In Part 1 we learned how the current “stack” of generations is very reminiscent of the generational makeup of the late 1930’s. In Part 2 we examined how our current “Crisis” portion of the four phase cycle is playing out. In Part 3 we will look at what is next based on that historical perspective.
America is headed towards an extreme crisis which will probably culminate in the next 4 to 8 years. According to “The Fourth Turning
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Satayana
For a primer on Generational Theory, go to Neil Howe’s site Lifecourse.com
According to generational theory, we are now in a period called “The Crisis” which will culminate in a “Climax” that has historically been a military conflict. These world-changing events occur every 80-100 years:
- 1929-1946 (17 years) – Great Depression and WWII
- 1860-1865 (5 years) – Civil War
- 1773-1794 (21 years) – American Revolution
- 1675-1704 (29 years) – Glorious Revolution
- 1569-1594 (25 years) – Armada Crisis
- 1459-1487 (28 years) – War of the Roses
In most of the examples that “The Fourth Turning” outlines, the battles have resulted in clear winners and losers and the heroes are rewarded generously for their victory. This is true for all of their examples except for one: The American Civil War. This battle, fought on US soil with Brother against Brother, and the result did not feel like a victory for anyone, but rather defeat for all involved.
The reason that Strauss and Howe give for the quagmire that resulted from the Civil War had to do with timing. In the other Crisis battles, there had been adequate time for a “Hero” generation to form and prepare for battle. This was certainly true in WWII with the GI Generation as the heroes as well as the American Revolution with Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Generation. There were no such heroes in the Civil War because when the war started in 1860, the Progressive Generation of Woodrow Wilson were too young to fight. The generation that did fight in the Civil war was the Gilded Generation who are more similar in character to current day Gen X’ers. They were not lauded for their role and were not interested in taking up the mantle of victors since survival was their main desire. Because the Civil War came too early, in generational terms, it also was extremely short, and brutish. All the other Crisis in history have covered from 17-29 years, enough for an entire generation to feel their full effect.
So the timing seems the key factor in determining the nature of the Crisis Climax. The timing of the current Crisis has been debated for some time in generational circles. There are three possibilities:
- The Crisis began 2001 with 9/11
- The Crisis began in 2008 with the Great Recession
- The Crisis hasn’t started yet
First we have to understand how the Crisis is broken down into sections. The Crisis starts with a Catalyst, which Strauss and Howe describe as “a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood”. Following the Catalyst, society should move quickly, typically from 1-5 years after the catalyst, into the regeneracy, which is “a new counter entropy that re-unifies and re-energizes civic life”. The Regeneracy should last from 10-15 years. And then finally we have the Climax which is a relatively short period of extreme conflict that leads to a resolution.
If we consider 9/11 as the Catalyst, we can certainly see that it was a startling event that produced a sudden shift in mood. But we would have expected 1-5 years later that the country really started to pull together. That would have been around Obama’s first term which got off to a strong start that seemed to pull young Millennials into a new civic engagement, but that energy was quickly lost after his first mid-term elections. The rest of his terms left most on the left and right feeling disillusioned not “re-energized”.
Perhaps the The Great Recession was the startling event that produced a massive shift in mood. Most in our society had never faced the degree of economic turmoil and worry that engulfed the nation. It was only the extreme actions of the Federal Government that staved off immediate disaster, and we are still deeply in debt from those actions. But once again, if we look 1-5 years after the Great Recession, the civic regeneracy did not seem to materialize.
It might also be possible that the Fourth Turning has not started yet at all. This seems very remote, given how Strauss and Howe characterize the Fourth Turning mood. Unlike the Unraveling it is a time of clear polarization between sides, not just a splintering of society into many pieces. Although today’s social mood is definitely split, it is primarily a battle between open or closed society, which is a new set of rules from the old liberal/democrat split. So it seems unlikely that we are still in an Unraveling waiting for the catalyst.
But now with the populist movement of Donald Trump, perhaps we are seeing the civic regeneracy that was going on, all along, unbeknownst to the mainstream media. The Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin’s popularity and the election of a large cache of extreme conservatives in State and Federal Legislatures should have tipped Americans off that something was changing. The American people, or at least the Electoral College, chose a decisive direction for the country during this volatile period.
But perhaps there is another possibility: that the Crisis began with 9/11, deepened with the Great Recession and finally forced its way towards a Climax when those who felt most ignored and repressed finally spoke their minds. This would put us on course to have a resolution to the Crisis sometime in the next 4-8 years, which would mean that we should be done with a massive decisive conflict sometime between 2021 and 2025. That is right in line with Strauss and Howe’s original predictions from “The Fourth Turning” and would make this Crisis total out at 20-24 years.
In Chapter 9 of “The Fourth Turning” Strauss and Howe outline how the prior Climax have occurred. In their analysis there is one striking similarity to each Crisis cycle: practically no one sees the climax coming, even less than a year in advance. This is very instructive for the situation today where most of our populace knows something feels very different than in the past, but they can’t imagine another World War or individual States rising up in defiance of the Federal Government.
But back to the original question: will the Crisis be an internal battle between Liberal States and Trump’s Federal Government? Or will it be a war between the US and some other Sovereign Nation(s)? We will answer that question in Part 4 of this series.
Dave: my concern is that if Millennials distrust Trump, Trump won’t have a chance to be Grey Champion and Millennials would be without a leader to guide them through crisis. We need to remember the fate of Millennials is at stake.
“Of all today’s generations, the Millennials have the most at stake in the coming crisis. If it ends badly, they would bear the full burden of its consequences throughout their adult lives.”
Whatever goes it’s the Mills fault unless they’re step up as Heros and maybe trust Trump.
As for the Gilded, when the Civil War ended, the mantle would’ve only been on the table for the Union since the South was defeated. But both sides struggled to survive. The Civil War resulted from a polarized Society back then too.
The fate of Millennials quote was from the Fourth Turning book.
In the Fourth Turning, it also explained that the Millennials could end up being an Artist generation like the Progressives.
Do you think that’s still possible?
The heroes will be the ones who resist the current administration, who fight his tyranny, and the tyranny of those who empower him through their support. I hope that we make it through this climax in one piece as a country and as a united people again.
So that’s saying Millennials against Trumps administration.
Right. Millennials are against Trump and he’s the new Pearl Harbor moment.
Millennials have been heroes for some time now with their intense focus on social justice, racial, social and economic equality and the Occupy movement.
Trump threatens all that and we are finally seeing some of the older generations feel the pain and join the fight, instead of them dismissing younger people.
Could that make Millennials an Artist Generation as well? What if Trump runs for reelection?
Whether Mills end up being a Hero generation (like the GIs) or and Artist generation (like the Gilded) is still up for debate.
The Artist Generation Millennials would mirror would be the Progressives. Xers would be the Gilded. As far as the Gilded taking the mantle, that option would’ve only been available for the Union soldiers since the Confederate Gilded lost. I’ve spoken with folks who believe they see a weakening of our institutional structure like the Civil War. The nation is still very polarized where in the 1930s we were uniting under FDR. Also it’s yet to see if Millennials fight a major conflict that defines the Hero generation.
So if Millennials get Trump impeached and out of office as soon as Trump goofs, that’d be the Millennials D-Day moment, and getting in a Progressive (Democrat) that de-Trumps it all is there VE, VJ moment. I totally get it.
The one scenario left out of this commentary (i.e., Millennials not supporting Trump) is that we’re still in the early days of his administration. We cannot discount that he may win over this generation. How is anyone’s guess, but Fourth Turnings are all about a society recognizing an existential threat and combining forces to defeat it.
Millennials may yet decide Trump has their best interest at heart and may move to support him. Only time will tell.
Millennials are showing they’ll never get behind Trump. Millennials find his Narcissism and everything he’s against a compleye disgust. The next 3 years of Trumps term would be made or broken by Millennials.
Seems anti-climatic relative to pass climaxes. Somehow, I don’t think Trump is the key player in this climax. I believe he is a catalyst to the actual crisis (which for us is truly a crisis of economic) but the actual climax hasn’t happened yet that Mills will have to fight.
Ohhhh, how a year changes things.
I wonder seriously when I go back and look at year-old stories and comments like this… if people who wrote of DT as promoting ‘tyranny’ have seen the light at all. …his transparent persona/role as the champion of the working class seems so obvious that even those who feared the worst must now see and understand that the fake media was working overtime to turn the people against him….and now we see exactly who the real villians are –and what depts. of the federal gov have been sheltering them. A lot of people owe us an apology, but we’ll settle for you jumping on the train and being part of the MAGA effort.
They’ll never see the light, Junkie. There is a certain type of individual whose mind you can never change by giving them information. They will call good evil and evil good until they die. There are more of them alive now than ever before, I would bet.
Reading comments like this today, in the midst of the upheaval and tragedy of the “pandemic” and accompanying authoritarian crack-down, would be humorous if the stakes were not so high. (It is May 15, 2021).
Those of you who slurred and shamed President Trump and your fellow citizens as “tyrannical,” “white supremacists,” “domestic terrorists” — do you understand yet what you have done? Do you understand yet that your willingness to hate whoever the corporate media told you to hate resulted in the Big Steal, the end of free and fair elections, and the gleeful take-down now in process? It is four years after your post…do you finally see who the “tyrants” are?
Amerca, Canada, Europe, Israel — all falling. The shining restoration that began with Trump’s election — when jobs were plentiful, people were joyful, and peace was breaking out all over the world — is no more. The puppet in the White House is led about by handlers who hand him his mask when he forgets where he put it. The world laughs.
It was your eagerness to name-call, shame, and hate your fellow Americans that made it possible for the global technocracy to take over. Any small businesses left in your neck- of- the- woods? Are your kids back in school yet? Have you had your mandatory vaccines? How’s your “social credit”? Any risk of being “cancelled”?
Are you proud? Are you regretful? Do you even realize what you have done?
P.S. People like the commenter above forced the Fourth Turning in 2021…and we’re only at the beginning. May God save their souls.
If the conflict is shifting from left v. right to open v. closed, then a new faction which forms from both the left and the right and favors the closed (the direction favored in the Fourth Turning) could become very powerful. A nationalist populism that embraces the best of both left and right, say.
That’s saying a Nationalism that moves strictly to the center which promises to remodel our strength in government.
I’ve been pondering this question lately, as it appears we’re certainly in the Crisis now. However, it only seems to partially fit what Strauss and Howe lay out.
For example, they write “What makes a Crisis special is the public’s willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter…” (FT, p.258) On a national level, that’s far from true. Liberals are not letting Trump “lead, even when he falters.” Far from it, they are turning each misstep into a catastrophe. Republicans are not even submitting to his leadership, see, for example, the AHCA debacle. Things are not getting done.
However, this claim might be true within certain spheres. Many Republicans do still stand behind Trump, despite his vices. Many Democrats are still devoted to Hillary, despite her mistakes. And there is a kind of “civic energy” forming on both sides of the political divide. It is just not a civic energy devoted toward national ends, but partisan ends.
If we are in the regeneracy, it is a weird one, probably more like the Civil War than the New Deal and WWII.
I’m looking forward to Part 4.
I think the fourth turning began with the financial meltdown in 2008. If it only started recently then the length of the Unraveling would have been over 30 years. Neil Howe said the 1-5 years between the catalyst and the regeneracy is only what occurred for the six prior saeculum, that each one has its own rhythm. I think that the agency of the ruling elite can dramatically divert the saeculum, though not its overarching structure, if they are sufficiently isolated from the public. That is why I finger the Federal Reserve as the reason the regeneracy has only now at least possibly seem to have begun–8 years after the catalyst. They are at least nominally independent. They are also small enough in number for any idiosyncratic divergence from the characteristics of their generational archetypes to matter for policy. It also makes sense considering how much the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded, its continuation of near-zero interest rates for almost a decade, and the dearth of deleveraging among households and corporations. Ben Bernanke failed to let the market fully correct itself, as his analysis of Great Depression did not include generational changes. Thus, while he appeared solve the crisis, its consequences have just been postponed, such that Unraveling era-style politics continued way past the point it would have otherwise, if the economy had not “recovered.” Regeneracy does not necessarily happen on a unified basis if the fissures in a society are deep enough that they cannot be overcome in order to resolve the crisis, in which case that failure becomes part of the crisis in and of itself. Speaking of which, when the market does finally correct, will we at last come together to save ourselves? That is much more in doubt now than it would have been at the catalyst.
@Greg – I think that the start/end of this Turning will be much bigger than just the financial issues. Although I can totally see your point about how the financial crisis occurred and whether it has fully resolved, I think that Trump’s election and the deep divisions in US politics will play a huge role. Add Russia and the Middle East to the mix (not to mention China) and we’ve got a lot of volatility that may come to a head sooner than later.
My concern is the deep division in politics and Trump, would discourage Millennials to trust institutions in a critical point of their hero trial. Millennials could play on their own rather than have a Grey Champion at this scenario.
Hi you guys… Its nice to stumble on this place I have been thinking about the Trump/Brexit moment in terms of Strauss and Howe… It’s nice to see some other people are seeing things similarly.
I find the argument that the Crisis turning started with the attack of September 11 2001 to be the most compelling… Particularly in light of recent events. It really felt like the end of the unraveling and the start of somthing different and well… darker. The way I look at it the regeneracy took around 6 years to begin which is long but not too far off from the 1-5 Strauss and Howe predicted. It came in the form of the the galvanizing force of the Obama campaign beginning in late ’07 and and then his eventual election in November ’08. The crisis deepened with the crash of ’08 and produced the themes of resentment, disaffection, and inequity that appear to be the fuel for what I fear is the impending climax.
I believe one of the quirks of this turning is that Obama was out of generational order… He was borne on the Boomer side of the cusp of Boom and X, but his biography is pure Gen-X… And he lead like a cautious pragmatic Nomad not the fire breathing Prophet that he often sounded like in his speeches. He failed to deliver to the Millennial generation the true grey champion energy they were waiting for. As a result the crisis drifted sideways and the rudderless Millennials remained formless and some became disillusioned and angry.
The election of Donald Trump is not a pearl harbor moment, rather it is more like the election of 1860 where the previous party structure Whig vs. Democratic Republican broke down and a character… Abraham Lincoln… Who was radically unacceptable to a large portion of the country (The slave holding states of the Confederacy) was elected… Leading to secession and conflict.
…To be clear I am not comparing the personal character of Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln in any kind of favorable way. The comparison is just to point out that the peculiar energy around the elections of 1860 and 2016 seem to rhyme.
There is no rule that the Grey Champion needs to be a president. They might well be some other kind of leader… I would not be at all surprised if a Grey Champion rose out of the more and more organized and focused resistance to Trump… and then proceeded into a clash with him extravagantly over the soul of the democracy.
Thanks for the great observations. I agree with your analysis as a possibility for the climax to this turning. BTW, I think I have mentioned before that Obama was a little out of order. Our only other Nomad president during the Crisis was George Washington. Combine that with the peculiar nature of Trump and this 4T is shaping up to be unusual indeed. And I totally get your comparison to Lincoln in the generational sense and it makes a stronger argument for this cycle heading towards some sort of civil conflict…
If any election is to be compared to 1860, they’ve said this in 2004, 2008, 2016 but it should be the 2020 election. Especially if Trump somehow wins reelection. The division in US politics is not only deep but bitter. The polarizing started in 1994 between Gingrich and Clinton but Clinton was able to work with Republicans. Then the recount election in 2000 was a bitter Boomer battle. Bush 43 was seen as illigitimate in many ways that Trump is seen today. The real difference you have Millennials disenfranchised after Obama and Sanders and Hilary failed to deliver. So the Liberals are talking resistance the same way Conservatives did to Obama. We briefly United after 9/11 but we’re still worsening polarized when the Iraq war 2003 started. So we can expect to the divisions get more belligerent as each camp has its own regeneracy. We would not be socialized as in the Depression and World War II to overcome the crisis and won the war abroad. If we have a crisis abroad where GenXer Dave Sohigian mentioned: Russia, China or Middle East, the Red States will push to go to war while the Blue states will protest it preventing further mobilization as necessary in crisis. How will this impact the outcome? While Millennials are mostly Progressive for a Hero generation, they will have a Conservative outlet that would agitate them, (Millennials for Trump) which would put Millennials against each other in their coming trial. This would be a murky outcome of a World War and Civil War at the same time. US in Civil War 2, while Canada, Australia, Europe, Russia, Arab World, Asia engage in World War 3. This should all go down by the 2020’s. The US would be global stage but will see internal unrest start to grow throughout the 21st century. Xers would definitely come in and promise to clean out the whole mess. If there a win/lose what would this make Millennials and Homelanders?
Hi Guys,
So there are strange things brewing out there… Last time we had to feed a hero generation to the meat grinder, it was Nazi 88’s. The time before that it was the Confederate cavalry… I know that 500 Nazi/Confederate thugs in homespun military uniforms, descending on Charlottesville is neither Fort Sumter nor the German Occupation of the Sudetenland. But It feels a little like John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry or even more symbolically apt, like a torch lit Nuremberg Rally… Or both at once with the sides and symbols all mixed together. Which is to be expected…
One very interesting, and at the same time ominous, features of the emerging struggle of the (Trump/Alt Right/ Euro-Turkish Russian-Authoritarians) vs. the as yet still forming (Black Lives Matter/Woman’s Marchers/Berni-Millennial/Merkel-Macron-Trudeau global democrats) is that in the United States it looks to be a non-racialised argument about bigotry… That is to say most of the faces in the anti fanciest crowd this weekend in Charlottesville were Caucasian. This is not a minority liberation movement about self determination like the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. It is a intramajority fight, including the the issues of race and identity, but more about the fundamental philosophical nature of the country, which is more reminiscent of the 1860’s.
I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the climax is building at this point and it will involve some armed civil insurrection, issues of race and tolerance, national identity, the fall (or not) of a presidential administration, and foreign (probably Russian cyber interference)… All to culminate in some kind of final modern people power style revolt or even competing revolts. It will look a little like the Arab spring, or Tienanmen Square, and the Eastern European color revolutions… Except bigger and more American in flavor.
The thing that is really remarkable about this weird time in the life of the nation, is that the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of this period is so similar to what happened in the 1920s to 1930s before WWII, and also near the end of the previous cycle in the 1850s leading up to the US Civil War. Those were times just before cataclysmic wars in the Anglo-American economic-political cycles, and these cycles also were entrained with the world cycle, including S. America, Asia, and Europe. See the book on history: “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss and Howe, described in the chart below (attached).
These cycles or “saeculi”, which last about 80 -some years, or the lifetime of a human, start out just after a world-changing struggle in an organized and hopeful High season like spring (1950-60s), then it advances with a baby boom in an Awakening of reforms like summer (65 -80s), then comes the backlash to idealistic reforms in an Unraveling like autumn (1990 -00s), and finally ends in the selfish gridlock of dysfunctional Crisis like winter (2010 -20s). Each of the four seasons of the saeculum “year” lasts for a generation of around 20 years, and by the end of the 80 +/-5 year cycle in history, the elders who didn’t personally learn vital lessons from the last time of crisis (the “great forgetting”), will give in to greedy corruption to drain wealth from the economy, and then lead the nations in another paroxysm of violence to break out of the unworkable gridlock of the Crisis. It is sad but remarkable to see how closely Trump’s fascist and racist mysogeny fits with the zeitgeist of this time of crisis, with nonfunctional, selfishly ignorant and corrupt governments seizing their moment in power here and abroad, and hatred parading pompously in the Capitol.
These clear patterns in history predict that by the middle 2020s we will have gone through a serious economic collapse, and there will be a world-changing war of national and international proportions. The nature and reasons for the struggle are not the same in each cycle, and the weapons keep evolving, but this time we can expect cyberwarfare in addition to or superseding the bombs. The signs of this impending time of crisis are already evident. After 10 years of the Obama era economic recovery, most economists expect a collapse of this cycle within a couple of years (by 2020), exacerbated by the Trump-Republican stock-bubble and trade war. I do not want to promote a coming war, but regretfully I am reporting an existing pattern.
This is a timeline of the historic patterns starting in 1700s (but going back over 1000 years):
Time period: 1690 -1780 ; 1780 -1865 ; 1865 -1945 ; 1945 -2027
Cycle name: Revolutionary Civil War Great Power Millennial
Crisis war : US Revolution US Civil War World War II WW3???
Weapons : blunderbuss artillery, rifles jets, nukes cyberwar, psy?
Issues : Liberty from Freedom from Survival from Energy war, Ecological
Oligarchy Slavery Genocide, Tyranny Meltdown, ClimateChange
What can we do by knowing about this historic pattern? Can it be averted, or the outcome improved by our actions? An important thing that the authors of “4th Turning” found, was that when people came together during the time of Crisis (4th turning of the cycle), by repairing their towns and healing their families at the local level, to counteract the national chaos and mayhem, then the outcome of the fighting during the crisis came out better. By preemptively rejuvenating their homes and neighborhoods, these people would be better prepared and more resilient when the depredations of warfare descended upon them. Even more important, when a community worked together during the crisis time to have new plans for vital systems tested and ready to go, then they helped to insure that their own side prevailed in the war, and their community was able to flourish immediately when the crisis war was resolved. The warning for us is clear: we need to remember our moral compass and heal our nation. But if we fail to work together during the time of Crisis to begin resolving the serious problems, then a tragic outcome can happen, as in the Civil War.
A good example of local rejuvenation for the previous 1930 -40 Crisis before the WW2 climax is Roosevelt’s NewDeal programs including the Civilian Conservation Corps etc., which strengthened families for the coming war. Right now in this pre 2020 Crisis time of the Millennial cycle, Trump has been sabotaging ecological and local economic rejuvenation with massive corruption at the US national level; however this is accelerating the drawing-together of local communities to repair their neighborhoods and towns, and protect their states’ initiatives, such as the clean solar energy bonanza here in California where I live.
The mechanism which drives the turning of the saeculum is that the new generation overshoots in trying to fix the problems left from the elder generation’s own overshooting etc. etc. When the upcoming generation awakens to an idealistic solution to their world’s problems like racism or sexism, it is imperfectly implemented immediately, leading the elder’s backlash to try unravelling these reforms (“Take America back; put blacks and women back in “their place” etc.), and finally ending in stalemate of an unworkable crisis. The time of Crisis is sadly resolved by total warfare, such as the internal fight of the American Civil War, or the international warfare of World War II. So during these intensely difficult times of either an idealistic Awakening or the warfare in a life-and-death Crisis, it happens that the generations who come of age as impressionable young adults are imprinted by the character of their times. The idealistic generation imprinted by an Awakening (the Boomers in the Millennial cycle) will mature into the moralistic elders who lead the Crisis war. The practical generation imprinted as young adults by a Crisis (Great Generation of WW2, and Millennials in the coming struggle) will be the can-do leaders who hopefully win the war and set the new agenda for the next saeculum. It is clear why the practical young Millennials have no patience or interest in the divisive morality-fights of their Boomer elders, while the Gen-Xers just want to survive.
In this context, it is very clear that Trump is the leader as a throwback to the “old school” elder generation’s reactionary political agenda, which has degenerated into mere social posturing with no real consistent policies. This old “silent majority” of deplorables who are now unraveling the reforms of the Boomer generation’s Awakening, (including civil rights, women’s rights, environmental cleanup, LGBTQ+ rights, and monetary regulation), will have their last orgy in abusing power, and then be supplanted by the next generation who will inevitably win the struggle (as the old ones die off), and re-establish the necessary reforms on a firm institutional foundation. So goes the immortal turning of the Saeculum wheel of history. Liberty, Freedom, and Survival of our ecosystem must win in the end, or there is simply no way for us to continue living.
So I don’t see Trump as a Grey Champion who appears to resolve the Crisis. Rather, he is the culmination of all of the gridlock and nonfunctional divisiveness that peak during the middle of the Crisis period of 4th Turning. Millennials will never reconcile to Trump; I feel that the 2020 election will be the time in which the new regenerative regime will be elected, who will hopefully be a Champion that the Millennials could follow toward a better outcome. Trump will end up as an embarrassing blip in history. He is doing great harm out of his ignorance and narcissistic vanity, but America and the world will get over it, or at least get on with it, when he is impeached for treason and money laundering.
So, when is part 4 getting published? It’s been over a year since part 3 and would love to read part 4 sooner. 🙂
More posts and perspectives, please! 🙂
Yes, I agree. More posts, please! Very interesting site to come across.
My only question is what happens if the US loses a foreign conflict? Russia and China are already teaming up to take on the petrodollar, and the renmnibi is now a reserve currency. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the possibilities of the US being the evil empire and other countries having to take on the warmongering American rogue nation. I’m sure Europe/the EU would sit out of the conflict, so it’s the US against the world.
I think I can see this war as the biggest possibility for an upcoming conflict. I don’t think the US would come out of the conflict well (that’s an understatement) and the Millennials would be completely defeated. Not sure how this fits within The Fourth Turning, but that’s what I envision.
I mean, unless it’s climate change. Certainly plenty of younger people are voicing that ideal right now, but I feel the recent press has been mostly around Generation Z (with a collective name yet to be decided.) I think the Millennials certainly resonate with that ideal as well, but whether it will truly become their Hero moment has yet to be seen. I guess it may boil down to the US elections in 2020 to see where we head.
Again, super interesting site!
Thanks for the comment. Sorry I haven’t been posting lately. I agree that a battle between the US and China/Russia would probably have a lousy outcome (wars always do, after all). If you would like to read an interesting fiction on the topic, I would recommend “Ghost Fleet”: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World-ebook/dp/B00LZ7GOI4
It is an entertaining look at how technology and warfare might play out in the future.
I also wonder whether climate change will end up being the “War to end all wars”. If so, that may be an even tougher battle!
Will you ever publish PT 4?
I’m thinking about it. I composed half of it a long while back and it isn’t quite as timely. But I was working on it yesterday after you commented. Maybe in the next week or two!
Suppose Millennials are completely defeated in a war? Russia/China/Arab World vs. US and the West? That would discount them as Heros.