“The old American republic is collapsing. And a new American republic, as yet unrecognizable, is under construction.” The opening line of historian Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023) jumps to the point. It also foreshadows the odd dualistic theme that seems to run not only through the book’s pages but through the very air of our national moment: intuitions of imminent doom and destruction, intimations of hope and renewal; one world dying, another struggling to be born. We sense that serious change, of one kind or another, is coming—and soon. Howe’s book tries to tell us why that is, and why we should find cause for optimism.
Howe does seem to have a knack for timing. A quarter-century ago, he, along with his late coauthor, the satirist William Strauss, published The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). An analysis of generation-driven historical cycles, it predicted that a period of political, economic, and social upheaval would rattle the United States midway through the first decade of the 2000s, culminating in an acute crisis or series of crises in or around the 2020s. Though initially ignored, the book began attracting attention after the “trigger” event that it forecasted arrived pretty much on schedule with the economic crisis of 2008. Amid many tumults since 2016, the book has gone on to achieve cult status and even served as the inspiration for a conservative-themed, Pulitzer-nominated 2019 play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Now, with its prophecy still seemingly on track, Howe has followed up with a book spelling out exactly where he thinks we’re headed.
Howe begins by describing an American malaise that most readers here will likely need little convincing is our present reality: a government that can no longer carry out even the most basic tasks of governance; rock-bottom public trust among the American people and in institutions more broadly; hyper-partisanship; high economic inequality; declining public health; moral and legal chaos; strife between the sexes; and a collapse of family formation and birth rates. All these and more, says Howe, were predictable circumstances. They are also, he declares, almost certain to turn soon for the better: winter is here, but spring is coming.
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Article URL : https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/creative-destruction?