On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: Is America caught in a loop of extreme crises? From the great recession to the Covid-19 pandemic to extreme political polarization, the past 15 years have been marked by one crisis after another. And, with ongoing inflation, talk of a new recession, and the current housing crisis, the hits keep coming.
Author Neil Howe believes that America is experiencing an extended moment of crisis. It is what he calls our dark winter season, or the Fourth Turning. Neil explains his theory of the seasons of history and maps out what each season tells us about how and when America’s current crisis will end in his book called “The Fourth Turning is Here,” out July 18, 2023.
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Dana:
Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, July 16th, 2023.
Is America caught in a loop of extreme crises? From the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme political polarization. The past 15 years have seen one crisis after another, and with ongoing inflation, talk of a new recession, and the current housing crisis, the hits keep coming. Author Neil Howe argues that America is experiencing an extended moment of crisis. It is what he calls our dark winter season, or the fourth turning. Neil explains his theory of the seasons of history and maps out what each season tells us about how and when America’s current crisis will end, in his book called The Fourth Turning Is Here, out July 18th. So, when will this dark winter of crisis finally end? You may not like his answer to that. Thank you for joining us, Neil.
Neil:
Dana, I’m so glad to be here.
Dana:
So, two key sets of parallels that set up part of the framework for your book, both focus on seasons, and I want to start with seasons of time. I had a Game of Thrones flashback when I read the words, “Winter is here.” How is our current season, the fourth turning, aka winter, how is that defined?.
Neil:
Yeah. Winter is here is an interesting phrase, and actually it appeared as an ad for our original book, The Fourth Turning, back in 1997. In the 1997 version, and in the current version of The Fourth Turning, we share the basic paradigm that history moves through seasons. Modern history does. And we’ve had now several centuries, actually maybe five or six centuries of this, in many modern nations around the world. And the seasons are punctuated by crises, that is to say winters, is a good way to time it. When you think about the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the Great Depression, and then on into where we are today.
Dana:
And these seasons, they last roughly 20 years, is that correct?
Neil:
Yeah, 20 or 25 years depending on where you are in history.
Dana:
So a current sign of the times is how disgruntled so many people seem to be, what you call the rise of free-floating anger in public venues. What behavior patterns do we typically see during crises, and how do they differ from what we see during awakenings?
Neil:
I think what’s happening now is that we see a lot of anger, and we see a lot of dysfunction, but we also see people gravitating into tribes, into communities, into families. At the platoon level, I think Americans feel pretty good. It’s at the national level where we feel completely leaderless, as though no-one’s really in charge, and there’s no cooperation whatsoever. In an awakening, which is very different, awakening often attacks a society at the lowest level. One thing that happened during the awakening of the late ’60s and ’70s was the breakup of the family. There was a time when the average family size had its biggest ever decline in American history. We build homes now for multi-generational families, and you’ve got this sense of connectedness, and you see too that political parties which were falling apart really, during the late ’60s and 1970s, today are becoming very monolithic and strong. We talk about red zone America and blue zone America. The problem is that we don’t see how we can remain one country.
Dana:
So we have at least another ten years to go with winter. Is it possible that the COVID-19 pandemic was the climax of the winter season that we’re currently in?
Neil:
No, I don’t think so, because nothing was resolved. In fact, if anything it’s worse. One telltale indicator though during the pandemic, to show that we are in the crisis season, was that those who were advocating more power to the community, and a greater adherence to or compliance with national or standard community rules, tended to be younger people. When it’s young people who are most opposed to following community rules, like back in the late ’60s and ’70s, we’re closer to the last crisis. When it’s young people most in favor of complying, we’re closer to the next crisis. COVID resolved nothing.
The Fourth Turning ends with a resolution, and we go through the stages of what a fourth turning is and the various stages of the crisis. I mean, it starts with a catalyst, it goes through various periods of regeneracy, and finally hits a consolidation when it congeals into a great crisis with two sides, and everyone realizes that one side is going to win, it’s going to decide the future of the country, and it climaxes. There’s a climax when people realize which side is going to win, and then it has a resolution. Treaties are signed, new borders are created, whatever has to be done, everything is resolved. You set the mood for the spring. So did COVID… Is that the climax? Clearly not. Here we are, as leaderless and as contentious and as unresolved as ever, as a country.
Dana:
So take us through a past season, say the 1930s, where you found other parallels to what is happening in the United States and the world today.
Neil:
Oh, gosh. The parallels are so clear. You think of the first decade of our current crisis, the 2010s, which included in it everything from the GFC to the rise of Trump and the new populism on the right in America, and the rise of extreme partisanship, the rise of voter participation rates, the rise of excitement over politics. Say what anyone wants about Trump, he certainly solved the problem of disengagement from politics that we complained about. We’ve seen the highest voter participation rates in 100 years in these last two or three elections. So, we are engaged again.
Well, think about what happened in the 1930s, and think of all the parallels. First of all, it started with a great global financial crisis. 1929 and 2008, I think you got it. It was a debt deflation crisis. I mean, it was basically a huge balance sheet recession. Same in both cases. Back in the 1930s, we complained about debt deflation, and secular stagnation. Those were two terms designed by two economists in the ’30s. And again, those were resurrected in the 2010s. So, the same sort of problems.
We saw a rise of extreme governmental activism in trying to solve problems, obviously with the New Deal, and all of the various expedients during COVID and the pandemic, we’ve had two pretty amazing unusual recessions, and a lot of completely unprecedented governmental expedients to try to solve these problems. We also see the rise of populism and the rise of new, more authoritarian modes of government. And by the way, not just here, but around the world. Remember what was happening in the 1930s, not just in America, but you had communism rising in the Soviet Union at that time, or rebuilding, going through terror. But you had fascism rising around the world. You had fascist dictatorships taking over democracy after democracy. You had Germany and Japan on the rise, and people thought that the future belonged to authoritarian governance, either communism or fascism.
So you see the same mood, and I think you see the regrowth of ideologies based upon tradition, homeland, race, ideology, totalistic ideologies that have to do with who I am as a group with others, very illiberal ideologies, growing around the world.
Dana:
So you wrote that war is not inevitable. Have you tracked any national or global anomalies where a major war was not the climax of the winter season?
Neil:
Yes, but not in America. So in America, and I will say this, when is required in a fourth turning is mobilization. We have to become totally mobilized as a national community. That’s always a track record of a fourth turning, and that’s how we have that transformation. You can’t go through that chrysalis and come out into a first turning, with satisfied community, without going through that rite of passage. Now, history shows that, as a rule, that tends to happen through total war. It is sobering to think that every total war in Anglo-American history, and I’m going back to the War of the Roses, I mean I’m going back to the 15th century, has always occurred in a fourth turning, and that every fourth turning, it’s had a total war.
So, there are exceptions. I just think they’re rare, and I think we need to be prepared to what we are probably going to have to undergo. One thing, though, that one can say is the nature of that. It will involve a conflict, or it typically does tend to climax in a conflict, but what kind of conflict? Will that be internal, external? That is actually unknowable
Dana:
By your estimation, spring is at least a decade away. So following whatever this impending major event turns out to be, based on historical parallels, how will society shift?
Neil:
We’re going to shift from privilege to equality. Inequality always goes down during fourth turnings. I mean, that’s the big rule, and it happened during the 20th century, by the way. Inequality fell hugely during World War II and the late ’40s, early ’50s, and it kept falling all the way until the late 1960s before it rose again. So fourth turnings are signs of growing equality. I mean, there are good things that come out of fourth… The sense of community, and that’s one of them. So, from privilege to equality.
Dana:
So finally, how will we know when spring has sprung? Will we feel it?
Neil:
Oh, that’s the most obvious of all, just like it’s the most obvious of seasonal changes in nature, it’s the most obvious in history. After V-J Day and VE Day, all the troops came home, and everyone first of all feared for a while that there’s going to be another huge depression. And miraculously, they all found work, they all had huge welcome receptions, and the American economy took off, the fertility rate took off. That was the beginning of the demographic baby boom at the time, and the Fortune magazine was talking about an economic boom, and suddenly this America felt in a better place.
Now, there were still huge problems around the world no-one knew what was going to happen to Europe, and pretty soon people were talking about the beginning of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain and all that. We had dangers, we had problems, but we suddenly felt by 1946 that we were in a huge new and improved era, and that we had totally gravitated to a new kind of community, which no-one recalled from the ’30s, the ’20s, the teens. This was a newer America that emerged. It was very striking, pretty sudden, and that’s why we end that period of crisis in 1946. That really was a transition. It will be like the sudden huge, balmy spring day. Wow. This is a new season.
Dana:
I think we should end on that high. Neil, thank you so much for joining us.
Neil:
Thank you, Dana. It was great. It was great to be on your show.
Dana:
Thanks to Mark Sovel, Alexis Gustin, and Cherie Saunders for their production assistance. Our senior producer is Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow with another episode of 5 Things.