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

by William Strauss

As Senator Moynihan suggested, deviancy kept getting redefined downward. The people who in the Awakening had comprised the Silent Majority of Middle America now felt themselves engulfed in Blade Runner chaos and variance. On race, for example, polls showed Americans vastly overestimating the size and discontent of minorities and niche groups and underestimating the size and well-being of the majority. Fed by paranoia, public discourse became more tribal and less cordial with each passing year. Even mainstream Americans began to feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down—that is, like an embittered minority. National parties weakened, incumbents were derided, and attack ads proliferated. Suspicion began to creep into dealings with strangers, with only three people in ten believing that “most people can be trusted,” eight in ten that “civility in America has declined in the past ten years.” As the 1980s ended, personal security became one of America’s biggest growth industries. By the early 1990s, America’s niche group conflict came to be known as the Culture Wars, defined by Irving Kristol as a “profound division over what kind of country we are, what kind of people we are, and what we mean by ‘The American Way of Life.’ ” Three basic battlegrounds emerged: multiculturalists against traditionalists (the Sheldon Hackneys versus the William Bennetts), media secularists against evangelicals (the Murphy Browns versus the Dan Quayles), and public planners against libertarians (th...