President G. W. Bush declared “mission accomplished,” more Americans disapproved than approved of the Iraqi invasion. The lofty “nation building” goal was widely mocked as “making the world safe for democracy.”
Not long after the Twin Towers attack, Americans were following the president’s advice to “go shopping” or “go to Disneyworld.” The economy already rebounding from a mild post-dotcom recession, surged ahead. A year later the stock market was rising again. This time Americans latched on to a get-rich device even more democratically accessible that dotcom tech stocks: real estate. As home prices accelerated amid “Flip That House” shows, banks issued subprime mortgages to eager home buyers. The banks then securitized the mortgages and either held them “off the books” or sold them to voracious institutional investors. During the five years following 9/11, both home prices and total real estate wealth rose by nearly two-thirds, making homeowners feel $10 trillion richer than they had been before.
In 2008, it all came apart. This terrifying bust, which became to be known as the Global Financial Crisis, was the catalyst. And it led directly to the most severe global economic contraction since the Great Depression.
In 2016, both political parties set out to nominate a new presidential candidate. The mood was fraught. The economy had hit another post-recession air pocket, and public dissatisfaction with “they say things are going” remained at record highs. The Democrats narrowly missed going with their populist, Bernie Sanders, opting instead for an establishment liberal, Hillary Clinton. The Republicans went the other way. In the ensuing national election, their populist, Donald Trump, narrowly won the electoral college county, and their party managed to retain both houses.
The 2016 election constituted a clear regeneracy for both factions. In national politics, it mobilized party partisans to an intensity not seen since the mid-1930s if not the late 1850s. The left rallied many Democrats into a “resistance” – as if the Trump administration were an occupying army – before demanding action on various executive misdeeds by means for a special prosecutor and two successive impeachments. The right rallied around Trump, who continued while in office to behave and campaign as an outsider. He never stopped fulminating against the “deep state.” He hardly cared about the record-low approval ratings he was earning from voters for his actual governing performance. Even during the onset of the pandemic and global recession of 2020, Trump maintained his adversarial stance. He belittled his own top health officials without, however, dismissing them. He inveighed against hapless federal bureaucrats, even while approving seven Covid-related bills, authorizing those bureaucrats to spend trillions in benefit payments – easily the largest surge in federal social welfare spending in American history.
In November 2020, in an election that was mostly about whether to re-elect Trump – rather than about electing anyone else – American voters turned Trump down. Yet Trump chose to interpret this as a lost battle, not a lost war. Trump, exhorting his followers to “stop the steal,” and not allow an “illegitimate president” to take office, reminded them “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Hours later, many of them stormed the Capitol building with weapons while Congress was in session.
A year later, nearly three-quarters of Republican voters – and a third of all U.S. voters – agreed that Joe Biden’s victory was probably or definitely not legitimate. Nearly two years later, in the fall 2022 midterm election, more than two hundred GOP candidates running for federal or executive state offices said they at least questioned or doubted the 2020 outcome; about thirty said outright that it was “stolen.” Most of these candidates won their races – although, to be sure the most extreme MAGA deniers lost or underperformed in their elections.
Surveys show that political differences now outrank all other differences, including those of income or religion or race, in day-to-day encounters that people wish to avoid. One way to avoid such encounters is to choose a new church, club, or employer whose views match your own. An even better way is to choose a new neighborhood. To most Americans, the outcome feels like a dismal stalemate. We may as well be describing two societies – each having its own sectarian goals, yet both awkwardly yoked to one government.
From the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 to the ebbing of the global Covid pandemic in 2021, America’s biggest challenges were twofold: dismal economic performance and paralyzing civic discord. On February 24, 2022, a great new challenge broke into the headlines: geopolitical conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shocked the world. It was the first time in 77 years that one large European nation has tried to conquer another. Once again, the long-dormant threat of war between the world’s great powers has jumped back to life, only this time with nine nations already armed with nuclear weapons.
Since the invasion, Americans have awakened to see more clearly the consequences of America’s recent disengagement from global affairs. The list of damages here is long and demoralizing. It includes all the dire presidential “red lines” against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea that America never enforced; all the trade and defense agreements with close allies that America neglected, undermined, or scuttled; and all the commitments to governments at war against anti-American militants that America abandoned without warning – most ingloriously, in Afghanistan. Repairing this damage, if America chose to do so, would require re-engaging the world. It might also require the nation to reverse the long-term decline in its spending on defense – and become, once again, the free-world’s “arsenal of democracy.”
The hour may be growing late. Just before retiring at the end of 2020, Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, declared that “this Ukrainian crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup.” Citing the decline in America’s military capability relative to China’s in the western Pacific, he added: “The big one is coming. And if isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested … for a long time.”
As of early 2023, the two political parties remain essentially leaderless, each awaiting the next presidential primary season to see what happens. With parties leaderless, and with neither party fully in charge, the nation feels leaderless as well.
PREDICTION: FOURTH TURNING OF MILLENIAL ERA: The Millennial Crisis is very likely to become a Crisis era not just for America but also for much of the world – perhaps even more than the Great Depression-World War II Crisis that preceded it. What this means from an American perspective is that a saecular anomaly will be less likely. Rather than interfering with or neutralizing America’s saecular timing, the rest of the world will be reinforcing it.
The early 2030s appear to be the most likely years for the resolution of the Millennial Crisis and the opening of the First Turning of the next saeculum. The most likely year for the climax would perhaps be 2030. Such dates or course must be regarded as probability epicenters. The resolution could arrive earlier by three or four years. Or it could arrive later – though here the margin for error is larger since we may be underestimating the dilation of turning length.
CIVIL WAR:
Is America getting ready to engage in another civil war? The question must be taken seriously. Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely. And a growing number of social scientists agree that the United States now fits the checklist profile of a country at risk. Trust in the national government is in steep decline. Check. A heavily armed population has polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. Check. Each faction embodies a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and urban-versus-rural identity. Each wants its country to become something the other detests. And each fears the prospect of the other taking power. Check, check, and check.
According to Freedom House, America has become steadily less democratic since 2008. It currently ranks the United States 61st among democracies, a bit behind Argentina and Romania and a bit ahead of Poland and Panama. Global research centers that track and analyze political indicators by country now categorize the United States as something less than a democracy. One calls it a “backsliding democracy.” Another call it an “anocracy,” that is, something between democracy and autocracy.
GREAT POWER WAR:
World War II did not suddenly explode out of nowhere. It gathered strength, like an avalanche starting to heave with ever-larger tremors, until whoosh – all the world gave way. The early signs during the 1930s weren’t just the outright invasions, but the swelling wave of bloodless annexations, midnight coups, bribed newspapers, assassinated leaders, jailed dissidents, and rigged elections. It was the shadow of brute autocracy spreading over the world.
The same shadow is spreading today. According to one global institute (Freedom House), the share of the world’s population not living in “free” nations has expanded over the last decade from 55% to 80%. According to another (V-Dem), the shared living in “autocratic nations” has risen from 49% to 70%. Almost every year, the number of governments restricting civil liberties, criminalizing dissent, suspending due process, and manipulating elections has greatly exceeded the number moving in a liberal direction.
Identifying the major participants in a coming great-power war, should it happen, is not Black Swan mystery. To list the roster on one side, we need only refer to America’s four primary “adversaries” and “competitors” as they are described in recent yearbooks of the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence. These are: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in roughly that order. All four nations are growing steadily closer together in their trade and security agreements. Their policy statements are showing ever-tighter coordination, as when China now complains of Western powers orchestrating an “Indo-Pacific NATO.” And all together – after adding in another couple of dozen allies, dependencies, and vassals – they dominate the vast supercontinent of Eurasia. Arrayed against them, on the other side, is America, much of the western hemisphere, most of Europe, and the high-income western Pacific Rim.
On the adversary side, virtually every member country is non-free. On the American side, most member countries are free. The adversary side is superior in land area and (assuming India remains nonaligned) in population. The American side is superior in technology, economic capacity, and projectible military strength. That’s a big edge. But the adversary side believes it could prevail through technological breakthroughs combined with a greater collective willingness to plan ahead, take risks, and incur sacrifice. Once again, in all such encomia to “greater national will,” we hear echoes of the 1930s.
The adversary side may have one more hope, which is that the American side disintegrates on its own. The western Pacific Rim democracies may lose confidence in American security guarantees and start cutting their own deals with China. The European Union, having already lost Britain, may lose more members as a result of economic hardship and populist party victories. Western European leaders, tiring of the war in Ukraine, may choose to come to terms with Russia over sovereignty in Eastern Europe – a tempting move that would at once gain them populist votes, pull down energy prices, and boost their economies. Xi likes to compare “China’s order” with the “chaos in the West.” As well he might for it’s a playbook the world has seen before. Leaders of the Axis powers, after several successful invasions in the late 1930s, were themselves astonished by the disunity of their vanquished opponents.
Best of all, for the adversary side, would be for America itself to disintegrate internally. This scenario too is one that Xi no doubt takes seriously. “Time and momentum are on our side,” he proclaimed after hearing of the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. “America’s Main Opponent is itself,” The People’s Daily explained a few days later in a headline. Such hope is not groundless. It is possible that America’s civil conflict could worsen into a civil war. And if that happens, America’s global security capabilities would be undermined, perhaps severely. Almost overnight, the adversary side could find itself free to realize long-sought strategic goals – starting with large regional expansions of their spheres of power – and face little possibility of an American response.
The next great-power war will once again pose terrifying risks to all who enter it. The reason, of course, is the global proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) with rapid and effective delivery systems. Once Iran possesses nuclear weapons (which may happen at any time), there will be ten nuclear powers. Four of them will be on the adversary side – five of them Pakistan joins.
THE NEXT FIRST TURNING: SCENARIOS:
The next First Turning will begin when the current Fourth Turning reaches its resolution, which as we have seen is most likely to happen in the early 2030s. To make the future tangible, let’s choose a date: 2033. Let’s also assume that the recent trend toward somewhat longer generations and turnings continues. We therefore project that this turning will last 23 years. So, we’re looking at 2033 to 2056 as suggestive start and stop dates.
Favorable Scenarios:
From the outset, the most striking feature of this new era will be an overwhelming sense of national unity – a sense unfamiliar to most Americans today. The memory of the Crisis climax will still be fresh in everyone’s mind, along with the lives and fortunes sacrificed in order to ensure that the nation would prevail.
Following the Crisis, loyalty to the new national regime will become the first organizing principle in party politics. Should the Fourth Turing culminate in civil war, First Turning electorates will cast into the wilderness whichever faction led the losing side – in this case, perhaps leading red zone Republicans or leading blue zone Democrats. Should there be a great-power war, the faction which most opposed the war or maintained the closest ties with the enemy could remain under a dark cloud of suspicion.
All legitimate political factions, certainly both major parties will agree on the paramount need to defend and strengthen the new regime – not just to rebuild whatever may have been physically destroyed, but to redesign and modernize institutions across the board. Political discussion will focus on means, not ends.
Following almost any Crisis climax scenario, it won’t just be America that will require rebuilding and redesigning. It will be much of the rest of the world as well in what may be a global First Turning. Once again, following the precedent of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, America will likely be called upon to provide leadership and assistance to that effort. Once again America will be motivated by enlightened self-interest. By investing heavily in a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic post-Crisis world, America will be able to secure the long-term “freedom from fear,” its citizens will be yearning for.
As the next global First Turning opens, the most desperate need will be to calm a world in turmoil – enforcing new peace agreements, setting up provisional governments, resettling refuges, rebuilding destroyed cities. formalizing alliances, and possibly redrawing national boundaries. America will necessarily play a large role in all such activities.
Today, most of these goals – like banning of rogue nuclear states, for example, or an enforceable global budget for atmospheric carbon – seem like hopeless one-world dreams. Come the next First Turning, they could become reality. All that is necessary is for a few great powers to take the lead in proposing these rules and to persuade most countries that they will be enforced. American voters will go along with this expanded global role so long as it serves their long-term interests and does not relinquish their national sovereignty.
By the 2040s, later in the First Turning, the national mood will shift by degrees toward greater confidence and optimism. By then, the new regime will have proved itself by delivering what most Americans long for. They will desire more social stability and will get it – with low rates of crime and social disorder. They will desire more time for family and community and will get both – with resurgent birth rates and proliferating ties to local civic groups.
In national politics, the growing sense of achievement both at home and abroad will push confidence toward complacency, even triumphalism. Partisan differences between parties will continue to narrow. Neither party will express any fundamental dissatisfaction with America’s direction, each disagreeing with the other only on how to push the nation ahead faster. By the early 2050s, for the first time in living memory, the nation will take progress for granted. Americans will take special pride in the much faster growth rate of its economy – which may have been catapulted forward, as so often happens in the First turnings, by the clearing away of economic obstacles during the preceding Fourth Turning.
The U.S. economy, restructured by the 2040s to produce more efficiently what the typical family wants, will deliver dramatically higher living standards. This greater affluence will mainly benefit an enlarged middle class. In the next First Turning, America’s middle class will be further strengthened by the 21st century return of the “social ethic.” Compared to today, individuals will be judged less by how much money or power they possess than by how well they fit in with their family and community and serve their friends and coworkers. There will be a renaissance in volunteering and charitable giving. Participation in local civic organizations will again be fashionable. Many churches will reverse their declining membership by shifting their focus from liturgy to community uplift.
Unfavorable Scenarios:
At the darkest end of the possibility spectrum, we can imagine a war that triggers the unconstrained use of WMDs, most likely an exchange of nuclear warheads. To be sure, this scenario is possible in any turning. Since 1945, by some counts, the world has experienced sixteen “near miss” nuclear war incidents – roughly one every five years. During a Crisis era climax, these odds will certainly grow. Wars will be undertaken for greater stakes. Nations will be more likely to perceive that their survival is in jeopardy. Tensions will rise, along with the possibility of misperception and miscalculation. Leaders may try to “out-crazy” each other to force the other to back down. In the very worst nuclear outcome, the catastrophic loss of life, of industry, and of public services – to say nothing of the damage to the natural environment – would generate misery on a global scale. While both humanity and civilization would survive, the world might require decades, perhaps an entire saeculum, to regain most of what had been lost.
Another unsuccessful Fourth Turning outcome would be one that doesn’t result in large-scale WMD destruction but does result in America emerging as a damaged and diminished nation. Or America could emerge unvanquished and intact, but drastically degraded in its political constitution – for example, by losing free elections, by losing basic civil liberties, or by losing all barriers against central government control over state and local governance.
Most likely, in an unsuccessful outcome, America would suffer an overlapping of all scenarios. We might imagine, for example, a great-power war in which America’s performance is fatally undermined by political divisions at home. Or a civil war in which other great powers intervene and overwhelm. Or, in any Crisis climax that does not go well, a desperate citizenry submitting to authoritarian rule in order to stop what they fear is a descent into anarchy. In the worst of these scenarios, America would emerge torn into pieces or be occupied. In the best America would emerge intact and functional, but also weakened and demoralized.
Should any of these scenarios happen, it would constitute the first Anglo-American Fourth Turning that ends in failure – or, at the very least, that compels America during the subsequent First Turning to dedicate itself entirely to regaining some measure of what it has lost. Such an outcome would surely be unfortunate for Americans. Yet in today’s world it would be unfortunate for other peoples as well. A suddenly weaker and less functional America would pull down the entire world. It would reduce the global rate of tech innovations and economic growth; undermine the enforcement of global rules for trade and legal disputes; leave air and sea lanes less protected, embolden global terrorists and pirates; enfeeble any backstop against global financial, economic, or energy emergencies. Most importantly, it would strip the world’s democracies of the strong security guarantees they now depend on and render many of them defenseless against powerful regional autocrats.
Let’s return now to our imagined First Turning scenario. How would it differ if it were to follow an unsuccessful, rather than a successful, Crisis outcome? Clearly, it would change the state of the world – a great deal. Rather than investing the surplus of unprecedented prosperity, Americans may be struggling to raise living standards back to where they were before the Crisis era began. Rather than leading a coalition of victorious allies, the nation may be struggling to mount a resistance to a coalition of victorious adversaries. In the very worst scenario, it we dare to go that far, rather than erecting gleaming green communities or sending manned missions to other planets, Americans could be choosing hardy crops that survive in radioactive soil and building insulated shelters to survive a nuclear winter.
So yes, success or failure matters. Depending on which way it goes, Americans in the next First Turning would be living very different lives and working toward very different national goals. No question about that. In most of these scenarios, however, the social mood would be similar. Like all First Turnings, the era following failure would still prioritize community, cooperation, political unity, and conventional norms. The focus on building – or perhaps now, rebuilding – cities and economic infrastructure is likely to be especially strong, along with the desire to start new families. All this seems to be the clear pattern in modern nations that have suffered Crisis-era defeat – for example during World War II.
WISDOM:
We should follow ancient wisdom and conform our behavior to the season. If it’s winter, we should act like its winter. We should help our community prepare to be strong in the coming spring while allowing the least possible suffering so long as the storms rage. Though we may not be able to prevent the winter from happening, we are able to make the winter turn out better or worse. But we can’t help at all unless we first acknowledge that winter has indeed arrived. Only then we can see clearly, plan responsibly, and act effectively.
Source: The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Howe (7/18/2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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