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

by Neil Howe

The first have to do with crisis. This book proposes that America is midway through an era of historical crisis, which—almost by definition—will lead to outcomes that are largely though not entirely beyond our control.

more ancient yet also more optimistic doctrine: that our collective social life, as with so many rhythmic systems in nature, requires seasons of sudden change and radical uncertainty in order for us to thrive over time.

Blaise Pascal: History has reasons that reason knows nothing

This book suggests that generations are causal agents in history and that generational formation drives the pace and direction of social change in the modern world. Once people understand this, they are often temp...

This temptation must be resisted. In the words of the great German scholar Leopold von Ranke, who weighed so many Old World generations on the scales of history, “before God all the generations of humanity appear equally justified.” In “any generation,” he observed, “real moral greatness i...

Marcel Proust

History never looks like history when you are living through it. —JOHN W. GARDNER

The old American republic is collapsing. And a new American republic, as yet unrecognizable, is under construction.

Little more than a decade ago, the old America, while not in robust health, still functioned. In the mid-2000s, most voters still read the same news and trusted their government, the two parties still conferred on big issues, Congress still passed annual budgets, and most families remained hopeful about the nation’s future. Then came the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could ha...

Pollsters are struggling to catch up with the depth of Americans’ dismay across the political spectrum. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that “America is falling apart.” Seventy-six percent worry about “losing American democracy.” Sixty-two percent say “the country is in a crisis” (only 25 percent disagree). Measures of national happiness and national pride (“very proud to be an American”) have fallen to record lows. At its worst, the recent collapse has exposed our aging republic’s staggering incompetence at carrying out even basic tasks. We can’t keep the electricity turned on or baby formula stocked in stores. We can’t recall how to enforce laws on the streets or at the border. We can’t ensure minimal care for homeless famil...

steep decline in Americans’ trust both in one another and in their leaders. No public trust means no public truth,

Conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void, and the nation’s unifying narratives are replaced by a mingle-mangle of warring anthems.

Another change has been the abject failure of leaders to govern as if outcomes matter.

Leaders who can’t identify objectives, exercise authority, and get results—who are forever redefining what they are there to do—invite contempt for their office. Institutions struggling to fulfill their core function are taking on vast new tasks at which they have zero chance of success:

Other agencies, perversely, are prohibited from fulfilling their core mission.

rise of free-floating anger in public venues. Airlines, restaurants, hospitals, and police report an epidemic of unruliness.

Millennials seek not risk, but security. Not spontaneity, but planning. Not a free-for-all marketplace, but a rule-bound community of equals.

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.”

The young increasingly associate democracy with sclerosis

The generational contrast is stark.

Globally, America has grown more alarmed about its enemies, less generous toward its friends, more wary of everybody. The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 was the pivot point.

Until then, “globalization” seemed inexorable and global trade expanded (as a share of global production) almost every year. Since then, global trade has been shrinking, trade barriers have proliferated, and onshoring has replaced offshoring.

Personal identity is likewise balkanizing into self-referential fortresses such as ethnicity, gender, religion, region, education, and (of course) political party.

Our politics are now monopolized by two political parties that represent not just contrasting policies, but mutually exclusive worldviews.

Every election, no matter how local, has thus become a national election.

every national election is regarded as a do-or-die turning point for America.

populists make no pretense of rule-making neutrality:

Justice requires a whole new set of rules to usher in a whole new definition of how the national community should think or feel.

We may want to believe these disquieting trends are unique to Ame...

The same trends are now coursing through most of the world’s developed and e...

Global surveys indicate a growing dissatisfaction with democracy itself—what academics call a “global democratic recession”—led

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.

our political behavior, we are becoming less a nation of detached individualists and more a nation of all-in tribal partisans, ready to move collectively in one direction or the other.

Our preferred leadership style is moving from the elite technocrat to the plainspoken everyman (or everywoman),

the rhetoric of violence and the threat of violence against political leaders is rising. Today, as then, few are in the mood to compromise. This may be the most ominous signal of all: To most Americans, the survival of democracy itself is not as essential as making sure their side comes out on top. Just before the 2022 election, while 71 percent of

Sensing that the price of failure is permanent marginalization, partisans on each side are girding for a crisis in which they are ready to break any guardrails to prevail. Everything is now on the table: gerrymandering, tilting election rules, subpoenas, impeachments, nuking the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and—in extremis—mobilizing mobs in support of state refusal to follow federal rules (nullification) or in support of outright state independence (secession). However the struggle plays out, America is getting ready for a gigantic makeover of its national governing institutions. Newspaper editorials focus mostly on the wrong question. They ask which side will win. The

The most important question is whether Americans are prepared for the trauma that will accompany the collapse of one regime and the emergence of another.

Few voters still think the status quo is sustainable.

America’s central government has already road-tested many of the policies it may employ to begin reconstruction.

Very soon, something will trigger this makeover to exit its destructive phase

What will this trigger be? Almost any new emergency could suffice.

In 2022, the Collins English Dictionary added the word “permacrisis” to its lexicon, meaning “an e...

Ever since the 2020 election season, close to half of Americans have been telling pollsters they believe a civil war is imminent.

the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five or six centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or

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 periodic rhythm, in which the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter correspond to eras of rebirth, growt...

Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. In the months following John Kennedy’s assassination, no one predicted America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural watershed that