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

by Neil Howe

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.

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.” A small but rapidly rising share of the young (about a quarter, twice as large as the share of the old) say democracy is a “bad” or “very bad” way to run the country. Most of these would prefer military rule.

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. Measures of partisanship (feeling strongly about an issue) and sorting (partisans all feeling the same way across all issues) are reaching the highest levels in living memory.

Abraham Lincoln, observing in 1858 that America was a “house divided,” prophesized that it would remain so until

“a crisis shall have been reached, and passed”—after which “this government… will become all one thing, or all the other.” Today, as then, America is torn by a struggle between two great political tribes, each trying to reshape the new republic toward its own goals and away from its adversary’s.

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 most important question is whether Americans are prepared for the trauma that will accompany the collapse of one regime and the emergence of another.

Ever since the 2020 election season, close to half of Americans have been telling pollsters they believe a civil war is imminent.

The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and an old values regime decays. The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime. The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants. The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s.

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.

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.

The Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another.

America entered its most recent Fourth Turning in 2008, placing us fifteen years into the Crisis era. Each turning is a generation long (about twenty to twenty-five years), and it is likely that this turning will be somewhat longer than most. By our reckoning, therefore, we have about another decade to go.

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.

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 Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness,

Yikes!