The Art of Manliness - The Fourth Turning — How History's Crisis Period Could Unfold

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 While studying history back in the 1990s, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss noticed something.

00:00:16.860 There seemed to be a pattern to history that repeated itself again and again.

00:00:21.560 Howe and Strauss developed a theory that history moves in 80 to 100 year cycles

00:00:25.540 divided into four 20 to 25 year turnings. The High, Awakening, Unraveling and Crisis.

00:00:34.040 Neil Howe argues that we are currently living through a fourth turning.

00:00:37.140 And today on the show, we unpack what that means.

00:00:40.140 Neil is a historian, demographer and economist.

00:00:42.940 And his latest book is The Fourth Turning is Here.

00:00:45.540 The crisis of the fourth turning isn't a historical event.

00:00:49.200 It's a generation long era that sometimes seems to be getting better, 0.96

00:00:52.120 sometimes seems to be getting worse, and moves through several phases

00:00:55.780 before reaching a climax and resolution.

00:00:58.540 Neil explains what these phases look like, which ones we've already been through,

00:01:02.100 and which are still to come, and when he thinks our fourth turning will end

00:01:05.400 and the cycle of history will start over.

00:01:07.700 In the second part of our conversation, Neil talks about what cultural changes

00:01:11.220 he thinks will experience as the fourth turning progresses,

00:01:13.900 including how he thinks gender roles will shift.

00:01:16.160 We also discuss what happens if the crisis ends in disaster,

00:01:18.920 and the most important thing to do to successfully navigate a fourth turning.

00:01:23.380 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash fourth turning.

00:01:40.080 All right, Neil Howe, welcome back to the show.

00:01:43.300 Great to be here, Brett.

00:01:44.640 So back in the 90s, you and William Strauss developed this generational cyclical theory of history,

00:01:50.860 and you got a new book out that is sort of a summary and synthesis of all your previous work.

00:01:55.600 It's called The Fourth Turning is Here, and we had you on the show back in 2016 to talk about that work.

00:02:01.060 We also wrote an article back in 2012 that I think offers a really accessible overview of your theory.

00:02:07.560 But for those listeners who aren't familiar with your cyclical theory of history,

00:02:11.680 I'll try to kick things off with a thumbnail sketch of it.

00:02:15.180 So basically, you say that history repeats itself in a certain pattern.

00:02:18.920 There's this 80 to 100-year cycle that repeats itself.

00:02:22.600 You call it a saculum.

00:02:24.060 And that saculum is divided into four periods or turnings,

00:02:28.220 which can be compared to the seasons of the year.

00:02:30.940 And each turning is 20 to 25 years long.

00:02:34.080 And I think it's really easiest to help people understand this to look at the last turning in a cycle, right?

00:02:41.060 It's first, the fourth turning, which is sort of like the historical winter.

00:02:44.920 The fourth turning is a crisis period.

00:02:47.260 A country faces some big threat.

00:02:49.180 It's often a war.

00:02:50.460 Our last fourth turning started with the Great Depression and ended with World War II.

00:02:54.700 And then the cycle starts over again with the first turning, which is a high period like spring.

00:02:59.420 In the first turning, institutions are strong and individualism is weak.

00:03:03.420 It's kind of conformist.

00:03:05.060 But people are able to work together and get big things done.

00:03:08.580 And our last first turning was after World War II during the late 40s and into the early 60s.

00:03:15.100 The second turning is a time of spiritual awakening.

00:03:18.380 This is the summer season in history.

00:03:20.560 People start getting tired of the conformity of the first turning.

00:03:23.420 And there's more emphasis on individualism and the inner life.

00:03:27.200 And this was in the mid-1960s to the mid-80s.

00:03:30.520 And then there's the third turning, which is like fall.

00:03:33.640 This is a period of unraveling when the individualism of the second turning kind of catches up with society.

00:03:39.840 And trust in institutions bottoms out.

00:03:42.560 And societal systems become dysfunctional.

00:03:45.640 People are divided and they can't get things done.

00:03:48.100 Things just feel really worn out.

00:03:49.620 And this was from the mid-80s to the mid-00s.

00:03:53.300 And then the crisis happens again.

00:03:55.080 And we're back to the fourth turning.

00:03:56.860 So that's it.

00:03:57.860 And then there's also four generational archetypes that are part of this 80-year cycle that are really interesting.

00:04:03.040 And they repeat themselves too.

00:04:04.840 But we're going to concentrate on the turnings today.

00:04:07.700 Particularly the turn you say we are in now, which is the fourth turning.

00:04:11.300 So let's talk about this current fourth turning.

00:04:13.820 Because a lot of people look around at the news.

00:04:16.400 They're looking at their social media feeds.

00:04:18.880 And it just seems like everything is falling apart.

00:04:21.320 And nothing works.

00:04:22.880 And that we're on the verge of just something bad is going to happen.

00:04:28.520 So let's dig into this fourth turning, what you talk about in the book, in this current crisis that we're in.

00:04:33.480 One of the things about fourth turnings is that they have their own chronology as well.

00:04:38.700 There's these phases that we go through that you've noticed throughout history.

00:04:42.800 So what are the different phases of a fourth turning?

00:04:45.240 And maybe it might be helpful to use the previous fourth turning, right?

00:04:49.060 The World War II Great Depression crisis as a way to walk people through these phases.

00:04:55.040 Yeah, I point out a number of these phases.

00:04:57.720 And these always occur in a certain order, although they can occur at any time during the crisis era.

00:05:03.600 And remember, a crisis is not an event.

00:05:07.300 It's an era, right?

00:05:08.440 It's a whole generation-long period of time.

00:05:11.520 And so there can be many crises, I guess, so to speak.

00:05:15.260 Many, many great dire events within a fourth turning era.

00:05:19.700 So typically, the first thing you notice is that sometime during the unraveling, there's what we usually call a precursor event.

00:05:28.980 Not always, but usually.

00:05:30.520 And this is an event which sort of foreshadows the fourth turning to come.

00:05:34.080 It's sort of its indicator of, you know, a sudden mood of public mobilization and urgency about some great danger, right?

00:05:41.800 And the country rallies briefly, but only briefly.

00:05:45.080 And then it kind of goes back into its third turning mood of sort of, you know, lassitude, individualism, sort of ennui and kind of waiting.

00:05:52.260 And for the Great Depression, World War II, this was World War I, which kind of appeared out of nowhere, right?

00:05:59.480 And typically, these periods do, these events, these precursors.

00:06:04.000 You know, you kind of have in the middle of an unraveling era, which was certainly that era, the very early 20th century was a period of, you know, a lot of individualism, a lot of aimlessness.

00:06:15.080 And suddenly, at World War I, kind of come out of nowhere, you know, everyone just thought, well, we had attained this permanent period of peace, kind of came out of nowhere.

00:06:23.480 And I think the similar parallel recently was 9-11, you know, which kind of, again, came out of nowhere, I think, shocked everyone.

00:06:31.200 Remember the big book that was so influential over that 1990s decade, which was Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History.

00:06:39.660 Government was sort of fading away, markets were taking over, globalization was everywhere, you know, where did this come from, right?

00:06:49.020 So, and these happen periodically.

00:06:51.700 We've got to talk about earlier ones in history.

00:06:53.920 And then, eventually, the generations kind of mature, you get into the correct alignment, and we sort of have a catalyst where we actually enter the fourth turning.

00:07:05.640 And for the Great Depression, World War II, that was Black Thursday, 1929.

00:07:11.060 That was a great crash.

00:07:12.740 And more recently, that was August to September 2007, and then even more, the fall of 2008, where we really entered.

00:07:22.480 In fact, the stock market was plunging at the time of the, I don't know if you recall this, but the time of the Obama-McCain debates, you know, during that presidential election, if you recall.

00:07:33.300 And major banking houses were beginning to go under and so forth.

00:07:37.400 And suddenly, we had to declare a national emergency and run these enormous deficits and, you know, guarantee, bail out, you know, hundreds of, hundreds of businesses.

00:07:47.780 So, that was that event.

00:07:49.320 That was the catalyst event.

00:07:51.240 And every fourth turning has a catalyst.

00:07:53.500 For, you know, the American Revolution, it was the Tea Party, Boston Tea Party.

00:07:57.300 And in the American Civil War, it was the election of Lincoln.

00:08:02.900 And, you know, going further back, the whole period of the Glorious Revolution and the wars in Virginia and New England, it was probably the massive violence that started Bacon's Rebellion and King Philip's War.

00:08:14.780 This was in 1675 and really initiated that quarter century of rebellion and revolution during the American colonial period.

00:08:24.660 And, again, you can go back.

00:08:26.820 Now, typically, as you move forward, it sort of awakens everyone, right, that they were in a new mood.

00:08:32.160 And typically, as you can go forward, you encounter these periods that we call regeneracies, when the public mood begins to regenerate after a long period of sort of, well, this is worse than anything, right?

00:08:44.240 I mean, we're now in this crisis.

00:08:46.580 We don't know what to do.

00:08:48.120 We're completely unprepared for this.

00:08:50.220 And then, finally, you begin to regenerate a sense of new public direction, a new sense of public mobilization.

00:08:57.240 And we begin to rally around certain kinds of communities, you know, around some new agenda.

00:09:04.300 And everyone becomes more interested in the public, in the nation, and where things are going.

00:09:09.720 And certainly in the Great Depression, that happened with the election of FDR.

00:09:15.040 You know, some years into the Great Depression, we finally had FDR and the New Deal, first New Deal, second New Deal, who was reelected in a landslide in 1936.

00:09:25.800 And I think you'd have to say that in our current fourth turning, the Regeneracy was really the election of 2016 with Trump versus Hillary Clinton.

00:09:39.440 And what that did was it suddenly changed America's involvement in politics.

00:09:44.260 One of the greatest things we worried about, you know, throughout the 80s and 90s and going into the to the OOs and so on was the fact that, no, Americans didn't care about politics anymore.

00:09:56.160 Well, in in the election of 2016, suddenly American participation in voting hugely shot up.

00:10:03.740 And again, in 2018 and 2020, we've seen the highest voter participation rates in a century in these elections.

00:10:11.580 And suddenly America becomes completely galvanized around these big political tribes we see today.

00:10:18.140 Right. Red zone and blue zone.

00:10:20.380 And in recent years, we see worries about civil war.

00:10:24.320 We see worries about civil crack up.

00:10:26.500 And I think this is scary to people.

00:10:29.440 You know, we may feel pretty good about our own lives in a sense and how things are working in our families and so on.

00:10:36.020 But we wonder if there's just some tremendous vacuum, complete lack of leadership at the national level, sometimes whether we're leaderless or sometimes whether we're breaking up into two separate national communities.

00:10:50.080 And this is a very common feeling.

00:10:52.380 I think a lot of people felt that way during the 1930s.

00:10:55.880 Certainly people literally felt that way during the Civil War and people felt that way during the 1770s and 80s.

00:11:02.720 And we go on from there.

00:11:04.720 Basically, what that leads to is a period of creative destruction of the public sector, often in the midst of organized conflict.

00:11:12.020 And that takes us into the last phases of the fourth turning, which is the consolidation and possibly further regeneracies, but ultimately into a consolidation, a climax, and a resolution.

00:11:26.240 And very often that could be a large, when I talk about organized conflict, of course,

00:11:30.880 we're often talking about war and typically in fourth turnings, these have been, you know, negotiated and carried out during periods of total war.

00:11:40.240 Every fourth turning in Anglo-American history going back six, seven centuries has featured at least one episode of total war and every total war has occurred in a fourth turning.

00:11:51.600 Okay. So a lot to recap there.

00:11:53.040 There's a lot to unpack there.

00:11:54.200 Okay.

00:11:54.420 So the four phases, it's, there's a precursor that happens in the third turning, the unraveling.

00:11:59.920 It's an emergency that temporarily galvanizes a society.

00:12:03.420 So if you look at the depression era crisis, that was World War I.

00:12:08.480 And then today you're saying the 9-11 attack was one that temporarily galvanized us.

00:12:13.660 I think everyone remembers after what happened 9-11 and we got, everyone was all for, you know, going back and trying to get back at, at the Taliban.

00:12:20.160 Right. I think if people remember that period, if you were alive.

00:12:22.480 Yeah. And for a brief period of time, everyone felt patriotic.

00:12:25.840 Right. Yeah.

00:12:26.720 Tremendous galvanization.

00:12:28.340 World War I was, was very much the same. 0.95

00:12:31.920 And by the way, the memory of both instantly became very bad afterwards.

00:12:36.040 Yeah.

00:12:36.560 I think it was Robert Kagan who once said that, you know, we all recall after, uh, after the Afghanistan and Iraq war, the whole mantra, you know, Bush lied, people died.

00:12:46.300 Right. But, but I think it was, it was Kagan who said that after World War I, the mantra was Wilson lied, people died.

00:12:53.560 You know, I mean, it was sort of the same thing.

00:12:57.460 Suddenly we wanted to turn our back.

00:12:59.760 And in response to both of them, we became a more isolationist nation and wanted to turn ourselves away from these global obligations that seem to have gone awry.

00:13:09.600 Okay. Then after the precursor, there's a catalyst, which kickstarts the actual crisis period or fourth turning for the depression, World War II era.

00:13:17.660 That was Black Thursday, the stock market crash.

00:13:20.380 And for us, that was the, you're saying about 2008 is when the, the fourth turning started for us.

00:13:25.300 Yeah, the fall of, the fall of 2008 was when it really went crazy.

00:13:29.440 Right. With the, uh, the great financial crash that we had then.

00:13:32.400 And then after the catalyst, people are feeling, everything's kind of run amok.

00:13:36.680 So people start trying to reunify community and regenerize civic life with a regeneracy.

00:13:42.560 And this regeneracy, you hear regeneracy and you thought that sounds positive.

00:13:46.540 It sounds like regeneracy can be, it's going to be a lot of conflicts.

00:13:49.620 What's happening is like our culture is trying to figure out how we're going to solve this crisis era that we're in.

00:13:55.600 So in the depression, as you said, the regeneracy there was FDR being elected and him implementing all the, the new deal legislation.

00:14:03.620 But I think people forget that was very controversial.

00:14:07.500 There was a lot of debate in our country that period.

00:14:10.480 And in fact, it was the equivalent of red zone, blue zone today.

00:14:14.080 Remember that the popular front and the new deal supporters, you know, thought about, uh, the 1930s as, as the fascist decade, you know, so they were already fighting the good fight.

00:14:24.980 Against the rise of fascism around the world, you know, whether it was a Spanish civil war or, uh, you know, the Japanese invading, uh, China and the rise of Hitler and so on.

00:14:35.080 But to conservatives, it was the red decade, right?

00:14:39.200 So you have these two completely different interpretations and many Americans not even wanting to talk to each other during that period, a very divisive period in our history.

00:14:49.800 And it, it's kind of astounding when you think about that, that given this schism in the way people in sort of the high income world, the West was interpreting the events of the thirties, that ultimately the nation was able to galvanize around a single objective, which was to defeat fascism.

00:15:08.960 And this was a point I make throughout the book that the conflict that characterizes the climax could be mainly internal or it could be mainly external, right?

00:15:22.480 It could be, you know, the nation against external enemies and it can be anywhere along the spectrum of that, but the nature of that cannot be determined in advance.

00:15:33.060 You would have no way of knowing in the mid thirties or even the late thirties that America wouldn't go to civil war before it would ever galvanize together to defend the world against authoritarian aggressors.

00:15:47.500 And I think that that's a repeated theme that I come back to.

00:15:51.760 Some things are predictable.

00:15:53.100 Some things aren't.

00:15:54.340 What is predictable is the searching for a new definition of community.

00:15:59.700 What's unpredictable is what form that's going to take.

00:16:02.480 Gotcha.

00:16:03.480 Okay.

00:16:03.820 So you say our current regeneracy was the 2016, 2018, 2020 elections where people in America are suddenly interested in public life again after.

00:16:14.020 Yeah.

00:16:14.220 And that was the first regeneracy.

00:16:16.160 Okay.

00:16:16.420 There could be another one.

00:16:17.220 It really started in 2016.

00:16:18.740 The Republican party went populist.

00:16:20.860 The democratic party in many ways went the other way and Trump was elected and the Democrats, you know, kind of an extraordinary move declared that they were in resistance.

00:16:31.120 You remember, there's a resistance kind of, again, taking from the 1930s, right?

00:16:35.800 There were going to be the resistance party, like an enemy army was occupying Washington.

00:16:40.820 So, you know, Trump and all the Republicans were suddenly these occupying invaders.

00:16:46.440 And then, of course, you had, you know, multiple impeachment attempts and trials and just unprecedented things in American history.

00:16:55.700 And then, finally, Trump losing the election and trying, you know, a putsch to retake the Capitol Hill.

00:17:02.680 Well, extraordinary events in the midst of a global pandemic, which, of course, this nation managed very badly.

00:17:10.960 And I say this as a demographer.

00:17:13.220 I mean, I know the figures.

00:17:15.320 We did not manage it very well, right, in terms of deaths.

00:17:18.700 And so this combination of galvanizing people to think that politics is extremely important, together with this continued demoralization of the fact that nothing works, right?

00:17:28.380 And the nation remains leaderless.

00:17:31.240 Now, there could be another regeneracy. 0.67

00:17:33.720 And, in fact, many of our foreturnings have more than one regeneracy.

00:17:38.140 The first regeneracy in the 1930s was, obviously, the enthusiasm around FDR and, obviously, the kind of, you know, galvanizing of the Republicans to oppose him.

00:17:49.360 But then what happened in the late 1930s was the enthusiasm around FDR sort of declined, particularly after 1936.

00:17:57.100 We went into another big recession, you know, the recession of 37, 38, horrible recession.

00:18:03.700 And it made most people convinced that by 1939, 1940, we were still in the Great Depression.

00:18:09.440 The New Deal hadn't really worked.

00:18:10.620 And what happened at that time was the constituency shifted, and mainly the New Deal shifted away from some of its reforms, which would have imposed themselves on the South.

00:18:23.120 And the South, in turn, came on board, not on FDR's domestic agenda, but came on board FDR's foreign policy agenda, which tended to be in favor of an active foreign policy abroad to prevent the rise of fascism.

00:18:37.520 And it was really around that refashioned constituency, defining the two sides, that we finally went to war and were ready to go to war, really about a year before Pearl Harbor.

00:18:50.680 The nation began arming again at a frantic rate, really in the spring or even at the very beginning of 1941.

00:18:58.660 We were already, you know, running huge deficits on the way, you know, galvanizing the economy to sort of rearm, and we had already reintroduced the draft and so on.

00:19:10.880 And then, of course, came Pearl Harbor, and that just simply galvanized.

00:19:15.520 That's when we went into what I call the consolidation, the time when we are aware that the fate of the country is at stake.

00:19:23.320 And, you know, extraordinary public mobilization is required.

00:19:29.020 And every fourth turning enters that phase.

00:19:32.680 Okay, so in a fourth turning, you first have a catalyst.

00:19:36.040 And in this fourth turning, you're saying that was the 2008 financial crisis.

00:19:40.580 Then you have a regeneracy.

00:19:42.480 And this is where the public gets energized to try to figure out how to solve the country's problems.

00:19:48.240 And that was the huge surge in political interest that we've experienced since the 2016 election.

00:19:55.320 Then there's a consolidation.

00:19:58.020 And that's when people sense that there's a real threat facing it.

00:20:02.100 There needs to be a public mobilization towards solidarity to overcome it.

00:20:07.620 And then that leads into the climax.

00:20:10.680 And, you know, I think a lot of people thought the consolidation was going to happen during the pandemic, right?

00:20:16.180 At first, it seemed people like we're going to come together, but then it became very politicized.

00:20:20.700 And then it just divided people even more.

00:20:23.360 And you say that's not surprising because you never know how these things are going to play out.

00:20:28.240 And when the time is ripe, you know, for one phase of the fourth turning to segue to the next.

00:20:34.540 So, you know, we're due an event that brings the consolidation.

00:20:38.420 And I think if people think about things that could possibly consolidate this crisis, there's, you know, stuff going on in Ukraine.

00:20:47.040 There's things going on in the Pacific with China.

00:20:49.860 So wars have typically been parts of the fourth turning.

00:20:55.080 Any other things that could be like the consolidation of this crisis besides, you know, these great power wars that we've had in previous turnings?

00:21:03.620 Well, again, it's external and internal.

00:21:06.040 So the other one is the internal threat, right?

00:21:08.720 What if there were kind of a catastrophic impeachment or the absolute refusal of the two parties to cooperate any longer in Congress?

00:21:16.700 Or what if certain states simply decided to refuse to go along with something that was legislated at the national level?

00:21:26.320 Well, what would be the reaction?

00:21:28.420 And it's interesting.

00:21:29.440 I do a lot of work for the military.

00:21:31.200 I've advised them on, you know, recruiting millennials and, you know, looking at millennials, both for the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps.

00:21:39.740 And I've had officers, you know, very high-level people ask me, you know, when things have been breaking out in some of the West Coast states, you know, what do we do if California suddenly decides to not follow federal authority?

00:21:54.920 We've got huge bases, you know, in Coronado and various other places.

00:21:59.880 And as I hear those complaints more than once, you know, it takes me right back to Fort Sumter.

00:22:07.160 But these issues recur.

00:22:09.580 And initially, you don't know how it's going to end.

00:22:13.940 So it could be a great war with another power.

00:22:16.240 It could be a civil breakup or, you know, a civil crisis.

00:22:19.860 You all say it could be just another financial crash, like something just even bigger happens than the Great Recession.

00:22:24.760 Yes. And, you know, I that's kind of what I do in my day job.

00:22:30.300 So we talk a lot about that.

00:22:32.280 And looking forward right now, we're trying to do this great disinflation, you know, without going through another recession.

00:22:38.700 And I think, you know, Americans have been relieved to the extent that which we've been able to get this far.

00:22:45.820 But the economy is still checking ahead.

00:22:48.440 But then again, you know, as an economist, when I look at all the long-term indicators of, you know, going into another recession, they're all flashing red.

00:22:56.600 You know what I mean?

00:22:57.200 Everything from, you know, the money supply to the yield curve to national income sort of exceeding our full employment equilibrium.

00:23:05.560 And all of these long-term indicators are indicating we're going back in recession land again.

00:23:11.260 And each one of these ratchets up the tension, right?

00:23:15.920 I mean, I think about a generation of children, you know, born since the early 00s.

00:23:21.120 You just can't even remember a time when America was not either in a recession, going into recession, or worried about going back into recession, right?

00:23:29.780 So this is a time of sort of hunkered down, constricted horizons of hope, you know, in terms of living standards, particularly catastrophic for younger generations today.

00:23:43.480 And I will say that younger generations are the most negative about democracy, which they see not just in America, but around the world.

00:23:51.340 Younger generations see democracy as a way of ensuring stasis, talking about everything, but it was inventing some procedure for making sure that change never happens.

00:24:00.780 Okay, so there's the consolidation, and then after the consolidation is the climax.

00:24:03.880 What was the climax in World War II depression crisis?

00:24:08.780 The climax was really the simultaneous invasion of Europe on D-Day in June of 1944,

00:24:17.420 and the invasion of the Mariana Island chain and the Battle of the Japanese Sea at the same time in June of 1944.

00:24:26.660 It was amazing.

00:24:28.000 We were actually organizing simultaneous invasions in two different oceans, and both of them ended up as victories.

00:24:34.420 About six weeks later, we were breaking out in northern France, and we had completely defeated the Battle of the Japanese Sea.

00:24:41.340 We had an absolutely decisive defeat over the Japanese Navy. 0.60

00:24:44.680 And that was really the climax.

00:24:48.260 That's when we knew that the end of the war was a matter of time, and that's the climax. 0.91

00:24:55.000 The climax is when you can start really to see the end.

00:24:58.060 And you've said the climax for this fourth turning is on schedule for around 2030.

00:25:03.540 Is that right?

00:25:04.380 Yeah, something like that.

00:25:05.400 It's going to occur sometime probably at around the end of the decade.

00:25:08.820 And again, this is an estimate.

00:25:10.940 I mean, my God, this is not – I'm predicting tides here.

00:25:16.300 We're not predicting when the individual waves are going to break, right?

00:25:19.880 So, you know, we're kind of doing bands of dates.

00:25:23.280 But I do think if there was any single moment, which was most likely, it would be sometime right around the very end of the decade.

00:25:32.040 And after the climax comes the resolution, and this is where you have – you know, you separate the winners from the losers, treaties are drawn up, national boundaries are redrawn, political parties are redefined, and the saculum comes to an end.

00:25:49.620 And you think our fourth turning that we're in right now will end in the early to mid-2030s.

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00:26:04.080 So you also talk about, with these fourth turnings, like the mood and how society starts organizing itself starts changing.

00:26:12.300 Are you seeing that right now in the current crisis?

00:26:15.960 Well, I think we see the great desire to move back to a community, just a greater sense of community, which is a desire which is embodied really in – I'd say even less the political agenda, but more even just the lifestyle.

00:26:32.040 Well, of the millennial generation, being that if you ask people, what should government reinforce the principle of individualism or should reinforce the principle of community in American life today?

00:26:44.580 People under 40 today overwhelmingly say community.

00:26:49.040 And people over 40 tend to say, well, individualism, right?

00:26:53.880 That we've never seen that degree of sort of inversion and difference.

00:26:59.420 And again, to come back to sort of archetypal difference, that's sort of the opposite of what you would have seen back in the 1970s, where it probably would have been inverted – had we asked that question – would have been inverted the opposite direction.

00:27:12.880 And so that movement to a community, which by the end of the fourth turning will be a sort of culminating event, is accompanied by other changes.

00:27:22.900 One is a movement to a greater equality.

00:27:25.280 That happens in every fourth turning and subsequent first turning.

00:27:29.520 Income and wealth become more equal.

00:27:31.320 Another is toward the movement from defiance toward authority, institutions which govern life with greater authority than before the crisis.

00:27:43.860 I think another we talk about is the movement toward deferring long-term decisions, toward instituting powerful long-term institutions, which actually invest in the future rather than borrow from the future.

00:27:59.540 So a movement toward deferring long-term decisions to making long-term decisions and actually moving resources from the present toward the future.

00:28:10.560 And one of the great ironies about fourth turnings in American history is that even at the time when the country feels endangered and in urgent peril of its existence is exactly the time when we construct these amazing long-term institutions.

00:28:28.300 I mean, it was when the country felt like it was baking to pieces in the 1780s that we wrote this very powerful American constitution, right, which we've sort of venerated ever since as this, you know, building blocks of sort of the American form of government.

00:28:43.860 It was during the civil war when we instituted, you know, for the first time, a national income tax, a national monetary system.

00:28:53.480 We legislated the Intercontinental Railway, you know, state colleges and a state educational system, nationalized weights and measures.

00:29:02.140 I mean, we just did all this stuff, right, at a time when even Washington was under fear of attack.

00:29:07.600 And think of all the things we did during the New Deal, long-term decisions, the Social Security Act of 1935, which most of the legislation's planning was done in 1934, which is the cornerstone of the modern social welfare system in America today.

00:29:23.480 Not just pension programs, but also, you know, all of the state federal programs like, you know, TANF and SSI and all those programs that are sort of the bedrock of sort of social insurance in America today, unemployment insurance and all the rest.

00:29:41.040 We legislated them, Brad, at a time when GDP was in free fall.

00:29:48.440 I mean, unemployment was near 20%.

00:29:50.740 We had no idea how long this country was going to stay around.

00:29:55.220 Countries in Europe were falling to fascism.

00:29:58.400 I mean, this was the darkest period you can imagine.

00:30:01.360 No one knew what was going to happen for the next couple of years back then, right?

00:30:05.100 When FDR took over in the spring of 1933, the banks had closed in about half the states.

00:30:13.400 Even the markets had closed down for about two weeks before his inauguration.

00:30:17.300 This was a nation in total panic, and much of the world was in panic.

00:30:20.780 And yet, that was the time when we were planning these long-term changes.

00:30:24.720 We were doing these massive new regulatory edifice, which remained in place for the next seven or eight decades.

00:30:32.020 And I guess my point is, this is kind of paradoxical, isn't it?

00:30:37.220 You'd think that we would design these long-term institutions on sunny days when we all feel great.

00:30:43.980 We can have plenty of time to think about it.

00:30:47.020 That's not how history works.

00:30:48.660 And it's fascinating to me that usually when times are great, we don't do anything for the future.

00:30:54.640 When times are down, at times of crisis, is when we think about the future.

00:30:58.400 And finally, I talk about a transformation of our culture, from a culture of irony to a culture of convention.

00:31:06.600 And I think there is a sense of exhaustion in the culture today.

00:31:11.680 And I do think there's a sense of people looking for something new.

00:31:14.800 But it's out of the, again, out of the stress and urgency of crisis, that culture moves back to a certain kind of simplicity, almost necessarily toward that, and simply clarifies basic fundamentals.

00:31:33.740 People become more earnest.

00:31:35.000 That's happened in every crisis.

00:31:37.080 Yeah.

00:31:37.940 You also talk about how just our culture will change because of how the generations are lining up in this crisis cycle.

00:31:45.060 And one thing you've noticed throughout all your books is that in a crisis period, gender roles become more distinct and separate, particularly in a fourth turning.

00:31:56.320 But I was curious, today you're seeing a lot of this gender fluidity in our culture today. 1.00

00:32:01.280 What do you think is going on there?

00:32:02.160 How do you square the gender fluidity that we're seeing with this idea that you've seen in other fourth turnings where gender roles become more distinct and separate?

00:32:11.340 I think we're seeing gender fluidity, but we're also seeing a certain kind of gender role exhaustion, right?

00:32:17.080 In that, you know, when gender can mean anything, then people began to insist, well, it must mean something, right?

00:32:24.040 I don't see a lot of, a tremendous amount of passion about the limitations of gender roles as there was, you know, 40 years ago.

00:32:35.280 And in fact, I see a lot of young people just wondering how they could make their lives work more simply again through roles that just make everyone's life easier, right?

00:32:48.560 I see a lot of that, not really having to do with my wanting to express myself more fully because I want sort of a different kind of gender role that's suited for me personally, but rather, how can we make basic roles work so that we can all just get stuff done again, right?

00:33:07.120 And just live, live more peacefully.

00:33:09.860 I think there's a tremendous sense of exhaustion when it comes to having to think about gender roles all the time.

00:33:17.060 So I think the last time we had you on, we talked about the male-female dynamic, your hunch was that you were noticing with women, millennial women in particular, was that they were looking for more of a traditional kind of guy, I think as you were saying.

00:33:30.980 They were looking for a guy who was stepped up to the plate, who was, you know, wanted to do well with his life.

00:33:37.600 And you thought that was sort of an indicator that we're transitioning to this more, you know, fourth turning type gender relation.

00:33:46.640 Does that, does that sound right?

00:33:48.840 I think that's right.

00:33:50.500 And I think that, you know, what women want usually is followed with a lag by what men become. 0.59

00:33:58.720 I really do believe that.

00:34:00.480 And it's interesting, if you look at the National Values Survey, where they actually ask questions about, you know, what do you think is wrong with people?

00:34:08.020 And one of the questions they used to ask is, you know, I wish men were more likely to be less workaholic and talk more about their feelings, you know, loosen up and sort of mellow out, right?

00:34:20.520 You found a very positive response in questions taken when boomers were young adults and moving into midlife, you know, back in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, right?

00:34:31.180 And it's really changed.

00:34:33.020 Those questions are now getting much more negative responses, particularly by women who don't particularly want that, right?

00:34:40.300 What they want is, because you can imagine with the silent generation, with boomers, you had all these, you know, workaholics and so on. 0.90

00:34:48.540 And everyone said, why don't you lighten up?

00:34:50.380 You don't need to work so hard, you know, just to just be a real person, right?

00:34:54.060 But I think now with millennials, it's more, and you knew this, you know this from so many surveys, women want guys who will be there for them, who will provide them with security, who are in control of their lives, and who actually want to do something with their lives and in the community and actually be something so they'll provide them with some security.

00:35:16.880 And that is one of the reasons why marriage rates are down and fertility is down so much.

00:35:23.660 And a lot of it is because it's true.

00:35:26.020 Some of it is because married couples today, young married couples don't feel they can afford to do as much.

00:35:32.060 But a lot of it is that women just don't find guys that they can depend upon.

00:35:36.400 Single biggest complaint.

00:35:38.320 And it's the bigger complaint as you go down this socioeconomic scale, right?

00:35:42.700 And so for the first time now, this actually kind of switched over about 10 or 15 years ago.

00:35:49.140 But for a long time, back in the late 20th century, it was, you know, non-college Americans were getting married before college-educated Americans and getting married more frequently.

00:36:01.480 And now it's completely moved the other direction.

00:36:03.860 It's people with degrees and with income now are getting married and other people aren't.

00:36:08.400 And I think that is where women aren't finding men that they can count on. 0.99

00:36:14.360 They would like a family.

00:36:15.860 They would like to have kids.

00:36:17.280 They would like to participate in, I guess, what you could call kind of a traditional gender role future for themselves. 0.97

00:36:24.880 They just don't see it happening.

00:36:27.260 And so they have to do other things.

00:36:29.460 They have to get college degrees.

00:36:30.820 They've got to make other arrangements for stability in their own lives.

00:36:35.240 I don't know, Brett.

00:36:35.940 How do you see it?

00:36:36.760 I don't know.

00:36:39.160 It's true that fewer men are going to college and they're dropping out of the workforce more.

00:36:44.860 But I also think if you talk to men, some men would say, well, I just can't find women who want to have a family.

00:36:53.140 Or they'll say like, well, I just can't find any good women who are, you know, worth sort of shaping up for. 0.96

00:36:58.880 So maybe, you know, men and women, you know, they want similar things, but they're waiting for the other sex to move towards it first. 0.95

00:37:07.420 So it's like this catch-22 or a stalemate.

00:37:12.380 Could the crisis like shake that up?

00:37:14.960 So right now, you know, you make the case that because of the affluence that we've experienced for the past, you know, since the post-war, World War II period, 70 years, you're able to have men who just like opted out and not do anything.

00:37:26.440 Could the crisis kind of be like, well, no, you can't do this anymore because this lifestyle.

00:37:31.800 It does.

00:37:32.160 And it also provides huge opportunity for guys to suddenly, you know, serve and, you know, get public respect, you know, actually serving the country because the country actually needs them.

00:37:43.020 I think one thing that we find today with our definitions of citizenship is that we tend to think of it as it comes with all these rights that we have, but what are the real obligations, right?

00:37:54.760 And of course, there's a time of crisis when people discover the obligations, but these things are often energizing to young men.

00:38:02.740 I mean, if there's any, if anything we've discovered during a crisis, it's when we're reshaping public institutions in a way that designing them for the future and designing it for the future automatically means more for young people, right?

00:38:15.660 Because we're investing in their future.

00:38:17.360 We're reshaping institutions for them and young people get to get in on the ground floor of that.

00:38:23.720 And inevitably, when you're talking about extraordinary efforts, you know, to redesign big public institutions, you're often talking about mobilizing young men to do something.

00:38:36.600 And that does become a slingshot for them, you know, over the rest of their lives.

00:38:41.120 It certainly was for the GI generation, particularly the last wave GIs that were born in the 1910s and the early 1920s.

00:38:48.840 And I do think that late wave millennials, you know, people that are today in their 20s, early 30s, it will serve the same purpose.

00:38:57.800 Any other things you're seeing in our current fourth turning crisis and sort of the cultures changing and kind of lining up with what you would expect?

00:39:05.040 Well, there was a recent survey and it was done by the Southern Poverty Legal Center, you may know, which often does surveys on various kinds of, you know, violent prone groups.

00:39:15.480 Certainly a progressive organization, if there ever was one.

00:39:18.700 They did a very large survey and they found, interestingly, that when it comes to the issue of what feminism has done to the country.

00:39:27.120 And I pointed it out because it seems so counterintuitive to me.

00:39:31.340 It pointed out that younger people, people under age 40, were significantly more likely.

00:39:37.120 And this is true both among Democrats and Republicans, men and in women, were much more likely than older people to say feminism has done more harm than good. 0.68

00:39:46.640 Now, that's interesting to me.

00:39:48.160 Talk about a difference, again, in inversion from what you would have seen, you know, 40, 50 years ago, right?

00:39:55.800 Where obviously young people would have said feminism is really important and older people would have opposed it. 1.00

00:40:03.080 And that's that sense of exhaustion.

00:40:05.720 And so, Brad, if you're talking about what are we seeing today that is a precursor to this, to what I think will be more of a reality as we move into the rest of this fourth turning, I would point to those signs.

00:40:18.200 Gotcha.

00:40:18.640 So this is the first fourth turning where people are aware of the idea that a fourth turning exists.

00:40:24.260 So can being aware of the fourth turning change the way the fourth turning plays out?

00:40:28.860 I mean, could people theoretically start trying to pull levers to manipulate the crisis?

00:40:33.080 Well, I don't know.

00:40:35.460 It'd take a lot of hubris for me to be able to see that that would actually change things.

00:40:39.640 I do think that at some very basic level, people are aware, right?

00:40:46.700 You know, I'm hardly the only person who has drawn attention to the parallels today, who we see today to the parallels of what we saw during the 1930s.

00:40:55.600 I mean, many others have done that, too.

00:40:57.980 And certainly, these simply arise naturally.

00:41:01.320 When the North and the South finally parted ways in 1861 and the war got underway, both the Southern Confederacy and then the Union both likened their struggle to America's, you know, they both called it America's second revolution, America's second declaration of independence.

00:41:20.720 Since we were going through it again, they were aware of the parallel, that the battles that they were going to fight were exactly on par with the original fight to part with Britain and actually define the nation.

00:41:32.460 And the same thing occurred again in the 1930s.

00:41:36.120 People came back to that parallel.

00:41:37.880 Why are we fighting the war?

00:41:40.060 Was it a war to rid the world of slavery?

00:41:44.160 That's how FDR announced it in his inaugural address.

00:41:48.060 And after his reelection in 1944, he said that we're engaged once again in a world to rid the world of slavery, just like we did in the Civil War.

00:41:57.340 I guess what I'm saying is these things come back naturally.

00:42:00.220 In these fourth turning events, the parallels, once you move toward the crisis, arise naturally.

00:42:08.140 And as we move toward the climax of this crisis, the parallels to World War II and the Great Depression, to the Civil War, to the American Revolution, will arise naturally.

00:42:20.500 And I guarantee you that political leaders and civic leaders of all kinds will instinctively reach toward them, whether or not they knew about what I wrote about or not.

00:42:33.060 All right.

00:42:33.140 So these things are probably too big for any one person to be like, well, I'm going to control this thing.

00:42:39.140 Yeah.

00:42:39.380 I guess what I'm saying is that I think that these obviously are very long-term movements.

00:42:43.740 But I think more importantly that once we're in them, we understand the parallel.

00:42:49.920 We might not understand them quite until we're actually in the midst of it.

00:42:54.100 But once we're in the midst of it, we do understand the parallel.

00:42:57.680 So could a crisis end in disaster?

00:43:01.320 You know, so the previous things we've been talking about, you know, World War II, the Revolutionary War, it was terrible, but then things turned out great.

00:43:09.480 You know, we had this high period afterwards.

00:43:11.020 But, you know, what happens when there's a crisis, there's no resolution, and it just sort of ends in disaster?

00:43:19.780 Well, I mean, it could well be a resolution, and the resolution could be terrible.

00:43:24.220 Right.

00:43:24.720 Okay.

00:43:25.320 You could lose a war.

00:43:26.640 Well, yeah.

00:43:26.980 So it's like, I guess, in World War II.

00:43:29.460 Well, let's take the example of the Confederate South.

00:43:31.980 I mean, there was a resolution.

00:43:33.940 It was Appomattox, and it was abject defeat.

00:43:37.020 And it was poverty for the area of the country for the next many, many decades.

00:43:42.440 In fact, even by the mid-1960s, I mean, the South was barely above, you know, two-thirds of the average income level of the rest of the United States.

00:43:51.580 So there you have what you'd have to say was a pretty disastrous outcome, you know, for a region anyway.

00:43:58.340 And if you look at other countries, you can see that fourth turnings don't necessarily have good outcomes.

00:44:05.160 And so it's not, you know, I like to say that a fourth turning with a good outcome, what follows is a first turning, which many people will liken to another golden age.

00:44:16.020 You know, everything works again.

00:44:17.440 Everyone feels good.

00:44:18.580 Well, they might not have a lot of individualism the way we define it today.

00:44:22.200 So that's kind of a downer.

00:44:23.420 And a lot of people today might not like that aspect of it, but certainly everyone who lives the crisis is going to see a good outcome as the beginning of another golden age.

00:44:33.680 When everything will work again, everyone can build big new institutions again.

00:44:37.220 We can make huge new advances again in technology, world peace, discoveries, you know, not only in this world, but, of course, today maybe in other worlds as well.

00:44:49.240 And I talk about that a lot, right, in that chapter, sort of the good aspect of a fourth turning that ends well.

00:44:55.920 But then there's the possibility of ending badly.

00:44:58.880 And I think it's worth pointing out that we tend to use devastating technologies of mass destruction, what's ever available.

00:45:09.260 I mean, look, if you have a bad night, Brett, you could imagine a lot of horrible scenarios, right, about how this thing would end.

00:45:16.940 So I don't mean to say that this is necessarily automatically positive.

00:45:22.340 And that's why it's important what we do.

00:45:24.720 I don't believe in determinant history at all.

00:45:27.320 It's important how people play their roles and how we find our way out of this thing.

00:45:32.420 Okay.

00:45:32.540 So when things turn out positively, you have this high period.

00:45:35.780 But if it turns out negatively, like what does that first turning look like?

00:45:39.660 How does it-

00:45:40.180 You still have some of the same archetypal reconstructions.

00:45:42.940 And I think that's actually why the saculum is such a powerful, complex system.

00:45:49.660 It's always pushed back toward equilibrium, so to speak.

00:45:52.840 I mean, imagine what the American high would have been if we weren't that prosperous and that successful.

00:45:58.260 Imagine if we were just simply reconstructing from damage done during World War II.

00:46:03.340 We would have had the same basic outline without the optimism, without the confidence, perhaps.

00:46:08.300 But it still would have been a period of strong institutions and solidarity and with a tremendous amount of investment in the future.

00:46:15.400 Maybe just, you know, getting back to where we were before.

00:46:19.660 And typically, too, these societies have 20, 25 years later an awakening.

00:46:24.780 The defeated nations in World War II had awakenings in the late 60s and 70s.

00:46:30.460 They were every bit as acrimonious and explosive, even more so than the victorious nations.

00:46:37.720 Okay, so there's still a high period, even when a fourth turning ends badly, right?

00:46:41.680 So, like, you know, using Germany as an example, you know, they lost the war during World War II.

00:46:45.940 But then they still entered that first turning.

00:46:48.100 It's just that their first turning looked different than the one in the U.S.

00:46:51.900 You know, they still had rationing after the war.

00:46:53.840 They had, you know, they still had some suffering to go through.

00:46:56.260 So, it wasn't as hopeful and prosperous as the first turning in the U.S.

00:47:01.420 But they did rebuild and they did experience that first turning pattern.

00:47:06.200 And I guess, too, I mean, in some cases, you know, the damage could be permanent, right?

00:47:11.100 Like, it's permanent destruction that happens during the fourth turning that, you know, a country is never able to recover from, even though the cycle continues.

00:47:18.980 So, as you said, you know, what we do matters during the fourth turning, right?

00:47:23.320 The leadership we choose matters.

00:47:24.820 The roles we play matter.

00:47:27.300 So, if people are feeling some unease during this fourth turning, what advice do you have for navigating this period, you know, like, personally?

00:47:35.720 One thing that becomes very important in fourth turning is that as public institutions begin to have to allocate all their resources toward the national survival, that many of the benefits or many of the safety nets become less generous, right?

00:47:54.300 So, it becomes very important, I think, in these times to make sure that people solidify their network of friends and community and, above all, family.

00:48:07.400 When the chips are down, particularly in a fourth turning, when no other kind of safety nets may be available.

00:48:14.780 Finding a way to be close to your family and knowing who you can count on and fortifying and reinforcing all of your kin networks and friendship networks is probably the most important thing you can do.

00:48:28.500 And if you read accounts or just diaries of people in these crisis periods, you know, read the accounts of people having lived through the 30s and 40s, for example, or lived through the Civil War, and so much of it is close friends and family that helped them through and that were there for them when the chips are down and they cared for them.

00:48:50.840 So, and that's part of the cultural shift, of course, it occurs when family, perhaps not being as important during the unraveling, you know, during the 1990s or the 1920s, suddenly becomes a lot more important by the 1930s and 40s, and by extension, you know, by the late 2020s.

00:49:10.920 Well, Neil, this has been a great conversation.

00:49:12.460 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:49:16.220 The book is, the fourth turning is here.

00:49:18.700 It's available on, you know, any bookstore, you know, Amazon, or I don't know, wherever you want to look.

00:49:24.380 It's available in hardcover or Kindle or, or audio.

00:49:29.680 Fantastic.

00:49:30.180 Well, Neil Howell, thanks for your time.

00:49:31.140 It's been a pleasure.

00:49:32.560 Thank you very much, Brett.

00:49:34.800 My guest today was Neil Howell.

00:49:36.060 He's the author of the book, The Fourth Turning is Here.

00:49:38.240 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:49:40.820 Check out our show notes at aom.is slash fourth turning, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

00:49:48.700 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:49:55.800 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of.

00:50:03.420 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a view on the podcast or Spotify.

00:50:07.640 It helps that a lot.

00:50:08.440 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:50:09.840 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think we get something out of it.

00:50:14.280 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:50:16.540 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

00:50:18.160 Remind you to not listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:50:21.720 And I'll see you next time.

00:50:29.720 We'll see you next time.

00:50:38.740 Bye-bye.

00:50:44.040 Bye-bye.

00:50:44.200 Bye-bye.

00:50:44.860 Bye-bye.

The Art of Manliness - July 19, 2023

The Fourth Turning — How History's Crisis Period Could Unfold

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