The Fourth Turning Is Here (part 3)

February 1, 2024

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Neil Howe believes that today’s social turmoil is shaping up to be another once-in-a-lifetime Crisis, similar to the most dramatic turning points in American history. Although the current cultural and political divisions are part of his story, he is cautious about trying to say which side should or will win. He does not expect a total victory of either one. “In a democratic society, one tribe never fully dominates the other without incorporating key elements of the other’s program within its own.”

While I agree with that, I will strike a somewhat more partisan note. One thing that stood out for me as I read the historical parts of the book is that the three last “saecula”—Howe’s term for the long cycles of American history—have all culminated in victories for democracy. The Revolutionary Saeculum ended with the victory of democracy over monarchy and British colonialism. The Civil War Saeculum ended with the victory of democracy over slavery. The Great Power Saeculum ended with the victory of democracy over fascism. Democracy is always a work in progress, and none of these turning points perfected it. But I think we should at least hope that our current Millennial Saeculum leaves democracy stronger than ever before.

Today’s battle for democracy

If that is our hope, then the next question is which side in today’s political struggle better represents our democratic values and institutions. Once we pose the question that way, the answer seems obvious: Surely it is not the party dominated by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

Trump’s own autocratic tendencies are obvious to many observers. He places himself above the law, claiming immunity from prosecution for any acts committed as president. He expresses his admiration for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. He wants to replace thousands of Civil Service employees with people selected less for their expertise than for their personal loyalty to him. Having failed to change the results of the 2020 election by legal means, he led an effort to resort to illegal means, with substantial support from both Republican leaders and the party base. The Mueller Report had already accused him of obstructing its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Now he continues to obstruct, delay and attack any court that tries to hold him accountable.

In addition to using undemocratic means to gain or maintain domestic power, MAGA Republicans have been impeding US support for democracy in the world. They are currently obstructing military aid to Ukraine as it defends itself against Russian invasion. They are less committed to international cooperation among democratic nations through NATO, the United Nations, and international agreements like the Paris Climate Accord. Their global stance is reminiscent of the isolationism that prevailed before the United States joined the war effort against Nazi Germany. As columnist Max Boot wrote this week:

Every president but one since Franklin D. Roosevelt has believed that the United States should exercise preeminent international influence for its own good and that of the world. Trump is the lone exception. He is committed to an “America First” agenda — the same label embraced by the Nazi sympathizers and isolationists of the pre-Pearl Harbor period. He has nothing but scorn for the twin pillars of postwar U.S. foreign policy: free-trade pacts and security alliances.

MAGA economic policies also seem more appropriate for an earlier, pre-Crisis time. They include propping up the private sector with additional tax cuts, while depriving the public sector of needed tax revenue and opposing public sector investments for the common good. In some cases, these policies are throwbacks to the previous Unraveling era, especially the 1920s. Then too, tariffs and trade wars hampered the global economy, and restrictive immigration laws tried to hold back the ethnic diversification of the population. Howe points out that since the American-born population is reproducing too slowly to replace itself, we depend on immigration to grow the population and boost the economy. Immigration is one area where compromise is needed, with some balance between facilitating legal immigration and blocking illegal immigration. Currently, Trump and his followers prefer chaos to compromise, in the hope that it will benefit them politically. In general, MAGA policies are less likely to leave the nation greater and stronger than poorer and weaker.

Framing the current Crisis as a crisis of democracy highlights the absurdity—but also the critical importance—of this year’s presidential campaign. One of our major parties is preparing to nominate the man who is least likely to uphold democratic institutions at home and abroad.

Where the generations will stand

Donald Trump is a member of the Boom generation, the generation of the Prophet type which is supposed to provide the moral leadership in a time of Crisis. But he is noted for neither his personal morality nor his civic virtue. Writers like Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory) have marveled that so many evangelical Christians have hitched their wagon to a leader who flouts so many moral norms. If Trump is a prophet at all, he is a false prophet or Prophet of Doom. His message is that the country is going rapidly to hell, and he alone can save us. Contrast that with FDR’s positive, hopeful message that we have nothing to fear if we all pull together.

Where are the progressive leaders of the Boom generation? Here’s an interesting fact: Both Republican Boomer presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, lost the popular vote to their Democratic Boomer opponents—Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Both elections were controversial, since five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices intervened in the 2000 election, and the Russians interfered with the 2016 election. While the presidency has been narrowly out of reach for them lately, Boomer Democrats do hold the position of Senate Majority Leader (Chuck Schumer) and governorships in fifteen states.

I do not know whether any particular Boomer will emerge as a “Gray Champion” like Franklin Roosevelt. I do expect aging Boomers to keep raising questions of values and ideals, trying to formulate broad goals for the nation. They will probably move from asserting individual values like self-expression, personal growth and sexual freedom; to placing more emphasis on civic virtues like voting rights, honest debate and the rule of law. Expect to hear a lot about democratic values being on the ballot in the upcoming election.

As members of Generation X assume their midlife leadership roles, they will bring a lot of practical skills to the collective tasks at hand. As an especially right-leaning generation thus far, they will need to ask serious questions about what values and goals they serve. Hopefully, Trump’s fall from power will soon be complete, either by electoral defeat, criminal conviction, removal from office, or ineligibility to run again. Having been slavishly devoted to its one strongman, the MAGA movement may then disintegrate. Many Generation Xers may then rethink their loyalties, turning from the politics of grievance and resentment to something more constructive. Alienated and lonely young men may then reconnect with their communities and learn how to fight for society instead of against it.

As members of the Millennial Generation complete their transition to adulthood, their first civic obligation will be to vote in large numbers. In later life, they will assume leadership during the High era that hopefully follows the current Crisis, as the G.I. Generation did after World War II. But for now, they will provide masses of followers for whatever leader can set the national agenda. The leader to inspire them will almost certainly be someone less selfish, narcissistic, and belligerent than Donald Trump. This generation craves teamwork, order, security, competence and civility. They are ready and willing to make sacrifices for causes they believe in. Although they are not currently wild about our aging Silent-Generation president, they are ready to join some team, and I don’t think the MAGA team will suit them.

When the national mood changes, it often changes with dizzying speed. Who predicted the emergence of a “counterculture” in the 1960s, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, or the MAGA movement of 2016? We live in “interesting times,” in the words of the Chinese curse. Fasten your seatbelts, and prepare to be astonished at how fast the country can turn

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The Fourth Turning Is Here

January 24, 2024

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Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Ever since I read Generations (1991) by Neil Howe and William Strauss three decades ago, I have been fascinated by their cyclical theory of history. Strauss died in 2007, but Howe is still going strong. His latest book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, further refines the theory and applies it to more recent events.

I think this interpretation of history provides a lot of insight into where America is now and where it is likely to go. The future cannot be known with any precision, but the cyclical patterns identified by Howe and Strauss give us some useful clues. At least they alert us to possible futures that we may want to embrace or avoid.

In this post, I’ll lay out the theory, and then in later posts apply it to the current social situation, which Howe regards as a once-in-a-lifetime social crisis. As we will see, the Millennial Generation will have a lot to say about how the crisis is resolved, although all living generations have some role to play.

Personal and historical cycles

This theory asserts a relationship between phases of the human lifecycle and phases of historical cycles that also last about the length of a lifespan, about 80 to 100 years. Howe refers to these historical cycles with the Latin word “saeculum,” which the Romans applied both to long lifetimes and long periods of history. In Howe’s interpretation, we are in the final phase of the “Millennial Saeculum” that began at the end of World War II. The previous “Great Power Saeculum” extended from the end of the Civil War to 1945.

Ancient writers like Ibn Khaldun and modern historians like Arnold Toynbee both described repetitive patterns over such long periods. Toynbee “found the span of time between the start of one ‘general war’ and the start of the next to have averaged ninety-five years with a ‘surprising degree of coincidence’ across the millennia.”

But why should such cycles exist at all, especially in modern societies more preoccupied with linear progress? Why isn’t modern history just a story of continuous progress in technology, productivity, material prosperity, and so forth? The general answer is that change is rarely that continuous. “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.” Periods of relative social stability are interrupted by social crises that require rapid institutional innovation and reform. After such a crisis, people try to conserve the new order until pressures for change build up again. That means that each generation is not just progressively different from the one before—better educated and more productive, for example—but each is situated differently in relation to major social events.

[I]magine that the society is suddenly hit by a Great Event (what sociologist Karl Mannheim called a “crystallizing moment”), some emergency, perhaps a war, so consequential that it transforms all of society’s members yet transforms them differently according to their phase-of-life responses.

For children, this response might be an awestruck respect for adults (and the desire to stay out of their way); for young adults, taking up arms and risking death to meet the enemy; for midlifers, organizing the troops and mobilizing society for maximum effort; for elders, setting strategy and clarifying the larger purpose.

Each generation is forever shaped by whatever is going on in society when they are growing up. Each generation also shapes later events by bringing their early experiences with them into later phases of the lifecycle. The interaction between historical change and personal change creates repetitive cycles, as explained below.

The four turnings

Each saeculum includes four “turnings,” which are analogous to the seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter. Each has a “characteristic social mood…reflecting a new shift in how people feel about themselves and behave toward each other.” Each turning lasts for about a quarter of the human life span. Howe divides the life span into the phases of youth, rising adulthood, midlife and elderhood. With each turning, each generation advances to the next phase of life. Each generation is shaped—especially as children—by the turnings it experiences, but each has its opportunity to shape events and moods as it ages. The interplay of turnings and generations creates four recurring types of generations, each with its own distinctive role in each of the four turnings. I’ll describe the turnings first, and then the generations.

The First Turning, analogous to spring, is a High. Howe describes it as “an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civil order implants and an old values regime decays.” This comes after the previous fourth turning, when society had to confront and surmount a serious social crisis. The most recent example of a High is the postwar period that followed the crisis period of the Great Depression and World War II. The High of the previous saeculum was the “Gilded Age” after the Civil War.

The Second Turning, analogous to summer, is an Awakening. This is “a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.” The most recent example is the “Consciousness Revolution” of the 1960s and 70s—Howe dates it from 1964 to 1984. The Awakening of the previous saeculum was the one that historians call the “Third Great Awakening” (1886-1908), associated with both religious fundamentalism and the the more progressive Social Gospel movement. These spiritual or cultural revolutions occur regularly, but they catch most people by surprise. Why disturb the relative peace and prosperity of a High? A key reason is the appearance of a new generation, which has no memory of the previous crisis, no mandate to build more order, and greater freedom to explore an inner world of meaning, self expression and higher purpose.

The Third Turning, analogous to fall, is an Unraveling. This is “a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civil order decays and the new values regime implants.” The Awakening era has generated enough new ideas and ideals to threaten existing institutions, without yet producing a consensus on institutional reform. The most recent example is the “Culture Wars” period (1984-2008). The Unraveling of the previous saeculum was the “World War I and Prohibition” era, when “opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like alcohol, drugs, sex, immigration, and family life.”

The Fourth Turning, analogous to winter, is a Crisis, “a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civil order with a new one.” Obvious examples include the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Depression/World War II era (1929-1946). The last of those gave us bigger government, with its permanent military establishment and social welfare policies. Now The Fourth Turning Is Here. Howe dates the most recent Crisis from the Great Recession of 2008, and he expects it to end sometime in the 2030s. The economy has recovered, for now, but we still face extreme inequality, debt-fueled spending, shrinking world trade, political gridlock, climate change, and rising threats to democracy at home and abroad. But like previous long cycles, it may just be the winter before the spring. “If the current Fourth Turning ends well, America will be able to enjoy its next golden age, or at least an era that will feel like a golden age to those who build it.”

The four generational archetypes

In this theory of cycles, both generations and turnings are approximately the same length as a quarter of the life cycle. The exact dating of generations and turnings depends on finding a good fit between the two. “The leading edge of every generation…emerges from infancy and becomes aware of the world just as society is entering one of these eras.” Then it enters “rising adulthood” just before the following era. The Boomers started being born just before the end of World War II and entered adulthood just in time to help create the “Consciousness Revolution” of 1964-1984. Howe gets the best fit by dating their births from 1943, rather than using the more traditional 1946, the year when birth rates spiked.

The Four Turnings shape the character of four generational archetypes, which in turn shape subsequent turnings. The Hero type is born during an Unraveling, and then enters adulthood during a Crisis. The Hero generation we know best is the G.I. Generation (born 1901-1924), which has become known as the “Greatest Generation.” “We remember Heroes best for their collective coming-of-age triumphs…and for their worldly achievements as elders.” Being born in an Unraveling has the advantage that parents often go out of their way to protect their children from the cultural storms that are raging, which encourages the new generation to be cooperative and respectful. Once the Unraveling and Crisis have past, Heroes preside over the reformed institutional order they have helped build. The G.I. Generation presided literally, providing the string of seven U.S. presidents that held office from 1961-1992. Now Howe classifies the Millennial Generation (born 1982 to 2005—the latter date is a little uncertain) as a new Hero type, although it remains to be seen if they will live up to their advance billing.

The Artist type is born during a Crisis, and then enters adulthood during the following High. The Artist generation we know best is the Silent Generation (born 1925-1942). “We remember Artists best for their quiet years of rising adulthood…and their midlife years of flexible, consensus-building leadership.” Protected to the point of suffocation during the Crisis, they grow up cautiously conforming to the expectations of the institution-building older generation. In midlife the Silent have been sandwiched between more powerful G.I.s and more passionate Boomers, making them somewhat indecisive and conciliatory. Howe expects the children being born into the current Crisis—he calls them Homelanders—to be similar. Skipped over for the presidency for many years, the Silent finally got their one president, Joe Biden (born 1942).

The Prophet type is born during a High, and then enters adulthood during an Awakening. The Prophet generation we know all too well is the Boom Generation (born 1943-1960). “We remember Prophets best for their coming-of-age passion…and their principled stewardship as elders.” Prophets experience easygoing, indulgent parenting and develop high standards of personal fulfillment. They are very critical of flaws in social institutions, such as poverty, racism, sexism and environmental degradation. They tend to become the midlife moralists and culture warriors of the Unraveling era, but they can also provide inspiration for the next Hero generation. According to Howe’s dating, Boomers have produced three presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

The Nomad type is born during an Awakening, and then enters adulthood during an Unraveling.  That includes Generation X (born 1961-1981). “We remember Nomads best for their rising-adult years of hell-raising.” Why hell-raising? Because the cultural upheaval of an Awakening is probably the worst time to be parented. During the Consciousness Revolution, parents were distracted by their new opportunities for self-fulfillment, and the sudden revolution in sexual and gender norms led to a surge in divorce. Generation X tended to become rootless and rather alienated from social institutions, contributing to the Unraveling that began in the 1980s. In a Crisis, however, they may become pragmatic leaders doing whatever needs to be done to survive, such as leading troops in battle. Barack Obama (born 1961) is Generation X by Howe’s dating, although a Boomer by more conventional dating.

Generational configurations and endowments

Each of the four turnings has its own distinctive generational configuration. During an Awakening like the Consciousness Revolution, Heroes are entering elderhood, Artists are entering midlife, Prophets are entering adulthood, and Nomads are being born. This is a formula for generational conflict, as elders who are committed to the existing order confront young Prophets who are raising new moral issues and demanding more personal freedom. This was the situation when Hero presidents Johnson and Nixon ordered up the Vietnam War and young Prophets responded with moral indignation. During a Crisis, the generational types are reversed, with Prophets entering elderhood, Nomads entering midlife, Heroes entering adulthood, and Artists being born. When the elder Prophet Franklin Roosevelt told the country what it needed to do, young Heroes signed up for service, whether in the WPA, Civilian Conservation Corps, or military service.

Finally, each generation has its own endowment of qualities that it brings to society. For Heroes, they lie in the area of “community, affluence, and technology”; for Artists, “pluralism, expertise, and due process”; for Prophets, “vision, values, and religion”; and for Nomads, “liberty, survival, and honor.” As each older generation dies off, a new generation growing up under similar circumstances can compensate by providing a similar endowment. In our time, the loss of the G.I Generation has created a vacuum in institutional organization and leadership that the Millennial Generation should be able to fill. As the current Crisis unfolds, the result may be a sudden shift away from individualism and culture wars and toward teamwork and social cooperation. Howe says that “every generation usually turns out to be just what society needs when it first appears and makes its mark.” And since the turnings occur within a long cycle that is about the length of a lifetime, each turning is a once-in-a-lifetime experience—and opportunity—for every living generation.

Continued

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Kids These Days (part 2)

February 2, 2018

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Malcolm Harris describes a world in which young people must struggle to develop their human capital in order to remain competitive in a hi-tech economy. Some succeed more than others, of course, but Harris is focused less on individual differences than on the Millennial experience in general. He notices how much of the enhanced value of labor is going to benefit employers rather than laborers. Higher productivity is not translating into higher wages or more leisure, but into lower labor costs and higher profits. The Millennial generation and their families are being systematically ripped off, being forced to bear the costs of human capital development while seeing most of the benefits go to someone else.

Inner stress, outward conformity

“More competition among young people–whether they want to be drummers, power forwards, scientists, or just not broke–means higher costs in the economic sense, but also in the area of mental health and social trust.” The percentage agreeing with the statement that “generally speaking, most people can be trusted,” has dropped precipitously in this generation, while rates of anxiety, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have soared.

Millennials have been heavily medicated for these conditions, and Harris links medicalization with a broader youth control movement, “a way to keep kids quiet, focused, and productive while adults move the goalposts down the field.” He describes Millennials as the “most policed modern generation,” with authorities quicker to suspend or incarcerate young people who get out of line. On the other hand, society has also taken some steps to protect children, such as cracking down on child abuse.

Whether it is an effect of tighter social control, social protection, or something else, “Millennials are significantly better-behaved than earlier birth cohorts.” They have lower crime rates than Baby Boomers or Generation X had in their youth. They are also having a little less sex. The median age of sexual initiation has gone back up to 18, after dropping from 19 to 17 between 1939 and 1979. The percentage of young people using protection from the outset of sexual activity has increased dramatically.

A bleak future?

Harris is much better at extrapolating worrisome social trends into the future than he is at envisioning social reforms. He imagines that students may become even more weighed down by their student loans, as lenders “start demanding a percentage of future earnings from borrowers in return for money up front….” We would then have a generation of urban sharecroppers, forever indebted by their need for capital to those who can help supply it. He also imagines that the country may have to institutionalize more and more of the people who just can’t measure up in a hypercompetitive system.

Harris is pessimistic about the standard ways that liberals encourage people to change society–through their votes, their protests, their buying power, or their volunteer work. For example, he doesn’t see how voting can bring about campaign finance reform, if politicians are more responsive to the financial elites than they are to the voters.

In the end, Harris offers no positive vision or program for the future, beyond the vague advice to stop playing the entire game and become revolutionaries.

Positive models

I am not content to leave it at that, because I think Millennials need more than a wish for an alternative order too unimaginable to be described. They could use some positive models for how the country might do things differently.

Having reviewed George Lakey’s Viking Economics and Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything, I think that some constructive policies to deal with the issues raised in this book are available. Nordic countries do a couple things better than we do. They share the costs of developing human capital through more generous public support for education and job training. And they support stronger worker organization, so that workers can bargain for a better share of the fruits of their own productivity. As a result, young people can grow up with more confidence that their talents will be both developed and rewarded. Easy to say, harder to accomplish, but it can be done.

As for the grip that rich and selfish conservatives have on our political institutions, I will only say that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of cultural change. When public opinion shifts dramatically in a particular direction, it usually finds a way of inducing institutional reforms. Consider, for example, how sexually abusive men are starting to be ostracized (well, okay, not all of them).

I think Malcolm Harris has done a good job describing what makes life so difficult for the Millennial generation. For ideas about how to make it less difficult, readers have to look elsewhere.

A place in history

A more inspiring vision for Millennials was published by Neil Howe and William Strauss in 2000 under the title Millennials Rising. They had already given the generation its name in their previous book, Generations, where they laid out their elaborate theory of generational cycles in American history. Here are their birth dates for Millennials (slightly different from Harris’s), along with those of other living American generations:

  • G.I. (1901-1924)
  • Silent (1925-1942)
  • Boom (1943-1960, often dated 1946-1964 based on birth rates)
  • 13th (1961-1981, more commonly known as Generation X)
  • Millennial (1982-2002)

Once every 80 to 100 years, according to Howe and Strauss, a “hero generation” passes through the life cycle and has an unusually transformative effect on society:

A hero generation arrives just after an era of societywide upheaval in values and culture that many historians call a “spiritual awakening” and passes through childhood during a time of decaying civic habits, ebbing institutional trust, and resurgent individualism.
A hero generation directly follows a youth generation widely deemed to be disappointing [in this case, Generation X], reacts against the older “postwar” generation that fomented the spiritual awakening as young adults [Baby Boomers]–and fills a void left by the passing of an elder generation known for civic purpose and teamwork [G.I. Generation].

As they are entering adulthood, the generation is challenged by a “heroic trial,” such as World War II for the G.I. Generation. Howe and Strauss did not yet know what that might be for Millennials, but I am tempted to speculate that the current assault on our democratic institutions by the forces of oligarchy is a good candidate. In their midlife years, “they create powerful and enduring institutions, build big new infrastructures, craft a new modern world, and dominate politics and economics deep into their old age.”

Each generation has to solve problems created by the excesses of previous generations. Howe and Strauss see the Millennials reacting against the “narcissism, impatience, iconoclasm, and constant focus on talk (usually argument) over action” associated with Baby Boomers, as well as the “over-the-top free agency, social splintering, cultural exhaustion, and civic decay” associated with Generation X.  While my generation rebelled against powerful institutions that seemed intimidating and repressive, Millennials may do the opposite, rebuilding civic institutions weakened by excessive competitiveness and social polarization. “A new Millennial service ethic is emerging, built around notions of collegial (rather than individual) action, support for (rather than resistance against) civic institutions, and the tangible doing of good deeds.” In the economy, Howe and Strauss predict a new era of worker organization, class consciousness, higher taxes on the rich, and expansion of the middle class.

The Millennial generation would not be without its own excesses. Those might include “excessive collectivism and rationalism, a capacity to push technology too far or follow leaders too unquestioningly.” But those dangers would be the risk side of their historic opportunity, “to usher in an era when public events move the fastest and furthest, when nations and empires rise and fall, when the likelihood of political or economic calamity (and war) is high, when societies can either self-destruct or ratchet up to a higher level of civilization.” If Howe and Strauss are right, those who can see only gridlock and stagnation are in for a shock, probably very soon.

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