This Fourth Turning Crisis Period to Last Until 2029

 From Neil Howe at Hedgeye Market Insights:

NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.

The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.

The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”

Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.

Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.

In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.

At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.

 

The First Turning is called a High

 

This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity.

America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.

 

The Second Turning is an Awakening

 

This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.

America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.

 

The Third Turning is an Unravelling

 

The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.

America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.

 

And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis

 

This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.

In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030. If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.

Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).

To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.

From Jim Quinn at Burningplatform blog, who explains how the 80 year cycles in US history have been quite accurate:

"As Fourth Turnings go the 80-year cycle would certainly argue for substantial conflict to erupt in 2021.

In 1781, the Battle of Yorktown concluded with Cornwallis surrendering to General Washington and concluding the armed struggle of the American Revolution, insuring the birth of a new nation.

Exactly 80 years later in 1861, Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln needed to sneak into Washington DC to avoid an assassination attempt in Baltimore. Fort Sumter was attacked and surrendered to Confederate forces. The First Battle of Bull Run resulted in a resounding Confederate victory and led Lincoln to institute a draft and an income tax. Over 600,000 men died in the next four years.

Exactly 80 years later in 1941, while Hitler was riding roughshod across Europe and turning his attention towards Russia, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor after FDR cut off their oil supply to provoke an attack. Tens of millions died over the next four years. It is now exactly 80 years later. One must ponder what potential tragedy awaits our nation and the world?

With the elevation of a vacuous disorientated Trojan horse to the presidency, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings of their puppet, we are already experiencing many of the things Strauss and Howe warned about in their 1997 prophecy.

“Institutions will be increasingly bossy, limiting personal freedoms, chastising bad manners, and cleansing the culture. Powerful new civic organizations will make judgments about which individual rights deserve respect and which do not. Criminal justice will become swift and rough, trampling on some innocents to protect an endangered and desperate society from those feared to be guilty. Expect a loss of personal privacy. Fourth Turnings can be dark times for the free spirit: Just as one kind of official may have new authority to do something for you, another kind—some hastily deputized magistrate—may have new authority to do something to you.”

Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.