Crisis! At the Disco

Has anybody read The Fourth Turning? It’s a 1997 book about the cycles of history, specifically as they relate to American history. The authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, posit that history is cyclic. Each cycle, or saeculum, lasts approximately one hundred years and consists of four phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. At the moment, we’re (as you can probably guess) in the Fourth Turning, or Crisis Phase.

When they wrote the book, they identified their current period as an Unraveling, which began in roughly 1982 with the rise of neoliberalism and the growing exploitation of the so-called “culture wars,” and which continued until 2005, the year they mark as the beginning of the current Crisis. Personally, I would say the crisis began with 9/11/01, but let’s not quibble.

I haven’t read far enough into the book, nor am I knowledgeable enough about anything to support or dispute the theory, but it’s certainly fascinating. Maybe I’m more inclined to ascribe to it because when I was in high school, I calculated that the United States seems to find itself in a war every twenty years or so. If the pattern held, I figured, a major war was due right around the time I would be of prime drafting age. That year, I took a typing class with the thought that a soldier who could type would be more valuable behind front lines than on them. Then, a couple years after I graduated, the first Gulf War. Thankfully, sans draft.

The other fact that bolsters the theory is that the book was predictive in 1997; in 2024 it looks prophetic. In fact, the book’s subtitle is An American Prophecy.

We are in Crisis Mode. At this point, I’m not even sure that’s in dispute. Nearly every single one of our institutions is under assault, both from without and within. Our politics is a shambles. Our people are dying younger and getting dumber. We appear to be untethered to any national purpose other than the incessant accumulation of money. We have crises in nearly every sector of our nation. We have domestic instability, a growing White Christian Nationalist movement, curtailed rights, a fascistic threat home and abroad, and multiple regional wars which threaten to spread. There was also a global pandemic somewhere in there, but what am I going to do - catalogue every little horror?

We disagree about the solutions. We disagree about, pretty much, everything except that we’re currently riding the Amtrak Acela to perdition.

Americans have emerged from past crises with a clear vision of what needs to be undertaken to heal. Following the Civil War, for example, the nation began the laborious process of reconstruction – what followed was the Gilded Age, riddled with political corruption and poverty, but also which welcomed millions of immigrants to aid industrialization and the expansion of the railroads. The abuses of The Gilded Age led to the Progressive Era, which led to the unraveling of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and Prohibition, which took us right into full-blown crisis, with World War II.

Strauss and Howe figure the current crisis will end somewhere in the 2030’s. Strauss, in fact, wrote a 2023 sequel to The Fourth Turning entitled The Fourth Turning Is Here, which I haven’t read yet. In that book, he counsels Americans how to deal with our current problems and how to prepare for the next phase.

Assuming the Strauss/Howe Saeculum Theory is correct, it carries a deeper warning. A crisis is only a crisis because it truly threatens the established order. Which means there is a chance that such an order, or nation, or empire, will eventually not survive the crisis. There will come a point where the oppositional forces are simply too strong, or the institutions being defended are too weak, to survive.

Yes, we’ve been here before and under worse circumstances. But at what point do the pilings give way to pressure?

At this point, it seems like there are two, mutually exclusive views of how the nation ought to be run. The divisions, again, are not new. They can be traced right back to the first settlers. People came here for money, religion, and freedom. Those three colors can be combined into every shade in the political spectrum. With the ascension of Reaganism in 1982, the GOP figured out how to combine money and religion, and call it freedom. This is the jaundiced color the rest of us have been fighting ever since.

That vision, the one best exemplified by the current GOP presidential nominee, is an authoritarian, nativist, and definitionally exclusionary politics. It’s built on an us vs. them mentality. It promises retribution. Not against international boogeymen but against our own people. This vision wants to, essentially, reset American history to the pre-Civil Rights era, an era in which the passport to the American Dream largely rested on the color of one’s skin and the stuff between one’s legs.

It's a vision that cannot square with the pluralistic and meritocratic society the rest of us are trying to build. The two are incompatible; to me, that feels like the crisis in which we find ourselves. It’s a global crisis, perhaps even a new kind of global cold war (with some hot spots), one in which forces of oppression lean against forces of cooperation. It’s why you see a considerable minority of the United States allying itself with Russia (oppression) against Ukraine (cooperation). It’s why the Israel/Hamas conflict is so maddening to so many of us, since two forces of oppression - Netanyahu’s Israel and Hamas - are bumping against each other with devastating consequences for those seeking cooperation. The opposition/cooperation dichotomy is also why you see Republicans calling for an American dictatorship.

What settles the current crisis? How do we emerge? Broken or whole? Is the America of the next Turning one in which I even want to participate? Like I said, I’m not smart enough to confirm or dispute the book’s findings, but I find them fascinating. Maybe you will, too. In the meantime, if there are any younger people reading this, a word of advice: learn to type.