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

by William Strauss

That explains why Americans old enough to remember the High feel so alarmed by the Unraveling, and why those too young to remember the High find so little meaning in America’s pre-Awakening history.

the Unraveling’s corporate chairmen put the Time-Warner logo behind the overt profanity of Nine Inch Nails. “There

“a little self-indulgent and pretty much convinced that he and his generation are smarter than everyone else.”

Now as before, the advantage goes to whomever yells the loudest and has the best conversation enders. Everything gets hyperbolized: An offensive touching becomes assault, which becomes rape, which becomes murder, which becomes genocide.

America’s middle-aged believers are fleeing mainline churches for fast-growing fundamentalist, charismatic, and breakaway redeemer sects that dress casually or ethnically, sing lively songs, listen to guitar-and-brimstone homilies, erupt in periodic applause, and engage in other rites drawn from the recovery movement.

Many Boomers who preach honesty and sacrifice will remain personally self-indulgent. Like Bill Gates (whose ecofriendly mansion has a garage for twenty cars), the Cultural Elite will consume heavily while pretending otherwise.

They have constructed a flinty ethos of self-determination in which being rich or poor has less to do with virtue than with timing, salesmanship, and luck. What people get is simply what they get and is not necessarily related to what they may or may not deserve.

bring bring

People young and old will puzzle over what it felt like for their parents and grandparents, in a distantly remembered era, to have lived in a society that felt like one national community. They will yearn to recreate this, to put America back together again. But no one will know how. —

Like they want to Make America Great Again but dont know how....

Yet how? The only way they can see is a way back, what Bob Dole calls a “bridge” to a better past—an America stripped of the family damage, cultural decay, and loss of civic purpose that has settled in over the intervening five decades. Such a task feels hopeless because it is.

This is a critical threshold: People either coalesce as a nation and culture—or rip hopelessly and permanently apart.

In every prior Fourth Turning, the catalyst was foreseeable but the climax was not. Had

Since the dawn of the modern world, there has been but one Fourth Turning constellation: elder Prophets, midlife Nomads, young-adult Heroes, and child Artists. For half a millennium, that constellation has recurred exactly the same way five times, and a sixth time with a slight variation in timing and consequence.

With savings worth less, the new elders will become more dependent on government, just as government becomes less able to pay benefits to them.

Vachel Lindsay’s words, that “a nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed.”

colored scooters. Gone too will be the Unraveling era’s personable Korean War vets with their modest We Fought Too buttons.

more selfish, and (an easy prediction) much more numerous. This kind of forecast leads to the conclusion that early next century, younger generations will be overwhelmed by extravagantly doctored, expansively lobbying, age-denying old people. To

Elders will be defined as spiritually gifted over their juniors who “are too busy to cultivate the quietness and inwardness from which mystical experience is possible.”

They will view as sacrilegious many of the Unraveling era’s new pro-choice life-cycle laws, from genetically engineered births to nontraditional marriages to assisted suicides.

Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, uncalmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade—all at a time of maximum public peril.

duty of enforcement. The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In

The situation looks dicey. The protagonist, too, has slim expectations of success. But at a pivotal moment, this lonely wayfarer challenges destiny, deals with the stress, zeroes in on what matters, does what is required, and comes out on top. The

A charismatic anti-intellectual demagogue

Hmmmmmmmm

Start with a winner-take-all ethos that believes in action for action’s sake, exalts strength, elevates impulse, and holds weakness and compassion in contempt. Add class desperation, antirationalism, and perceptions of national decline. The product, at its most extreme, could be a new American fascism.

Welp

Similarly, an Unraveling-era society must let go of old habits that made sense twenty years ago but no longer do.

But i dont want to grow up im a Toys R Us kid!!!!!!!

Among people of all ages, we need to reinvent good citizenship at the local level. Communities should improve their own functions (schools, housing, transportation, safety, justice, social services) with their own resources, without expecting money from anywhere else. Towns and cities should create public spaces, hold public

History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The

“Old men do not grow wise. They grow careful.”