The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

We foresaw, in other words, that the irenic self-satisfaction of late-1990s America would experience a rather drastic reset. What Fukuyama called “big history” was not coming to an end. Rather, it was about to restart with a vengeance. The remarkable popularity of our book over the last twenty-seven years suggests that a great many readers come to believe that our thesis has thus far been borne out by events. They recognized that the generation-long era we foresaw did indeed begin about when we expected: in the middle of the 2000s decade. The new era was foreshadowed by the 9/11 attacks, began in earnest with the global financial crisis of 2008, and has thus far progressed along the bone-jarring crescendo all-too-familiar to Americans who have been following the headlines: the shrinking of the middle class, the “MAGA” rise of Donald Trump, the collapse of public trust in governing institutions, the harrowing pandemic emergency, the rise of scorched-earth political partisanship, the rise of authoritarian populists both at home and abroad, and the new fears of a great-power war.