The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

The old are spending more money and time investing in their own children and grandchildren. The young, hedging their bets, move less, stay closer to their families, mortgage their future to buy a credential rather than a home, and increasingly marry both later in life and only within their own class.

Global surveys indicate a growing dissatisfaction with democracy itself—what academics call a “global democratic recession”—led in most countries, as in America, by the rising generation of young adults. After conducting a comprehensive analysis of global survey data, the Cambridge University Centre for the Future of Democracy recently concluded: “

The same trends are now coursing through most of the world’s developed and emerging-market nations: growing economic inequality; declining generational and social mobility; tighter national borders; and intensifying ethnic and religious tribalism, weaponized through portable social media. Electorates are demanding, and getting, more authoritarian g

The average date here is 2028. Recall from Chapters 3 and 4 that a new turning typically arrives four years after each generation begins to enter a new phase of life. This would point to the Millennial Crisis ending in 2032.

Only when this collective rite of passage is complete, sometime in the mid-2030s,

Roughly equal shares (46 percent of Biden voters and 44 percent of Trump voters) at least somewhat agree that “it would be better for America if whoever is President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or the courts.” Younger Americans are leading this shift: One in four voters under age thirty would prefer such a powerf

both sides say that victory for the wrong side will do lasting damage to the country. Half say that politics is a struggle between right and wrong. A third say that violence may be justified to achieve political goals, and two-thirds expect violence in response to future election results.

they did, with terrifying impunity. Above all during these decades, social priorities in America and much of the world seemed to shift in the same direction: from the individual to the group; from private rights to public results; from discovering ideals to championing them; from attacking institutions to founding them; from customizing down to sca

While surveys show the willingness to use violence has risen about equally on both sides, a much larger share of the actual rise in violence has been by red-zone partisans, many of them affiliated with self-designated “militia” movements.