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

One result is little planning and wretched execution—as both Trump and Biden have demonstrated on trade, immigration, pandemic response, and foreign policy. Another is the willingness of both parties, when in power, to eke out near-term economic gains by means of fiscal and monetary stimulus—until stimulus must be withdrawn, and then everybody suff

Why is the “Big Sort” happening? Rising political passions, aligned as they now are with behaviors and lifestyles, are pushing like-minded tribal members to seek out geographic cohesion.

Yet if economic stagnation and unfair wealth distribution are growing long-term worries, Americans’ more immediate concern is how falling civic trust threatens national cohesion if not the very possibility of democracy. That’s the second driver.

Blue zoners are more likely to self-identify as cultural creatives, skilled at high-tech, high-touch tasks that red zoners aren’t smart enough to handle. Red zoners are more likely to self-identify as hardworking Americans, willing to take on strenuous tasks—like growing food, producing energy, assembling products, and fighting wars—that blue zoner

Not long ago, to be an American was to be a rule-breaking, risk-taking individualist who believed that flouting convention somehow made everything better over time. That still describes many older Americans. It doesn’t describe many young adults. Today’s rising generation, shell-shocked by the pervasive hollowing out of government, neighborhood, wo

Ordinarily, Americans prefer day-to-day competence rather than partisanship in the people they elect. Yet whenever they are reminded that the other side is pushing their country toward catastrophe, they are apt to forget about day-to-day competence.

civic order comes under attack from a new values regime. The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants. The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement

This time, it’s education replacing income as the key determinant of voting behavior.

The precursor to the Millennial Crisis was the 9/11 attack followed by the U.S. retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2001−2003). Like World War I, 9/11 struck like a bolt out of the blue, shocking a complacent public that was counting on an endless future of pacific globalism.