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

by Neil Howe

Or, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal: History has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Marcel Proust wrote that “what we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.”

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

What America has experienced over the last decade, writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is aptly captured in the biblical story of the tower of Babel: As if the Almighty had flipped a switch, everyone began speaking different languages and refusing to cooperate on common projects.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives cannot maintain a national firearms registry, even though guns now kill more children annually than automobiles (an astonishing predicament America shares only with Yemen).

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

Our politics are now monopolized by two political parties that represent not just contrasting policies, but mutually exclusive worldviews. These are “megaparties,” to use political scientist Lilliana Mason’s powerful term, which attract supporters first and foremost through their emotional brand identities and only secondarily through their positions on issues.

When people start taking on less risk as individuals, they start taking on more risk as groups.

Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride, Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings war; War brings spoil, and spoil poverty, Poverty patience, and patience peace So peace brings war, and war brings peace. —JEAN DE MEUN (FL. 1280−1305)

“The warrior does not wish to fight again himself and prejudices his son against war,” he observed, “but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic.”

Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at UC San Diego, has spent her entire career studying civil wars, from Rwanda to Myanmar. When asked about America, she says the evidence is pretty clear: “We are a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

Sociologist Charles Tilly is pithier: “War made the state, and the state made war.”

Back in the mid-1970s, Ronald Reagan famously declared that the ten most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.” Stanford historian Ian Morris, who has argued at great length (with Holmes and against James) that war is indeed inevitable, observes that Reagan’s quip could only make sense at a uniquely secure moment in a uniquely comfortable corner of the world. For most of humanity and throughout most of history, writes Morris, the ten most terrifying words are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.” War, he implies, is what happens when people are lucky enough to have an effective government willing to protect them.