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

by Neil Howe

And even before the new U.S. president could be sworn in on March 4, 1861, all seven Deep South states had held conventions, voted overwhelmingly for secession, and together formed a new “Confederate States of America.” This Southern reaction to Lincoln’s election, not the election itself, was the catalyst of a new Crisis era, which was fated to unfold with terrifying speed. Had the South not seceded, ironically, it could have hoped to maintain its peculiar institution for perhaps decades to come:

The rebels fired first. On April 12, 1861, Charleston batteries began bombarding Fort Sumter. This was the regeneracy. War was now a fact, and the two sides rushed to rally for their respective causes. To fight for the Union, Lincoln immediately ordered the states to call up seventy-five thousand volunteers—a request that pushed the wavering border states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) to join the Confederacy.

All summer Lincoln had feared that Northern voters, staggered by the heavy casualties incurred during Grant’s Overland Campaign, were ready to elect a “Peace Democrat” who would let the South go. But now, the end in sight, voters re-elected Lincoln by an impressive 55 percent popular majority and gave only 40 of 183 House seats to the Democrats. Half of the states in the Union did not elect a single Democrat. The administration took a big gamble in passing out ballots to war-weary Union soldiers at the front. But it paid off: Overwhelmingly, they voted to reelect their commander in chief.

No doubt this resolution would have seemed bittersweet to Lincoln had he lived to see its fruits. Yes, the Union was preserved, the slaves emancipated, and the Industrial Revolution fully unleashed. But the Union’s postwar authority quickly collapsed, its politicians fell into disrepute, and emerging social issues like labor violence and urban squalor remained unaddressed. The war left the South impoverished and in political exile. And neither two more Constitutional Amendments (ratified in 1868 and 1870) nor a far-reaching Civil Rights Act (in 1875) could prevent Reconstruction in the South from ending in Jim Crow by the late 1880s.

The war’s very carnage, Lincoln darkly suggested in his second inaugural address, might be nothing less than God’s bloody retribution for the injustice of “American slavery.” If the dying must continue until “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…,” he declared, “so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

Most Americans don’t need to look at opinion surveys to know that the social mood of their country has been shifting in a more urgent direction over the last decade or so. We’ll get to some of those surveys a bit later. But one quick way to assess this shift is to check out Google Ngram, a website that tracks the relative frequency of words or phrases used in a wide cross-section of U.S. books published in every year since 1800.

Awareness of discord and conflict coincides with the coalescing of tighter communities. But, as we might expect early in a Crisis era, this has happened mainly at the “small platoon” level of personal association. Words that have risen steeply in usage include friends, neighbors, family, clan, teamwork, and like-minded—along with lonely. What has been falling, on the other hand, is any word that refers to large, trusted civic institutions. These include organization, committee, citizen, member, rules, laws, official, order, procedure, connected.

Like World War I, the 9/11 wars were fought with great enthusiasm but little patience—and the public soon soured on their basic objective. In 2005, two years after President G. W. Bush declared “mission accomplished,” more Americans disapproved than approved of the Iraqi invasion. Soon, the lofty “nation building” goal was as widely mocked as “making the world safe for democracy” was in 1920. (As historian and journalist Robert Kagan notes, “Wilson lied, people died” is a good modern-day translation of the Harding-era mood.) Among both policymakers and the public, this post-Iraq disillusionment coincided—again, as it did after Versailles—with a long-term shift from engaging with the rest of the world to disengaging from it.

In 2008, it all came apart. After September, once Lehman Brothers went under, global lending froze, which in turn sent global production and stock markets into free fall. The Fed, Congress, and the U.S. Treasury eventually took unprecedented measures to cushion the blow. They cut interest rates to zero, extended unlimited credit to foreign central banks, shoveled out bailouts to nearly a thousand firms, and ran by far the largest peacetime deficit in U.S. history—nearly 10 percent of GDP.

The 2016 election constituted a clear regeneracy for both factions. In national politics, it mobilized party partisans to an intensity not seen since the mid-1930s if not the late 1850s. The left rallied many Democrats into a “resistance”—as if the Trump administration were an occupying army—before demanding action on various executive misdeeds by means of a special prosecutor and two successive impeachments.

Did most of these voters and candidates ever really believe Trump won the election? It hardly matters. Committed partisans never accept the possibility of their side losing a fair fight; they always claim the other side must have employed some sort of trickery, falsehood, or dirty dealing. And from that metaphorical understanding of “steal,” it’s a short distance to theories about spacecraft beaming messages to voting machines. Besides, if the other side is your enemy, you gain nothing by conceding defeat. But you may gain something if the world sees you as committed and implacable.

In June 2022, it was the Republicans’ turn to take a hit when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, thereby fulfilling a long-sought goal of conservatives. Voter enthusiasm for the GOP duly fell during the summer and fall. Come the 2022 midterms, the two parties once again fought themselves to a virtual standoff—this time giving only a slight edge to the Republicans.

both parties seek to gain by magnifying the threats facing America. For the red zone leaders, the threat is “socialism” (a word Trump wielded repeatedly during his presidency), which allegedly enables personal lawlessness to destroy the nation through unchecked crime, illegal immigration, and government spending. For blue zone leaders, the threat is “fascism”—or “semi-fascism,” according to President Biden—which allegedly enables corporate lawlessness to destroy the nation (and possibly the world) through unchecked monopoly power, social privilege, and climate change. Either way, voters are asked to grant extraordinary authority to partisan leaders so they can fend off the threat of permanent ruin posed by the other side.

By fostering a sense of community solidarity, geographical polarization also promotes conspiracy thinking. If a Trump voter in 2020 does not personally know even a single Biden voter, that voter might understandably wonder how Biden could have won the election.

Overall, America’s blue zone is wealthier, healthier, more educated, more professional, more mobile, more economically unequal, and more ethnically diverse. America’s red zone is more churchgoing, more neighborly, more charitable, more family oriented, more rooted, more violent, less bureaucratic, and less taxed.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine shocked the world. It was the first time in seventy-seven years that one large European nation has tried to conquer another. A stunned public watched news videos re-create narratives that haven’t been witnessed since World War II, when large conventional armies pounded each other’s cities every night in grainy newsreels.

Just before retiring at the end of 2022, Admiral Charles Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, declared that “this Ukrainian crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup.” Citing the decline in America’s military capability relative to China’s in the western Pacific, he added: “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested… for a long time.”

The first regeneracy was triggered by Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. And there is no question that Trump’s political reputation has suffered big hits ever since. The worst hit has been his record of serial failures—in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022—in winning elections for himself or his party. One of these failures was abject: Few Americans have forgotten his splenetic and rampaging last days in the White House. Another hit has been his fawning affection for brutal strongmen like Vladmir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un—which began to play poorly even among Republicans once Russian artillery began pulverizing apartment buildings in Kharkiv and Kyiv. In this newly dangerous world, to be sure, Americans may be growing more—not less—inclined to elect a strongman of their own. By a large margin, Americans say Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump been the U.S. president rather than Biden. Trump himself, however, seems unlikely to be the sort of strong personality American voters would elect a second time.

Dissatisfaction over America’s economic performance dates to the Global Financial Crisis at the very beginning of the Millennial Crisis era. It can be summed up in the growing conviction that incomes will no longer rise for most people over the long run. By a two-to-one majority, Americans now believe the average family will see its standard of living decline over the next thirty years. Two-thirds believe their children will end up “financially worse off” than they are. (If compared to similarly worded questions asked in prior decades, this negativity has reached a postwar high.) In the past, Americans’ long-term outlook closely tracked their near-term income gains. Remarkably, this is no longer true.

Grandparents, parents, and adult children are living together at the highest rate in decades, and they are mostly positive about the experience. More than at any time over the last fifty years, a record or near-record share report being satisfied with their job, their marriage, and (even) their child’s K-12 education.

FINANCIAL CRASH Thus far into the Millennial Crisis, America has experienced three financial crashes, the Global Financial Crisis (from the fall of 2007 to the winter of 2009); the Pandemic Crash (late winter of 2020); and a Post-Pandemic Crash (starting in the winter of 2022). All were global. A follow-on recession was triggered by the first two and seems likely to be triggered by the third.

a growing number of social scientists agree that the United States now fits the checklist profile of a country at risk. Trust in the national government is in steep decline. Check. Respect for democratic institutions is weakening. Check. A heavily armed population has polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. Check. Each faction embodies a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and urban-versus-rural identity. Each wants its country to become something the other detests. And each fears the prospect of the other taking power. Check, check, and check.

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.

In one study of twenty advanced economies since 1870, financial crashes have been shown to be regularly followed by more street protests, declining electoral support for incumbents, and a rising support for populism on the left and (especially) on the right. Another global study over a shorter time span shows that local epidemics have a similar effect: slower economic growth, higher inequality, and greater civil unrest.

Social scientists quibble over what exactly constitutes a civil war. Maybe a good working definition is this: any clash of wills between major partisan factions resulting in organized violence that cannot be suppressed through routine police action. A more important question is this: If such a war breaks out, how is it likely to be resolved? Media pundits have suggested any number of outcomes. Many say it could be quickly settled nonviolently by peaceful secession. Others say it would probably result in chronic low-level insurrectionary violence. Actually, neither of these outcomes is likely.

“A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for,” wrote the eminent diplomat George F. Kennan, “has a very good chance of eventually being fought.”

After the 9/11 attack, the sheer scale of the losses sent most survey measures of American patriotism and public trust soaring for nearly a year. And the effect is greatest when the losses are suffered by an entire nation in an ongoing conflict that lasts for years. In dozens of studies of wartime survivors around the world, social scientists consistently find (according to one meta-review) that afterward “in case after case, people exposed to war violence go on to behave more cooperatively and altruistically” and “tend to increase their social participation by joining more local social and civic groups or taking on more leadership roles in their communities.” Most of the studies find no decline in their pro-social behavior over time.

The morality question points to categorical beliefs and cannot be settled by evidence. The cost question is easily answered. War is rarely worth the cost, at least in terms of dollars. (In 1861, every slave family in America could have been emancipated and land purchased for it at a fraction of what both sides spent on the Civil War.)

As society moves further into a Fourth Turning, it rediscovers two remarkable truths about community in the modern world. The first truth is that too little community, just like too much community, literally makes us sick. Loneliness and isolation are highly correlated with substance abuse, chronic disease, depression, mental illness generally, and suicide. Deaths from such causes surged during the 2010s. The evidence suggests they rose as well early in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Apparently, even the mere threat or suggestion of disaster, disorder, epidemic disease, or economic loss fosters a spirit of solidarity. People respond by growing more judgmental in favor of in-group norms, more inclined to follow in-group rules, and more biased against out-group presence. According to other experiments, simply reminding people that they must someday die has the same effect. Thoughts of death, according to a leading “mortality salience” researcher, motivate behaviors that “contribute to nationalism, prejudice, and intergroup aggression, as well as prosocial behavior and cultural achievements.” To use cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand’s terminology, any perceived threat to people’s personal security tends to make their society “tighter.”

long-term solutions to big issues happen only when the nation reinvents itself. And that happens not on a sunny summer day—but on a dark winter day when citizens’ backs are against the wall and every available option points to sacrifice and danger. Paradoxically, the nation makes its most serious commitments to its long-term future precisely when its near-term existence seems most in doubt. These are the moments when everyone comprehends, as Benjamin Franklin allegedly quipped just after adding his signature to the Declaration of Independence, that “we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”

It has been said a thousand times. Only adversity can build or reveal true character. Helen Keller put it best: “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through the experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” What we observe about individuals applies just as well to entire communities. Only in a crisis can a nation discover if it still is a community—and if so, whether it can function well enough to survive and prevail.

Many Americans believe their country is lacking in leadership. Yet one lesson of Fourth Turnings is that great leaders are made, not born—and that great leaders emerge and gain renown precisely when societies need them, not before.

The acronym “G.I.” was stenciled onto soldiers’ backpacks during World War II. It could mean either “general issue” or “government issue,” and this generation stood squarely for both. All their lives, G.I.s have placed a high priority on being “general” or “regular” (as in “he’s a regular guy”), since generality promotes effective teamwork.

The high tide of G.I. optimism and power came in 1964 with their so-called “Great 89th Congress.” In the next year, after the G.I.s’ legislative triumphs—everything from civil rights enforcement to the founding of Medicaid and Medicare—their cohesion and power seemed unstoppable. “Americans today bear themselves like victory-addicted champions,” said Look magazine in 1965. “They’ve won their wars and survived their depressions. They are accustomed to meeting, and beating, tests.”

In 1992, Bush lost a close election to Bill Clinton, bringing an end to thirty-two years of G.I. occupancy of the White House. In 1996, Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton, bringing an end to fifty-two years of G.I. presidential candidacies.

Without delay, the Silent bought homes and cars and moved into suburbs. They emulated older G.I.s by marrying and having babies, and they did so at very young ages—younger on average, in fact, than any other generation in U.S. history.

The first Boomer trait is their individualism,

Among first-wave Boomer youth in the late sixties, this individualism inspired a cultural rebellion—against conventional views of authority, marriage, gender roles, and race. Among late-wave Boomer youth in the late seventies, it inspired an economic rebellion—against taxes, regulation, and “big government.”

Values-oriented Boomers are suspicious of purely material measures of life success. While the G.I. Generation invented “Gross National Product,” Boomers have experimented with more meaningful alternatives—like “Leading Cultural Indicators” or “Gross National Happiness.” Surveys show that Boomers are less likely than other generations to agree that the American Dream requires marriage or wealth.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, as they’ve begun to move past age sixty-five, Boomers have been redefining elderhood. And once again, they are choosing a very different path than the one chosen by their parents.

All their lives, surveys show, Boomers have been gloomier than other generations about America’s direction. Having blazed a decades-long trail of scorched-earth rhetoric, now at last they will find their words gaining traction on actual events.

Generation X (born 1961−81) today comprises roughly 85 million adults mainly in their forties and fifties. Their first wave, born in the early 1960s, debuted to the public in the mid-eighties as a hardened, throwaway Brat Pack of youth stars in such films as The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. A bit later, they appeared as a new breed of post-Boomer celebrity—all-action, no-nonsense, bottom-line-focused—like Michael Jordan, Michael Dell, Michael J. Fox, and Tom Cruise. In the early nineties, they got their name from a 1961-born British Columbian Doug Coupland, who wrote a sardonic novel drawing a deep divide between his own circle of friends and the Boomers who had come along just before them. The Xers’ last wave, born in 1980 and 1981, were the last teens to graduate from high school before the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Prequel:

Words like “latchkey,” “abused,” “abandoned,” “throwaway,” and “runaway” for the first time became commonly attached to children. And the word “dumb.” The 1983 Nation at Risk report decried the “rising tide of mediocrity” that America’s educators claimed was graduating from high school, students whose “educational skills… will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

Young Xers thus acquired the child-of-divorce syndrome on a grand scale: the feeling that they were the reason why no one thought much of them and why everyone was so unhappy—after all, America was doing great until they came along. Low collective self-esteem became one of their primary peer personality traits. “We’re rotten to the core,” sang the thug-boys in Bugsy Malone. “We’re the very worst—each of us contemptible, criticized, and cursed.” Sixteen years later, from their dingy basement, Wayne and Garth famously chanted, “We’re not worthy!” As novelist David Leavitt observed, “Mine is a generation perfectly willing to admit its contemptible qualities.”

While older people put them down as a “low-sweat,” “slacker,” or “why bother?” generation, Xers took pride in their own indifference—which is, after all, the finely honed skill of not wasting energy on stuff that just doesn’t matter.

Raised to take care of themselves, most Xers welcomed a less regulated economy, figuring that—since the rules were rigged against them—fewer rules were better.

Per person, barely half of all Xers earned more than their parents by age thirty or forty, and less than half of Xer men earned more than their fathers.

Most of all, they’ve matured into the most protective parental generation in living memory—obsessed with providing their own kids with the hands-on care and structure they never had. For Xers, parenting means always being there, always knowing where your child is, always watching out for danger. Once their child leaves for grade school or college, they become every teacher’s or professor’s worst nightmare: the not-with-my-child-you-don’t mom or dad, unafraid to sue the school principal or shout at school board members. Next to their own child, what happens to everyone else’s child means

“Gen X’s greatest gift to society: Grouchiness,” proclaimed a recent Washington Post headline. This generation’s most celebrated humorists (from Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey to Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle) come across as rough-edged and grumpy, full of snark and vitriol.