The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

by Neil Howe

Many indeed will find catharsis in a historic rupture that clarifies basic national choices. So has every Prophet archetype in a Fourth Turning. After Britain’s punitive measures against Boston in 1774, Princeton president John Witherspoon vowed “to prefer war with all its horrors, and even extermination, to slavery.” Emerson, after hearing of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, confessed he felt relief in a “war” which “shatters everything flimsy, sets aside all false issues, and breaks through all that is not real as itself…. Let it search, let it grind, let it overturn.” This time around, leaders of the aging Boomer clerisy are likely to react in a similar fashion.