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

by William Strauss

Growing anarchy throughout the former Soviet republics prompts Russia to conduct training exercises around its borders.

Millennials will come of age facing debts, tax burdens, and two-tier wage structures that older generations will now declare intolerable.

Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and

unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation) ■ Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities ■ Cultural distress, with the media plunging into a dizzying decay, and a decency backlash in favor of state censorship ■ Technological distress, with cryptoanarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos ■ Ecological distress, with atmospheric damage, energy or water shortages, and new diseases ■ Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders ■ Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction

Eventually, all of America’s lesser problems will combine into one giant problem. The very survival of the society will feel at stake,

Decisive events will occur—events so vast, powerful, and unique that they lie beyond today’s wildest hypotheses.

Even if the nation stays together, its geography could be fundamentally changed, its party structure altered, its Constitution and Bill of Rights amended beyond recognition.

With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.

If the Crisis ends badly, very old Boomers could be truly despised.

In their quest for ever more individualism, Republicans want to make public authority ever more dysfunctional. They seek to starve all government of revenue and are willing to shut down whole federal agencies to make their point. If Republicans get their way, they would prevent Millennials from forging a positive bond with government and limit the public resources directed toward the care and schooling of the neediest children.

you are starting a career now, realize that generalists with survival know-how will have the edge over specialists whose skills are useful only in an undamaged environment.

The memory spans of long-lived members of the Gilded Generation (John D. Rockefeller, Mother Jones, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) extended from before the American Revolution through the present day.