Neil Howe, in his apocalyptic bedtime story “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” proposes that American history, like a nervous tick, moves in repeatable cycles. If Neil Howe is to be believed—and why not, since prophets are always more entertaining than accountants—then American history is less a stately march toward progress and more a cosmic game of musical chairs, with the band changing every 20 years and the furniture getting increasingly rickety. According to Howe, our Anglo-American tribe has, for the past half-millennium, been caught in a sort of historical spin cycle.
These “turnings,” as he calls them, come in fours, like horsemen or Beatles, and together they span the length of a long human life—80 to a 100 years, give or take the odd war or financial panic. Picture history as a grand, cosmic waltz, the seasons pirouetting from spring’s rebirth to summer’s growth, then stumbling into autumnal entropy, and finally collapsing into winter’s creative destruction. It’s less “progress” than “rinse and repeat,” but with more drama and better costumes. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future.
Now, Howe insists we are deep in the throes of a Fourth Turning—which, like a hangover or a family reunion, is that special season of crisis when the fun stops and history takes off the gloves. A period the Chinese might call “interesting times,” and which Americans, in their understated way, might call “a hot mess.” It is a decisive era of secular upheaval when civic trust goes the way of Blockbuster Video and partisans foam at the mouth with righteous fury.
According to Howe our current societal migraine began in 2008. This is the Millennial Crisis, when Wall Street nosedived, taking the middle class, housing market, and several Icelandic banks with it. America, once proud steward of postwar optimism and suburban lawn care, now found itself flirting with authoritarian identity politics, meme-based governance and the ghost of Andrew Jackson. The MAGA movement rose like a soufflé, and reality TV’s Donald Trump stormed the gates. Pessimism is in vogue, populism is the new black, and partisanship is so fanatical it makes the Hatfields and McCoys look like a book club.
The Fourth Turning is not so much a chapter as a plot twist—history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another. It’s the moment when the old story ends, the new one begins, and nobody has the faintest idea who the hero is supposed to be. The real kicker? You only realize you’ve lived through a Fourth Turning after the fact, when the dust settles and the historians swoop in to explain what you should have been feeling all along.
Howe, with the confidence of a man who’s read too many history books and not enough comic strips, claims the last Fourth Turning was the Great Depression and World War II. Back then, after a decade of economic misery and alphabet-soup agencies (AAA, NRA, WPA—collect them all!), the Depression still hadn’t gone away. Unemployment was stubbornly high, asset values were lower than a limbo stick at a yoga retreat, and bond yields were so low they could have been used as limbo sticks themselves. Yet, in a twist worthy of Hollywood, FDR’s achievements were later lauded as monumental—a bit of postwar myth-making that would make the Brothers Grimm grin.
Both the last Fourth Turning and the current one kicked off with a global financial crash, a severe economic contraction, and a general sense that the universe was run by the Three Stooges. Both were “balance-sheet depressions,” triggered by debt bubbles popping like overinflated party balloons. Deflation fears abounded, labor and capital sat idle, and the usual fiscal remedies worked about as well as leeches for the common cold. “Secular stagnation”—a term dusted off from the 1930s—was back in fashion, trotted out by celebrity economists desperate for a comeback tour.
Inequality soared in both decades, ensuring that the rich and powerful would once again be the villains in everyone’s favorite political melodrama. Leaders, ever the experimental chefs, whipped up a smorgasbord of new federal policies. During the New Deal, Americans lost track of all the new agencies; during the Great Recession, the acronyms multiplied again (TARP, QE, CARES—an alphabet soup best served cold).
Populism, that perennial weed, flourished left and right, with charismatic outsiders gathering followers like pied pipers with better hair. Partisan identity hardened, the electorate polarized, and voting rates climbed, as if everyone suddenly realized democracy was a contact sport. The “culture war” of yesteryear gave way to existential struggles for power, with each side convinced the other was plotting the apocalypse.
Meanwhile, marriages were postponed, birth rates fell, and unrelated adults shacked up together—multi-generational living became so common that the “30-year-old gamer in the basement” became a sociological cliche. Families grew closer, if only because they couldn’t afford to move out.
Authoritarianism, like a tacky fashion trend, came roaring back too. Flags were waved, anthems butchered, and intellectuals (God bless ’em) lent their rhetorical muscle to every grievance movement that could afford a podcast. Meanwhile, the sacred cow of individual liberty began mooing a little less confidently, replaced by herd behavior, shame mobs, and a new gospel of civic salvation through bureaucratic paperwork and TikTok videos on the Constitution. In both decades, patriotism came to be equated with the settling of scores. In both decades economic globalism was in rapid retreat.
But don’t worry, Howe insists that the real drama hasn’t even started yet. He pegs the current Fourth Turning as beginning in 2008, which means we’re about two decades into this particular episode of “America’s Got Angst.” He reckons we’ve got another decade to go, and the real fireworks—the decisive national challenge, the existential test—are still ahead. Historically, this has meant war, either with foreign powers or amongst ourselves, because nothing says “national renewal” like a good old-fashioned conflagration.
According to him, every Fourth Turning unleashes social forces that push the nation, before the era is over, into a great national challenge. The challenge will demand engagement and sacrifice on a scale most Americans have only seen in movies. Every Fourth Turning ends not with a whimper, but with a history-altering kaboom. We don’t yet know what this challenge is. War, civil upheaval, mass psychosis—take your pick. It’s the part of the cycle where the old order finally croaks, and the nation either reincarnates into a shinier beast or decomposes into a cautionary tale. The historical menu offers Revolution, Civil War, and World War II as the chef’s specials. This time, who knows? Perhaps a cybernetic cold war with AI toaster ovens.
But war is not inevitable, merely probable—like rain at a British picnic. Still, there’s a silver lining or at least a pewter one. After the final act of this generational demolition derby, America will supposedly get a fresh new operating system. The old order will crumble, and by the time the dust settles, America will have a new identity, a new sense of income, class, race, nation, and empire. Out goes rugged individualism and ironic detachment; in comes community spirit, public trust, and a cheerful consensus that Big Brother isn’t so bad if he offers decent healthcare. Millennials, that much-maligned generation, will discover that civic membership is a two-way street: more benefits, but also more duties. They will finally get a shot at national purpose.
But before we cue the inspirational music, Howe asks us to remember this: no one living through these Fourth Turnings ever really knows what’s happening until it’s already happened. It’s all clear in the rear view mirror. At the time, it just feels like another Tuesday with a collapsing currency and a viral video of someone dancing one-legged in a parking lot.
America will pass through a historical gate as momentous as the Revolution, the Civil War, or the double whammy of the Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe is high: insurrection, civil conflict, geographic crack-up, or the embrace of authoritarian rule. If there’s a war, expect it to be total—because when Americans do something, they do it with gusto. By the mid-2030s, if Howe is right (and history remains such a dutiful plagiarist), we’ll have exited winter and stepped into spring—a First Turning. A new civic order will rise from the debris, like a phoenix wrapped in red tape. Things will feel… orderly. Optimistic. Predictable. Which is to say, deeply unsettling.
Yet, as the wheel turns, Americans will also have the chance to achieve a new greatness. Long-term problems may finally be solved—if only because the alternative is unthinkable. Just as the grim 1940s gave way to the golden 1950s, so too might the 2030s bring a new spring. Individualism will be out, community will be stronger than most of us recall from circa-2000; public trust will rise, institutions will function (imagine!), and optimism will bloom. The culture may be tamer, social conscience weaker, conformity heavier—but if all goes well, a new golden age awaits, or at least something that feels like one to those who build it.
As a final thought, don’t let the textbooks fool you, either. The myth that Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II neatly sculpted America’s postwar golden age is just that—a myth. History books and cable news will willingly tell you that the New Deal and winning World War II was what transformed America into a vastly more affluent and equitable society than it had been before—into a nation powerful enough to help many other countries grow more prosperous and democratic throughout the rest of the 20th century.
Today’s Americans often look back on the peace and prosperity created by this resolution as historically inevitable, like a giant sunlit plateau that has always been part of the landscape. A Hallmark version of history peddled by elites in order to hide the real truth of what led to America’s postwar prosperity—as to what really happened during the last Fourth Turning. The real story, as always, is messier. The transition from the Fourth Turning of the 1930s and 1940s to the golden age First Turning of the 1950s was more chaotic, less “greatest generation” and more “grim determination.”Pining for Prosperity: The Populist’s Postwar Paradise
Image: Donald Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap during his 2016 presidential campaign (CC BY-SA 2.0)
“Make America Great Again (MAGA)”—four words, one red hat, and an entire political theology distilled into something that sounds like a car commercial from 1957. But don’t be fooled by its patriotic jingle. Beneath the bunting and bombast lies a creaky ideological stew: part populist chest-thumping, part nationalist navel-gazing, a dash of nativist spice, and a heaping scoop of economic time travel. Add in a pinch of cultural conservatism—stirred, not shaken—and you’ve baked yourself a piping-hot slice of Trumpism.
Now let us not forget that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was not born in a Trumpian fever dream, but gently exhumed from the Reagan archives—specifically, 1980, when the Gipper used it to wrap his campaign in the aroma of yesterday’s pot roast. Trump simply poached it like a Twitter egg, seasoned it with grievance, and served it with fries.
But make no mistake, what MAGA truly longs for isn’t the 1980s, nor even the 1970s disco-fried breakdown—it’s the halcyon 1950s, that idealized postwar “First Turning,” as Neil Howe would label it. To the MAGA mind, greatness was achieved the moment Johnny came marching home from war, bought a tract house with a VA loan, and barbecued steaks in a backyard funded by 4% interest rates and a boss who gave you a pension and a gold watch.
At its glistening core, MAGA isn’t merely a slogan—it’s a resurrection spell, an incantation aimed squarely at summoning the ghost of 1950s America. They have settled upon the 1950s as their particular Eden—a decade they remember with a misty-eyed reverence. Yes, the decade of Elvis, Eisenhower, and earnest lawn mowing. An age where men were men, women vacuumed in pearls, and everybody watched the same three channels whether they liked it or not.
This golden memory bank, as cherished by MAGA devotees, shines with images of strong industry, uniform suburban bliss, and wholesome, flag-waving, God-fearing, authority-loving monoculture. It’s “Leave It to Beaver” on a continuous loop, with none of the racial segregation or lobotomized housewives that also happened to be part of the broadcast.
The faithful speak of this golden decade as if it were handed down from Mount Sinai, complete with tail fins and ranch houses. They remember a time when Americans “saluted the flag, revered the police, believed in God, trusted authority”—in other words, when the citizenry possessed that bovine contentment that comes from not asking too many inconvenient questions. How wonderfully Zen!
MAGA serves up a cultural soufflé of “before things got weird”—before the 1960s came along with their pesky civil rights, uppity feminists, LSD philosophers, and folks who insisted that perhaps America wasn’t perfect. MAGA is, at bottom, a revolt against modernity’s messiness. It’s the yearning for a “simpler time” that was, in fact, anything but simple—unless of course you were white, male, and sufficiently bland.
Perhaps the most delicious paradox is that these nostalgic souls, in their desperate attempt to climb back into the womb of the 1950s, have succeeded mainly in demonstrating how impossible it is to unscramble an egg—or, for that matter, to ungrow a consciousness that has already eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, civil rights and women’s liberation, rock and roll and the sexual revolution.
What delicious irony! Here we have a movement that rails against globalization while pining for an age that was built precisely upon America’s global dominance—when the rest of the world lay in convenient ruins, and we alone possessed the factories to supply their rebuilding. It’s rather like a poker player nostalgic for that one magnificent hand he held while everyone else was too drunk to play properly.
The deeper absurdity is this: they seek to restore an age of prosperity and social cohesion by embracing precisely the kind of divisive rhetoric and economic policies that would have horrified their button-down, consensus-seeking heroes of the Eisenhower era.
Yet there’s something deeply American about this cyclical yearning for a rebirth through regression. Neil Howe could call this Golden Age a new First Turning. But what exactly happened during the Fourth Turning of the 1940s that brought this about? Was it the New Deal? Our glorious World War II victory? No, far from it. It happened through the blood, sweat and tears of the working class—a detail that seems to evaporate from memory like morning dew when the reminiscing begins. It’s as if they remember the wedding cake but have forgotten the flour, eggs, and considerable mess required to bake it.
Some who idealize the 1950s may dismiss how prosperity was achieved as being immaterial. I argue otherwise. If we truly are, and I believe we are, in a new Fourth Turning, the winter of our discontent, we have immense challenges ahead. And just like the Fourth Turning of the 1930s and 1940s, we’re once again dancing on the precipice of massive institutional upheaval.
And now, in our current “Fourth Turning” (whatever mystical significance we’re meant to attach to that phrase), we find ourselves surrounded by prophets who claim to know exactly how to resurrect this suburban paradise. These modern-day Moses figures apparently missed the memo that the Promised Land cannot be reached by traveling backward through time, any more than enlightenment can be achieved by standing on one’s head and reciting the alphabet in reverse.
Nobody really knows what the hell is coming! Anyone who says otherwise is either lying, selling supplements, or running for office. No one can predict what will happen. The future, like a teenager with an attitude, refuses to behave. However, we can form ideas, inklings, even a vision if we take it upon ourselves to study not just the 1940s, that led to the prosperity of the 50s, but the blood, sweat, and sausage-making of the decades that came before— history at its most raw and real. The past offers lessons and it also occasionally offers directions. After all, you can’t truly make America great again if you’ve only ever read the cliff notes.
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Bobby Cyclone is an entrepreneur and nascent writer who grew up in the Washington DC area. His essays seek to cut through the ceaseless algorithmic sludge to examine the slobbering assault upon the planet, the perpetual, baffling imbecilities of the crowd, the dreary predictable farces of history, and the geopolitical puppet show from a handful of tech bros and senile politicians. All seasoned with a dash of spiritual musings.
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