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

Our time horizons too are contracting. Young Americans are deferring or canceling their aspirations. Over the last decade, we have witnessed a declining birth rate and falling home ownership among young adults—and fewer business start-ups either by or for young adults.

The worst outcomes would be dismal indeed. Imagine, perhaps, a war which, after extensive violence, leaves the world in chaos—and leaves America riven into two or more fragments, one or more of which is directed by foreign powers.

Most likely, it would begin with a proxy war that gradually draws major powers into it—or with a major power unexpectedly crossing a red line. While efforts will be made to minimize violence through cyberattacks and sweeping economic sanctions and blockades, nations will eventually resort to force on the ground. Whenever possible, they will employ

The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and an old values regime decays. The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the

We may want to believe these disquieting trends are unique to America—national flukes that will disappear as mysteriously as they appeared. But they are not.

The notion that an American civil war would primarily result in chronic disorganized terrorism—the so-called “Irish troubles” scenario—is likewise unrealistic. This typically happens when one faction is overwhelmingly more powerful than the other (so terror networks are the weaker faction’s only option). Or when the society has no history of legiti

Let’s take another look at the opening decade of our current Fourth Turning, the 2010s. And let’s compare it to the opening decade of the prior Fourth Turning, the 1930s. The parallels are striking.

When two tribes have lost all trust in the other, every action by one side tends to be regarded by the other as evidence of the most malign intentions. At which point, it would be irrational for you not to interpret it as a dire threat,

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.