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

by Neil Howe

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 justified.” In “any generation,” he observed, “real moral greatness is the same as in any other.” In truth, every generation is what it has to be.

Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that “America is falling apart.” Seventy-six percent worry about “losing American democracy.” Sixty-two percent say “the country is in a crisis” (only 25 percent disagree).

developed and emerging-market nations: growing economic inequality; declining generational and social mobility; tighter national borders; and intensifying ethnic and religious tribalism, weaponized through portable social media. Electorates are demanding, and getting, more authoritarian government. Charismatic populists are ascending to power—or have already gained power—in southern and central Europe, in Latin America, and in southern and eastern Asia.

Yet as Americans witness the old civic order collapse, they are moving beyond pessimism. They are coming to two inescapable conclusions. First, in order to survive and recover, the country must construct a new civic order powerful enough to replace what is now gone. And second, the new order must be imposed by “our side,” which would rescue the country from its current paralysis, rather than by “the other side,” which would plunge the country into inescapable ruin.

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. Just before the 2022 election, while 71 percent of voters agreed that “democracy is under threat,” only 7 percent agreed that this was the biggest problem facing the country.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet also so bland and socially conformist. But that’s what happened. The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. In the months following John Kennedy’s assassination, no one predicted America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural watershed that would separate anything thought or said afterward from anything thought or said before. But that’s what happened. The Third Turning was the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s upbeat “Morning in America” campaign in 1984, climaxed with the dotcom bubble, and ground to exhaustion with post-9/11 wars in the Mideast. Amid the passionate early debates over “the Reagan Revolution,” no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of celebrity circuses, raucous culture wars, and civic drift. But that’s what happened. 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 a...

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 any case, sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

A true cycle… is self-generating. It cannot be determined, short of catastrophe, by external events. War, depressions, inflations, may heighten or complicate moods, but the cycle itself rolls on, self-contained, self-sufficient and autonomous…. The roots of this self-sufficiency lie deep in the natural life of humanity. There is a cyclical pattern in organic nature—in the tides, in the seasons, in night and day, in the systole and diastole of the human heart.

Imagine a scenario in which most of history’s “noise” is suppressed. Imagine a single large society that has never had a powerful neighbor and that, for centuries, has remained relatively isolated from foreign interference. Imagine that this society was born modern on a near-empty continent, with no time-honored traditions to restrain its open-ended development. Imagine, finally, that this thoroughly modern society has acquired a reputation for pursuing linear progress—and for suppressing the cycles of nature—unequaled by any other people on earth. From what you know about the saeculum, wouldn’t you suppose that its history would be governed by a cycle of astonishing regularity? Indeed you would. But of course this society is no hypothesis. This society is America.

More than twenty years ago, political scientist Walter Dean Burnham predicted “that the present politics of upheaval may lead to a fourth American republic.” In recent years, others across the political spectrum have echoed this “fourth republic” prediction. Now that the Millennial Crisis has begun, we can point to the probable timing of its arrival: sometime shortly before or after the Millennial Crisis comes to an end.

Your generation isn’t like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you. Or, put another way: Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.

Like the four seasons of nature, the four turnings of history are equally necessary. Awakenings and Crises are the saecular solstices; Highs and Unravelings are the saecular equinoxes.

The mood of the recent Culture Wars era, starting with Reagan and ending with G. W. Bush, seemed new to Americans at the time, but was not new to history. After World War I, America argued about temperance, women’s suffrage, and fundamentalism amid a floodtide of crime, alcohol, immigration, political corruption, and circus trials. The 1850s likewise simmered with moral indignation, shortening tempers, and multiplying “mavericks.” It was a decade, says historian David Donald, in which “the authority of all government in America was at a low point.” Entering the 1760s, the colonies felt rejuvenated in spirit but reeled from violence, insurrections, and paranoia over official corruption.

America is currently well into a Crisis era, and the relevant indicators are shifting in the expected direction. 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.

Do these new technologies really change us—or do they just give us what we want when we want it? More often than not, technology tailors itself to the national mood.

Living complex systems possess a remarkable ability: They can self-adjust in order to maintain their complexity as their environment changes. Theorists call this ability “self-organized criticality.” It makes sense that living systems would acquire it: For anything alive, total randomness or total inactivity ordinarily means death.

If we pause and reflect on all of the seasonal extremes that seem to appear in the saeculum, we see two pairs of seasonal opposites. One pair, reaching its extreme at the solstices, is solidarity (end of First Turning) and freedom (end of Third Turning). The other pair, reaching its extreme at the equinoxes, is idealism (end of Second Turning) and materialism (end of Fourth Turning). The result is a quaternity of both social moods and generational personalities

An estimated two-thirds of all mammalian species exhibit multi-year cycles of population expansion and contraction. These range from roughly four years for lemmings and voles to ten years for snowshoe hares to thirty-eight years for moose. Most of these cycles appear to be unrelated to climate, predators, or anything else in the environment. More intriguingly, many are linked to a matching behavioral pattern—for example, cycles of aggression, herding, migration, mating, and stress. In effect, these animals act differently depending on when, during this repeating calendar, they are born. While biologists aren’t sure what drives these cycles, some have speculated that they may be triggered by periodic changes in the animals’ production of hormones and neurotransmitters and that these changes may be synchronized by pheromones and behavioral cues. No one has any idea whether this triggering does happen or could happen in humans.

Young people who once started full-time careers in their late teens or early twenties are now doing so in their late twenties. And despite their longer years of training and education, they are no longer outearning their parents. A record-high share of people aged twenty-five to twenty-nine—today about one-third—are living with older family members (usually parents). This share is highest, and has been growing the fastest, among non-college youth, an alarming number of whom now find themselves unable to start a self-sufficient career at any age.

Like nature, history is full of processes that cannot happen in reverse. Just as the laws of entropy do not allow a bird to fly backward, or droplets to regroup at the top of a waterfall, history has no rewind button. Like the seasons of nature, time’s arrow only moves forward. Starting from an Unraveling, society cannot move into a High (or into an Awakening) without a Crisis in between.

Each of the following phrases have hit highest-ever usage rates as of 2019 (the most recent year for which Google has data): right-wing, left-wing, radical, racism, authoritarian, repression, inequality, cover up, populist, angry, fight, conflict, shame, politics, and next civil war. The word fascist is at its highest since 1948; dictator, since 1945; oppression, since 1868. Other phrases of more recent origin have skyrocketed in usage since around 2008: red zone, blue zone, false flag, deep state, social justice, national reckoning, antifa, woke, red pill, and false equivalency

The precursor to the Millennial Crisis was the 9/11 attack followed by the U.S. retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2001−2003). Like World War I, 9/11 struck like a bolt out of the blue, shocking a complacent public that was counting on an endless future of pacific globalism.

The immediate peak-to-trough impact of the Great Recession (2007−2009) was certainly shallower than the Great Depression (1929−1933). But in the 1930s, while the economy plunged much faster, it also rebounded much faster. In the 2010s, by contrast, there was little rebound: Employment, productivity, and business dynamism (the rate at which the economy creates new firms and new jobs) never regained their earlier pace. As a result, the decade-over-decade slowdown in U.S. per-capita GDP growth was about the same before and after 2007 as it was before and after 1929.

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.

Under Trump, the Republican Party has gone irreversibly populist. It has traded away a sizable share of its educated, higher-income, and mainly suburban base in return for non-college-educated, working-class voters, mainly outside the big metro areas, who had earlier voted for Democrats like Obama and Clinton. In 2016, for perhaps the first time since the Civil War, the highest-income voters (the top 10 percent and the top 1 percent) were more likely than less affluent Americans to vote for the Democratic Party. Since 2016, while losing share among White voters, Republicans continue to gain share among nonwhites (especially Hispanics), who are more attracted to the GOP’s pragmatic and socially conservative messaging.

In the 1992 presidential election, there were thirty-two “battleground” or “swing” states, those considered winnable by either party. By 2000, there were twenty-two. By 2004, fourteen. And by 2020, there were only eight. In most states, presidential candidates no longer bother to campaign personally. The suspense of a presidential election now comes down to close votes in a mere handful of states; the rest are landslides. Similarly, the share of all states having “trifecta governments”—governor and both legislative houses controlled by the same party—has been rising. From 1967 until 2009, the number of trifecta states was never more than twenty-five. In 2022, the number reached thirty-nine, a seventy-year high.

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. Surveys indicate that Americans regard blue zone cities as more entertaining, but red zone cities as more affordable. Since 2008, while the blue zone has grown steadily wealthier relative to the red zone, migration between states has flowed strongly in favor of the red zone. Higher in-migration, combined with higher fertility, transferred three congressional seats (net) from solidly Democratic states to solidly Republican states after the decennial 2020 reapportionment.

Blue zone residents increasingly “over-index” for CNN, Whole Foods, Target, Chipotle, Levi’s, Starbucks, NBA, REI, Honda, and Tesla. Red zoners do likewise for Fox News, Walmart, Dollar Tree, Chick-fil-A, Wrangler, Dunkin’ Donuts, NASCAR, Dollar Store, Bass Pro Shops, GMC, and Land Rover.

the early 2030s appear to be the most likely years for the resolution of the Millennial Crisis and the opening of the First Turning of the next saeculum. Working backward from there, the most likely year for the climax would perhaps be around 2030.

Scenario one: The political red-versus-blue polarization of the 2016 regeneracy worsens until it ultimately culminates in a climax-defining civil conflict. Scenario two: One side, red or blue, achieves a decisive political victory over the other and leads the nation into a climax-defining conflict against an external threat. Or scenario three: The current red-blue partisan divide is redrawn by a new regeneracy—probably in an election and possibly with changes in party leadership—before pushing the nation back down paths one or two.

Never before has America approached a major national trial with such a low rate of economic growth, with such a meager savings rate, with such heavy public and private indebtedness to the rest of the world, and with so little available fiscal room—thanks to a large public sector that is now mainly dedicated (through benefits and tax breaks) to funding the personal consumption of its eldest citizenry. This time around, in short, the very structure of the economy is tilted steeply toward the old and the past. Unless America can rapidly reverse that tilt, no ambitious investment agenda on behalf of the young and the future will be affordable.

According to one global institute (Freedom House), the share of the world’s population not living in “free” nations has expanded over the last decade from 55 percent to 80 percent. According to another (V-Dem), the share living in “autocratic nations” has risen from 49 percent to 70 percent. Almost every year, the number of governments restricting civil liberties, criminalizing dissent, suspending due process, and manipulating elections (if they allow them at all) has greatly exceeded the number moving in a liberal direction.

A paradox of every Crisis era is that it works toward the creation of stronger community as an end, yet uses conflict—typically, deadly organized conflict—as a means

Measured by years of tenure, Boomers have proven to be a dominant generation of political and business leaders. They’ve held the White House for twenty years and could be in line for more. They’ve enjoyed a twenty-four-year generational plurality in the U.S. House and are on track to exceed that in the Senate. They still dominate corporate boards. Yet their governing style has been one of ironic detachment, in which institutions are allowed to run themselves with little accountability.

Once the Crisis moves into its consolidation phase, probably late in the 2020s, the emergence of a Gray Champion, who may today still be unknown to most of the public, will be a practical necessity. Boomer or not, this figure will help galvanize the nation and will represent, for younger generations, the translation of old Boomer arguments during the Culture Wars into a new Crisis-era context of community needs. By now, Boomers will be entirely unchecked by the moderating influence of older Silent leaders. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion—crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. The same generation that once railed against the “Establishment” will help the young build a new fail-safe Leviathan. In foreign affairs, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations—and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms. The same generation that once chanted “Hell No, We Won’t Go!” could emerge as America’s most martial elder generation since World War II.

Imagine, sometime in the late 2020s, that the United States is plunged into sudden hostilities with a major-power adversary. Only this war will seem to break all the rules. It will begin with a massive cyberattack of unknown origin, intended to cripple America’s energy, transportation, and communications infrastructure. It will be followed by an anti-satellite barrage, in order to render America blind as well as dumb. Then come the AI-guided drone swarms, perhaps synchronized with an invasion of U.S.-allied nations by unidentifiable hybrid troops who quickly mix with the civilian population. The war will manifest itself as a gigantic puzzle full of ruses and feints, decoys and dead ends, destruction and denial. Nothing will be clear, yet everything will be at stake. Whichever officers are in charge of the American response, they will need to be cool under fire, willing to call a bluff, and unfazed by extreme risk. They must act alone. There will be no time to convene meetings. They must be resilient problem-solvers, accustomed to thinking fast outside the box and kludging together high-tech solutions on the fly.

However the Crisis turns out, Xers can count on getting less than their fair share of the credit and more than their fair share of the blame. Now entering elderhood, Xers won’t be at all surprised. All their lives, Xers have suffered a blighted reputation in the eyes of other generations. Even Xers themselves half-accept the judgment, which is why they don’t think the world owes them much. As national leaders, their crowning achievement may be to use that collective humility about their own deserts in order to provide a better world for their children and grandchildren.

As they mature, Millennials are shifting America’s culture in a left-brained direction: toward rationalism, objectivity, and top-down systemizing. Moving into universities as students (and now as teachers), they have triggered a vast expansion of STEM curricula and professional prep—and a massive exodus away from the liberal arts and humanities that were once so attractive to young Boomers. The former, they believe, help us cooperate and build a better world; the latter merely foment argument between incomparable and subjective “perspectives.” Millennials are spearheading the steep recent growth in the share of all Americans who identify with “no religion.” Many suspect that godly dogma has helped to splinter public truth and breed rabbit-hole conspiracy thinking, benefitting no one.

The Millennial perspective on the Crisis era will be very different from that of older Americans. For Boomers, the Crisis will mark a transcendent culmination; for Xers, a brutal midlife course correction. But for Millennials, it will be a launching pad for adult lives that will still lie largely ahead of them: They will have yet to set the national agenda, assume power as national political leaders, or see their children come of age. Unlike their parents, Millennials will not be able to recall, even in childhood, a moment when anything built or done by “we, the people” wasn’t broken, decrepit, or distrusted. This will be their opportunity to construct a new and modern national community that works—and that they will be able to enjoy and take pride in as they grow older.

Indeed, during the regulatory shutdowns of the recent global pandemic, the bunker analogy came almost literally to life. For months at a time, children of all ages were eating, playing, and schooling at home, always under close 24/7 surveillance, even while their parents (though more at risk from Covid-19) occasionally traveled out to accomplish necessary tasks. While parents and their kids were able to bond even more closely, most children, teens especially, fretted that their social and educational development had essentially been put on hold. After the pandemic, more parents are choosing to work or school their kids at home simply because it’s cheaper or more convenient. That’s how child-rearing works during the Homelander era: Each ratchet up in protectiveness becomes more or less permanent. In the years to come, as the Crisis era moves toward its climax, this pattern of convulsive sheltering in the face of perceived danger is likely to continue. And the cumulative closing down of the childhood world is likely to intensify. The purpose will not only be to make the child’s world safer. It will also be to make it easier for adults, especially parents, to get other things done in their lives while their children are safe.

Whenever it happens, the resolution of the Millennial Crisis will draw a firm line between the beginning of full adulthood for one generation and the end of youth for the next. Everyone on the older, Millennial side of that line will feel they belong to the cadre that fully came of age during the Crisis era. Everyone on the younger, Homelander side will understand that they don’t belong. Homelanders will have to search for a different generational rite of passage. The quest to find their own collective catharsis may grow into one of the great questions, and perhaps frustrations, of the rest of their lives.

Beyond the early 2030s, everything about America’s role in the world—politically, economically, and technologically—will be radically dependent on how the Crisis era is resolved.

In the next First Turning, America’s middle class will be further strengthened by the twenty-first-century return of the “social ethic.” Compared to today, individuals will be judged less by how much money or power they possess than by how well they fit in with their family and community and serve their friends and coworkers. There will be a renaissance in volunteering and charitable giving. Participation in local civic organizations will again be fashionable. Many churches will reverse their declining membership by shifting their focus from liturgy to community uplift. In the workplace, firms will turn away from the hustle economy of lone contractors—and embrace the collaborative economy of workplace teams. The open office and the sticky paternalism of generous benefit plans will at last complete its triumph over the solo cubicle and the at-will, cash-only job model. Private-sector unions, once given up for dead, will make a comeback.

The Millennial Crisis is the first Fourth Turning in Anglo-American history in which the nation’s total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement rate. Indeed, it is the first era ever in which most of the nations of the world have begun to register below-replacement fertility. A rising number of these nations are offering generous “baby bonuses” to encourage more births. In the next First Turning, it is easy to imagine America participating in a global pronatalist makeover of social democracy. In this new “sustainable” welfare state, citizens will find themselves somewhat worse off for choosing to remain childless, and somewhat better off for choosing to raise future taxpaying citizens.

We should follow ancient wisdom and conform our behavior to the season. If it’s winter, we should act like it’s winter. We should help our community prepare to be strong in the coming spring while allowing the least possible suffering so long as the storms rage. Though we may not be able to prevent the winter from happening, we are able to make the winter turn out better or worse. But we can’t help at all unless we first acknowledge that winter has indeed arrived. Only then we can see clearly, plan responsibly, and act effectively.