The Fourth Turning Is Here: Our Great National Challenge

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and his late co-author William Strauss put forward a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back over the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about 25 years.

The last of these eras is always the most perilous. It’s a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal & World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. The authors called it "The Fourth Turning," and I had the great pleasure of speaking with Neil Howe on Hidden Forces about why he believes The Fourth Turning has finally arrived, what it means for those of us living through it, and how his theory of generational change will help us navigate this time with courage, competency, and a sense of resiliency that may seem unimaginable to us today.

Neil and I spend the first hour of our conversation laying the foundation for his theory, discussing the four different seasons of the saeculum, as well as the four different generations that propel it forward.

We spend the second hour applying that framework to the Fourth Turning itself, discussing what it would take to consolidate our society, what an existential threat to our nation’s survival will look (and feel like), and what we can do to prepare ourselves for this great national challenge that will draw all other problems into it and require the extraordinary mobilization of most Americans.