The Fourth Turning Is Upon Us
The crisis is upon us, and where it takes us before the next high point depends on showing up, speaking out, and recognizing the momentous period in history we occupy.
I was born in 1974.
According to the alphabetical classification we ascribe to generations, I fall smack in the middle of “Gen X”.
Referring to historians William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory chronicled in their iconic book The Fourth Turning, that means I am a “nomad,” someone who comes of age during an “awakening,” a time when long-established institutions come into question and people turn increasingly toward spirituality and individualism. Think of the tumultuous cultural milestones that occurred during the 1960s and 70s.
Awakenings precede “unravelings,” periods when things…well…begin to unravel. After 40 years of FDR New Deal programs that created the American middle class, we elected (twice) to the White House a man who proclaimed in his first inaugural address that government is not the solution to our problems — “government is the problem.”
If we look back at the past four decades with their massive tax cuts to the morbidly rich, rolling back of regulatory standards, off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, gutting of public education, reduction in union membership, crippling student loan debt, and workers’ wages unable to keep pace with productivity and CEO compensation, no wonder we find ourselves now facing the next turning — a crisis.
As Strauss and Howe theorized, each “turning” lasts about 20–22 years, with four turnings comprising a saeculum, Latin for “a long human life” or “a natural century.”
They are:
— A high
— An awakening
— An unraveling
— A crisis
Meticulously tracing historic events, Strauss and Howe delineate how the most consequential societal-shaping events have predictably adhered to this 80-year cycle.
For example, 80 years after the American Revolution the United States was gripped in the Civil War. 80 years after that saw the end of the second world war.
Within each saeculum lie archetypes, or templates, personality models passed down through generations.
Prophets are idealists. They enter childhood during “high” times, when communities center around a new social order. This can be seen in the transcendental generation exemplified in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. President Abraham Lincoln, according to Strauss and Howe, was of this generation.
Next, the nomad comes of age during an awakening, a time when people question the once-new social order of the prophets. The “Lost Generation” of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald is here, as is my generation, X.
Heroes enter childhood during an unraveling, a period of laissez-faire attitudes and a sense of self-reliance. The “GI Generation” and Millennials are here.
Finally, the artists occupy the final stage, the crisis. This is when social and political norms come under attack, and an ethos of personal sacrifice challenges those threats. Most of “Generation Z” falls under this umbrella.
If this trend is any indication, America is at an inflection point similar to those we have faced before.
In the 1930s, as fascism was consuming Europe — and even threatened to take over here — we elected a president, Franklin Roosevelt, who could have used the presidency’s awesome power at a time of great national weakness to join the authoritarian trend, and flip the United States to an autocracy.
He alluded during his first inaugural address to sweeping governmental reforms he intended to implement:
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
We normally only focus on the “all we have to fear is fear itself” part at the beginning. Rarely do we remember the “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency” part.
Coming from the mouth of an authoritarian like Donald Trump, Ron Desantis, or any of the current republican superstars subsuming the party of prophet Abraham Lincoln, could signal a drastic volte-face from the constitutionally limited democratic republic we have come to take for granted toward a fascist dictatorship.
After all, Germany was the most cultured, progressive nation in Europe before a frustrated painter with a funny mustache whom the political elites dismissed as irrelevant rose to power on a platform of fear, grievance, and scapegoating.
Which brings us, of course, to the United States today.
While eight to ten years ago the suggestion we could slide into fascism was the province of fringe conspiracy enclaves, it is no longer hyperbole.
Who would have imagined we would be speaking today of a former president inciting an attempted coup against our government?
Yet, that is exactly what happened.
The modern-day republican party has become the party of fringe conspiracies, ignorance, misogyny, fear, outrage, grievance, demagoguery, racism, violence, bigotry, oligarchy, and hate.
Over the past year, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.
Even Canadians fear the American experiment is on the precipice of ending.
In his new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian author Stephen Marche warns:
The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.
He isn’t alone.
Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon begins a Globe & Mail piece titled “ The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare” with a harrowing assertion:
By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.
There’s historical precedent for this.
Milton Mayer was a reporter for the Chicago Sun in the 1940s and 50s.
Ten years after World War II, he wondered how Germany, the most cultured country in Europe with a strong democratic republic, could have slipped into fascism so quickly.
So he traveled to Germany and befriended 10 average German citizens: a college professor, high school teacher, baker, janitor, tailor’s apprentice, cabinetmaker and volunteer firefighter, salesman, bill collector, bank clerk, and a police officer.
What they told Mayer, chronicled in his book They Thought They Were Free, should serve as a warning to all–even the “invincible” United States.
The college professor reported:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me–unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
In September, President Joe Biden delivered what might have been the most important speech any American president has had to deliver in which he acknowledged the existential threat from the rise of right-wing extremism.
While citing all examples of these extreme threats over just the past half decade is too daunting, the president summed it up:
History tells us blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.
They’re [MAGA republicans] working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
Yet here we are, beginning to look more like Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia, Slovenia, and Poland, countries the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance states the United States’ “backsliding” democracy is beginning to resemble.
“We’re Americans, after all,” so many proclaim. “We’re not like those countries.”
But if the republican party and others still loyal to the cult of “the former guy” aren’t stopped legislatively, legally, non-violently the next coup attempt will probably be successful.
We are teetering on the precipice here so much that if we don’t elect Democrats to the congressional majority and keep Joe Biden in the White House in 2024, we could go the way of the aforementioned countries.
The crisis is upon us.
A climate crisis.
An environmental crisis.
A student loan debt crisis.
A housing crisis.
A healthcare crisis.
An economic inequality crisis.
Where it takes us before the next high point depends on showing up, speaking out, and recognizing the momentous period in history we occupy.