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

by Neil Howe

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.

1946. Using these two bracket points, we should expect the Millennial Crisis to reach its resolution sometime between 2026 and 2038.

According to Freedom House, America has become steadily less democratic since 2008. It currently ranks the United States sixty-first 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 full democracy. One calls it a “backsliding democracy.” Another calls it an “anocracy,” that is, something between democracy and autocracy.

Less democracy, it turns out, could be an indicator that civil war is on the way.

Nor is the typical civil war triggered by a single urgent or “forcing” question of law or policy. Rather, it happens after one faction comes to fear that power wielded by the other will lead to the inevitable demise of its identity, its status, and its way of life—at which point the trigger could be almost anything.

Above all, civil wars (or, alternatively, “revolutions”) begin when one or both sides are persuaded of the irreversibility of future events once the other side gains further advantage.

What would raise or lower the likelihood of an American civil war during the remainder of the Millennial Crisis era? The likelihood would clearly rise in the presence of new social stressors.

The trigger that starts the conflict could be almost anything. It could start at the top with an impeachment, a contested national election, a Supreme Court decision, or a complete breakdown of House or Senate protocol. Or it could start at the bottom with several states refusing to comply with federal rules and beginning to set their own social, economic, immigration, or environmental policies. Whatever the trigger, the conflict would gradually gain momentum through a series of standoffs, ultimatums, and shows of force. And it would likely escalate, against most leaders’ original intentions, into large-scale organized violence.

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