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

by Neil Howe

preoccupation with national peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline. As the new civic order becomes more demanding, private risk-taking abates and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child-rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with determination and for maximum result.

Since the beginning of the Millennial Crisis, Americans have come full circle. Today they are again encountering powerful yet oppressive communities portrayed in novels and movies like The Hunger Games, Elysium, and The Circle or in award-winning TV series like The Handmaid’s Tale and Black Mirror. Alienated anti-heroes have been replaced by a pantheon of Marvel- and DC-curated save-the-world superheroes—whose recent domination of pop fantasy has no parallel since the late 1930s.

During a Crisis, individuals reattach themselves to their community and turn society outward toward a single and objective goal.

PARALLEL RHYTHMS

In our first chapter, we introduced a paradox: Modernity, though predicated on the goal of eliminating natural cycles, has given rise to an ever-growing multitude of social cycles unique to modernity itself. Many of these are cycles that take decades to complete.

Here we summarize several of the best-known of these cycle theories. And we suggest that perhaps they are not unrelated after all. Perhaps they are all reflections of the seasons of the saeculum, modernity’s Great Year, beating to the rhythm of the long human life.

America in the 1990s was due for a major new dose of big-government activism. That didn’t happen of course. Timing aside, though, Schlesinger is right about the fundamental rhythm of American politics. Authoritarian government wasn’t dead; it was just hibernating, poised to return in a Crisis era, rested and refreshed.

political scientists (primarily V. O. Key, Jr., Walter Dean Burnham, and James L. Sundquist), this cycle coincides perfectly with the saeculum. Every forty years or so—always during a Crisis or Awakening—a new “realigning election” gives birth to a “new political party system.”

“Four-fifths of the time,” politics is in “system maintenance mode,” he says, until “disruptive change” punctuates the equilibrium.

Critical Awakening-era elections can be called de-aligning to the extent that they reflect a loosening of party discipline. Critical Crisis-era elections can be called re-aligning to the extent that they establish or reinforce one-party

We might suppose that nothing could be more random than changes in America’s foreign policy. What pattern, after all, can possibly account for the global accidents of war and diplomacy?

political scientist Frank L. Klingberg (himself a student of war scholar Quincy Wright’s) discovered a “historical alternation of moods” in American foreign policy. He explained the clear difference between a mere event and society’s response to that event.

Foreign policy often leads to war. And without question, every major war in Anglo-American history has been shaped by the turning in which it arose.

CHART 4-4 Wars and Turnings*

Crisis-era wars have all been costly in resources and decisive in results.

They have all required maximum social consensus and exertion. They have also been deadly: Total casualties in these wars (as a share of the population) vastly outweigh casualties in all other wars combined. Home-front resolve is high, and the outcome contributes to a redefinition of the kingdom, nation, or empire.

In 1930, Stalin arrested the economist Nikolai Kondratieff and shipped him off to Siberia. His crime: daring to defy that most linear of modern ideologies—Marxism-Leninism—by suggesting that the long-term performance of market economies is cyclical.

According to Toynbee, Modelski, and Thompson, the K-cycle ordinarily moves in sync with the generational long cycle.

During a Crisis, the economy is rocked by some sequential combination of panic, depression, recovery, inflation, war, and mobilization.

A very high inequality eventually becomes unsustainable, but it does not go down by itself; rather, it generates processes, like wars, social strife, and revolutions, that lower

The two most famous European overviews of American democracy published during the nineteenth century (Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth) followed the authors’ tours of America in 1831 and in 1883−84, respectively.

inversely correlated with basic indicators of social trust.

Simple patriotism turns out to be a pretty good proxy measure of social trust, which prompts Roth’s best-known indicator: the share of all new counties named after national heroes.

There are decades when nothing happens. And there are weeks when decades happen. —ATTRIBUTED TO LENIN (V. I. ULYANOV)

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” So wrote Isaiah Berlin, quoting an ancient Greek poet, in a 1953 essay about Russian literature. The

After Franklin Roosevelt declared that there is a powerful “cycle in human events,” he made two further observations—that this cycle is powered by “generations” and that it is “mysterious.”

Specifically, we explore the following questions:

We like to think we are masters of our own destiny, free to choose whatever we desire.

we often feel, that our future behavior must be essentially unpredictable.

The very morality of reward and punishment for good or bad actions, the philosopher David Hume once argued, contradicts freedom of the will.

administration of justice presupposes instead that our actions are tied to predictable personalities and that each of us will respond to rewards and punishments in a predictable manner.

Even if a cycle of history does not violate free will, many troublesome questions remain: They go by the name of fortune, chance, or accident. Perhaps the most evocative word is contingency, which refers to the multitude of events that “touch upon” every other event.

How can the saeculum coexist with contingency?

Who could have predicted the steamship and locomotive? Or the stock crash on Black Thursday? Or the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the accuracy of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet? Or the invention of the microchip? All these contingencies have had an enormous impact...

The answer is straightforward: The saeculum neither predicts them nor denies them. History is forever begetting random accidents. All the saeculum insists is that what matters most is not the accidents themselves, but rather society’s response to the accidents.

History always produces sparks. But some sparks flare briefly and then vanish, while others touch off firestorms out of any proportion to the sparks themselves. The propensity of sparks to act one way rather than another is what we mean when we talk about changes in social mood.

History teaches, as we have seen, that wars tend to reflect the mood of the current turning. Wars in a Fourth Turning find the broadest possible definition and are fought to unambiguous outcomes.

The saeculum does not guarantee good or bad outcomes.

While many assume that a new technology shapes a new decade or generation, the true causal arrow may point more in the reverse direction: Every new decade or generation shapes how that technology gets put to use.

Since the seventeenth century, any reference to a natural cycle or period has always brought to mind a simple physical system, like the orbit of a planet around the sun. Its timing is exact, and its gravitational cause can be precisely identified and described. A cycle of social behavior, by contrast, possesses only approximate timing.

what causes it typically isn’t understood at all.

Systems theory offers a helpful perspective

the saeculum itself can be regarded as a complex living system that seeks a similar balance between order and disorder. This balance is dynamic in the sense that it self-adjusts over the duration of the saeculum.

Throughout this rhythm the system always maintains within itself a capacity for recovery and self-adjustment—for example, through the process of generational aging and replacement.

Modern ideologies of progress generally fall into two great camps, idealist and materialist.

progress is not the purpose of the saeculum. If the saeculum has a purpose, it is rather to push a society that always anticipates something better into phases of creative self-adjustment where it must, from time to time, confront something worse. It is to steer a people resolved to avoid cycles into participating in a cycle that will spare it from dissolution or stasis and therefore from social death. The saeculum contributes to long-term progress only to the extent that it keeps society alive and adaptive. In this sense, its purpose resembles that of natural evolution:

every social cycle has a periodicity. To know what it is, we can simply measure it across multiple cycle peaks. But to understand why the cycle has any given length or periodicity—and what may make it change over time—we need to know something about what determines it.

the natural framework of a behavioral cycle may suggest explanations for its length.

For simplicity in that discussion, we illustrated the pacing of generational formation by imagining phases of life fixed at twenty-one years, which would generate a saeculum of eighty-four years. Yet this length has not remained fixed since the dawn of modernity, at least not in the Anglo-American context. For the six pre-American generations, born through the late sixteenth century, the length of a generation averaged twenty-six years. For the seven American generations born before the founding of the United States, it averaged twenty-five years. Yet for the next ten U.S. generations, through Millennials, it has averaged just over twenty-one years. As the length of a generation has shrunk, so too has the length of a saeculum, from just over one hundred years to just over eighty years. The demographic data, spotty as they sometimes are, make it clear that this shortening trend in the length of a generation has roughly tracked a similar long-term shortening in the length of a phase of life.

no generation has come of age in America without inspiring a recognizable collective label.