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

by Neil Howe

Over time, American historians have built a nomenclature around these successive dates. In the winter of 1861, when war loomed, both the Union and the Confederacy announced that this confrontation would constitute a “new revolution” and a “new declaration of independence.” In the 1930s, Charles and Mary Beard declared the Civil War to be the “Second American Revolution”—a label since reused countless times, most recently by James McPherson. Similarly, in the 1970s, historian Carl Degler called the New Deal “The Third American Revolution.” He pointed out that the Democratic Party, for decades afterward, successfully reminded voters of the “lessons of the Great Depression”—just as the Republican Party “waved the bloody shirt” for decades after the defeat of the South. In his magisterial history of the American Constitution, Bruce Ackerman identifies “not one, but three ‘founding’ moments in our history: the late 1780s, the late 1860s, and the mid-1930s.” Counting forward from the 1780s, then, we are now living under America’s third republic. Should we be preparing for another? More than twenty years ago, political scientist Walter Dean Burnham predicted “that the present politics of upheaval may lead to a fourth American republic.” In recent years, others across the political spectrum have echoed this “fourth republic” prediction. Now that the Millennial Crisis has begun, we can point to the probable timing of its arrival: sometime shortly before or after the Millennial Cris...