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

by Neil Howe

Remarkably, over all those years, readers’ interest in our approach has steadily increased and the number of our readers has grown in episodic leaps. Many have been persuaded that the recent course of American history has vindicated the map of the future we originally laid out back in the 1990s. One surge of new interest came in 2008, when the Global Financial Crisis inaugurated the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression.

While history may shape generations early in life, so too do generations, as they grow older, reliably shape history.

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. The prospect of such radical uncertainty may fill us with dread. All too often in the modern West we fear that any outcome not subject to our complete control must mean we are heading toward catastrophe.

Over the course of this book, I hope to persuade you of a 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. Or, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal: History has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

The other words of counsel have to do with generations. 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 tempted to judge one or another generation as “good” or “bad.” 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 just...

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

Then came the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the rise of populism, and the pandemic. These were three hits that a healthy democracy could have withstood but that caused ours to buckle and give way, revealing pillars and beams that had been decaying for decades.

No public trust means no public truth, or at least nothing more substantial than what TV pundit Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” Conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void, and the nation’s unifying narratives are replaced by a mingle-mangle of warring anthems.

One symptom is the rise of free-floating anger in public venues. Airlines, restaurants, hospitals, and police report an epidemic of unruliness. Road-rage traffic deaths are up, as are random mass shootings.

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.”

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.

In this dawning climate of hope and (mostly) fear, every measure of political engagement is surging. U.S. voter turnout rates are now the highest in over a century. Individual donations and volunteering for political campaigns are exploding. Civic literacy, such as people’s understanding of the Constitution, has been climbing steeply after decades of decline.

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.

The Fourth Turning—for now, let’s call it the Millennial Crisis—began with the global market crash of 2008 and has thus far witnessed a shrinking middle class, the “MAGA” rise of Donald Trump, a global pandemic, and new fears of a great-power war. Early in Barack Obama’s ’08 campaign against John McCain, no one could have predicted that America was about to enter an era of bleak pessimism, authoritarian populism, and fanatical partisanship. But that’s what happened. And this era still has roughly another decade to run.

In both decades, marriages were postponed, birth rates fell, and the share of unrelated adults living together rose. In both decades, families grew closer and multigenerational living (of the sort memorialized in vintage Frank Capra movies) became commonplace.

What typically occurs early in a Fourth Turning—the initial catalyzing event, the deepening loss of civic trust, the galvanizing of partisanship, the rise of creedal passions, and the scramble to reconstruct national policies and priorities—all this has already happened. The later and more eventful stages of a Fourth Turning still lie ahead. Every Fourth Turning unleashes social forces that push the nation, before the era is over, into a great national challenge: a single urgent test or threat that will draw all other problems into it and require the extraordinary mobilization of most Americans. We don’t yet know what this challenge is. Historically, it has nearly always been connected to the outcome of a major war either between America and foreign powers, or between different groups within America, or both.

In chaotic time, history has no pattern. Events follow one another randomly, and any effort to impute order to their whirligig succession is pointless.

Enter cyclical time, whose prehistoric origins are informally rooted in the countless rhythms common to virtually all traditional societies: chanting, dancing, sleeping, waking, planting, harvesting, hunting, feasting, gestating, birthing, and dying. Cyclical time took formal shape when the ancients first linked these rhythms to cycles of planetary events (diurnal rotations, lunar months, solar years, zodiacal precessions).

So what’s the alternative? Enter the third option: linear time—time as a unique, directional, and (usually) progressing story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end. This option, which arose upon occasion in the ancient world, had both secular and spiritual origins.

Successive waves of immigrants likewise saw themselves as builders of a millennial “New Jerusalem,” inaugurators of a revolutionary “Age of Reason,” defenders of “God’s chosen country,” and pioneers in service of a “Manifest Destiny.” Thus arose the dogma of American exceptionalism, the belief that this nation and its people had somehow broken loose from any risk of cyclical regress.

FDR’s funeral near the end of World War II brought to mind, for millions of Americans, Walt Whitman’s valedictory to Lincoln (“O Captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done”).

The climax was not reached until September of 1864, when crushing Union victories spelled imminent victory—and Lincoln’s reelection. The following April, Robert E. Lee surrendered on Palm Sunday. Lincoln was assassinated five days later, on Good Friday. The outcome was laden in religious symbolism. But was it worth the suffering? “In 1865,” observes historian James McPherson, “few black people and not many northerners doubted the answer.” Unlike other Crises, the Civil War ended less with optimism than with a sense of tragedy having run its course.

The Millennial Crisis (2008−2033?; climax 2030?) began with the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession. Thus far it has witnessed stagnating living standards, ebbing global trade, the rise of populism, and the most extreme political polarization since the eve of the Civil War. Beset by the prospect of national breakup, of great-power aggression, and of serial recessions, Americans sense that the crisis is still gathering energy—and that its climax has yet to arrive.

Yet this new direction, as a rule, never leads the rising generation to follow the path of its parents as it grows older. Far from it. Liberal parents often end up raising conservative kids. And even when their kids also regard themselves as liberal, we can bet that it will be a species of liberalism alien to their parents’. It is therefore wrong to suppose, as some do, that children regularly will come of age with attitudes (toward life, elders, politics, culture) similar to those that midlife leaders had when they were young. Dating back centuries to the birth of modernity, this has not happened.

Occasionally, even a split second can be decisive in separating adjacent generations. In contemporary America, a one-minute delay in birth can mean the difference between kindergarten and first grade six years later. And still later, that can mean the difference between serving in a war or not—or getting laid off your first job or not.

Here’s the point: Every twenty years or so, Americans are surprised to encounter a new rising generation. They are struck by some publicized event or situation in which youth seem to behave very differently than the youth who came just before. This typically happens when the oldest members of the new generation are in their late twenties or early thirties.

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. —MARK TWAIN

A turning is an era with a characteristic social mood, each era reflecting a new shift in how people feel about themselves and behave toward each other. It arises from the aging of the generational constellation. As we have seen, society enters a turning once every twenty years or so, when all living generations begin to enter their next phases of life.

Many older readers recall America’s circa-1963 optimism about the future: The moon could be reached and poverty eradicated, both within a decade. Walt Disney’s original Tomorrowland welcomed visitors to a friendly future with moving skywalks, futuristic Muzak, and well-behaved nuclear families. During this “golden age” of space-opera science fiction, the future was all about high-tech rocket ships, intergalactic civilizations, limitless scientific progress, and peace and prosperity through social engineering—assuming, of course, nuclear war could be avoided.

Since 2016, voter participation has soared to rates not seen in over a century; national party partisanship is off the charts; and third parties are getting throttled, since (in today’s polarized climate) any vote wasted on a third party raises the odds that your sworn enemy will take over the country.

“Where were you in ’62?” asks the famous poster for American Graffiti, the Lucas/Coppola 1973 blockbuster which millions of Americans today regard as a nostalgic farewell to a lost era of national innocence. But what is the special significance of the year 1962? Sociologist Robert Putnam, who has written academic blockbusters of his own (most notably, Bowling Alone), believes he knows. According to his massive data archives, 1962 was the year when the average of his indicators on volunteering, trust in strangers, community engagement, political participation, and family togetherness—indicators stretching back to 1910—reached its all-time peak.

From 1940 to 1970, Black earnings, homeownership, and voting rates (relative to Whites) soared—and haven’t risen much higher since then.

When people believe their government is stable and legitimate and their social hierarchy is fair, they commit fewer murders—and vice versa. 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. In decades when this share was rising, the homicide rate fell; in decades when it was falling, the homicide rate rose.

to the dictum of the Chinese revolutionary playwright Cao Yu that “art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.”

Over the last decade, church-going and religious affiliation have entered a steep decline—by some measures, an unprecedented decline—signaling yet another “religious depression.” Transforming humanity through technology and politics, on the other hand, is attracting growing interest, especially among the rising generation. On college campuses, STEM majors are rapidly displacing liberal arts majors.

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 on our lives. How can any theory of social change predict such things?

When automobiles, telephones, and radios were still new during the 1910s and 1920s, they were regarded as inventions that would individualize and fragment American life. They would separate rich from poor, facilitate privacy, and allow people to travel and vacation anywhere. And so they did—for a while. Then, with the army convoys and propaganda machines of World War II, these same technologies symbolized unified civic purpose. By the 1950s, they helped standardize a middle-class lifestyle. And by that time they were joined by television, broadcasting the soothing consensus messages of Walter Cronkite and Ed Sullivan.

Consider rising marriage age. After reaching its historic low of just over age twenty-one in the early 1960s, the median U.S. age of first marriage for both men and women has climbed steeply and has today reached a historic high of twenty-nine. That’s a gain of eight years.

To be sure, this Fourth Turning utterly transformed America—as Fourth Turnings always do—in ways that most Americans today would regard as positive. The Civil War Crisis crushed sectionalism. It unleashed industrial production on a national scale. It abolished slavery. And it created, from the late 1860s to the late 1880s, a remarkable if turbulent era of biracial democracy in much of the South. All these outcomes were beyond the imagination of most Americans before the war.

Congress finally gave up (in 1890) any effort to block Southern “redeemer” states from disenfranchising Black voters. Reconstruction thus collapsed into lynching, Jim Crow, and racial apartheid. The postbellum South thereafter entered a regime of one-party government, limited franchise (even for Whites), economic backwardness, and widespread rural poverty.

Coming of age during the Awakening era, born from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a global “Boom Generation” (Prophet) is acquiring a reputation as values-focused, ethnocentric senior leaders. Generational names: ’68 or Boom (Europe); Protest or Sponti (Germany); Brigate Rosse (Italy); Post-1947 (India); Fourth or Red Guard or Sent Down (China). Sample leaders: Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Joko Widodo, Shinzo Abe, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Always occurring late in the Fourth Turning, the climax gathers energy from an accumulation of unmet needs, unpaid debts, and unresolved problems. It then spends that energy on an upheaval whose direction and magnitude were beyond comprehension during the prior Unraveling. The climax shakes a society to its roots, transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its people (and its generations) for life. During the Great Depression−World War II Crisis, the Ekpyrosis corresponded to the emergence of the “Spirit of America” described by Senator Inouye. During these years, according to surveys, the vast majority of Americans wanted summary punishment meted out to Axis leaders without trial—and rejected a negotiated settlement with any of them (even as late as the Battle of the Bulge).

Immediately after the Armistice came the Spanish influenza, back-to-back recessions, and the Red Scare—persuading most Americans that the critics had been right: The war had been a colossal blunder. The Senate turned down Wilson’s high-minded League of Nations proposal, plunging America back into isolationism.

The 1932 national election was another landslide, this time in favor of a Democrat: Franklin D. Roosevelt, a twice-elected governor of New York about whom the public knew little—except that he was not Hoover. Despair deepened and bank runs spread everywhere in the winter of ’33. On FDR’s inauguration day, March 4, both the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade had suspended trading, not a single bank was open in twenty-eight states, and millions had already lost their savings.

On Election Day, he showed that he had effectively coopted the populists and steamrolled the Republicans. He won by a 24 percent popular vote margin. The Democrats now utterly dominated Congress, by 76 to 16 in the Senate and 333 to 89 in the House. In his victorious inaugural address, FDR pointed to Americans still in desperate need (“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished”) and hoped most citizens would join him in pressing still further his progressive agenda.

But in the spring and summer of 1940, with the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, the public mood began to shift rapidly—now supporting aid to Britain and, above all, military preparedness. It wasn’t any longer just about world peace. It was about America being left alone in a world overrun by dictators.

The December 7 aerial bombing of Pearl Harbor, triggering immediate declarations of war, was the consolidation. Most Americans, realizing that everything they had achieved was now at risk, felt (in Senator’s Inouye’s words) a “spirit of America… that united and galvanized our people.” Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “Overnight we have become… at long last a united people… an awakened people—wide awake to the stark truth that the very existence of the Nation, the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of all of us are in the balance.”

VE Day for Europe came on May 8, 1945. VJ Day, delayed by stubborn Japanese resistance until after two war-ending atomic bombs, came on August 15, 1945.

Everything we are and have is at stake…. We have no question of the ultimate victory. We have no question of the cost. Our losses will be heavy.” This was hardly a message that pandered to its audience. But when Franklin Roosevelt died just three months later, Americans mourned him as they had no president since Abraham Lincoln.

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold an astounding six hundred thousand copies, polarizing both sides. Anger was further roused by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 and by John Brown’s suicidal raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. After his execution, Brown, who had earlier ax-murdered pro-slavery supporters in Kansas, was likened by Northern abolitionist leaders to Jesus Christ Himself.