The Fourth Turning

It’s a book. I’m not sure I agree with it, but the thesis is that we’re stuck in a four-phase historical hamster wheel. Despite the shades of Calvinism and Psychohistory, which greatly disturb me, I’m going to engage on its own terms.

The fourth turning/phase is what we’re in, now. While I have quibbles with some of his examples, the basic idea seems to hold: Things get very partisan and angry; national unity crumbles while community unity strengthens. Everything keeps getting worse until there is some crisis that unifies everyone. We all pat ourselves on the back, celebrate our great country and head into the first turning. This takes place on a fairly regular, generational timescale, so we know about how long each turning lasts. The projected (and very caveated and very qualified) crisis year is 2030. If you want the details, read the book.

The “catalyst” that marked the end of the third turning and the beginning of the fourth was 9/11: We all superficially unified, which lasted all of three days and then the partisan squabbling doubled-down.

There are various signposts along the road that things are not right. That seems obvious enough. I don’t think anyone – left or right – is looking around and saying things are hunky dory. The crisis at the end needs to be big/severe enough for everyone to pull together. War is the most common. The American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II marked the end of the previous fourth turnings. The book goes much further back, but I don’t know enough history to judge whether or not it is meaningful information or cherry-picked events.

I have a hard time imagining external war being the crisis that ends this turning. With whom?

Russia has proven itself 2nd rate, at best. Russia is basically Saint Petersburg and Moscow. That’s it. Even if they start lobbing nukes in Europe, I can’t see it as a big enough crisis to bring America together. It could be resolved with a phone call to Britain or France. We wouldn’t even need to nuke back, ourselves, let alone mobilize the citizenry. Would Russia be stupid enough to nuke America? Anything is possible, but we have a far more than two relevant cities and a nuclear triad. The boomers (submarines, not retirees) alone would devastate Russia. There’s no way in hell Americans would agree to invade and occupy Russia. It’s a mess of imperial resentments. Who wants to get into the middle of that? Especially after Iraq and Afghanistan have proven the folly of “nation building.”

With the “signal” of invading Ukraine, by 2030 Europe will be capable of dealing with European problems. Poland is buying everything that is for sale in international arms markets. Meanwhile, Germany is going broke. That won’t end well, but they’re both in NATO, so I don’t see the US getting involved in squabbles, even if it is between Turkey and Greece. Certainly not before 2030.

China would be idiotic to start a war, but if they did, so what? I can’t imagine any possible reason to invade and occupy China. I can imagine someone arguing that for Russia (as stupid as it would be), but China?!? Not even on the table. Blockade the Strait of Malaca (something like that) and more Chinese die within six months than there are Americans. Why would we invade when a handful of ships and submarines can handle it? Japan could do that, itself (so could Australia and India; South Korea maybe), with the added bonus of commandeering all the oil trying to get through for itself.

Neither is a bring-America-together level war. If nukes land here, yes, we’ll be pissed and retaliate (sorry for the wind-born fallout, Japan), but we don’t need mass armies to do it. The Navy, as shrunken as it is, is more than capable of bombarding “coastlines” (check the ranges on ship-born weapons; that deserves scare quotes) into rubble. It doesn’t have sufficient destroyers to police the world, but one aircraft carrier group is more than capable of removing countries from it – and we have nine.

A cyber attack might do it. Losing the US power grid might be sufficient crisis. It wouldn’t require mobilizing the citizenry for war, but it would require great sacrifice by all.

The EMP from nukes _might_ do the same thing, but I’m dubious of everyone’s targeting capability (including ours). It’s not as if ICBMs are test-fired around the world on a regular basis. For EMP to be a factor, CEP (circular error probability) becomes a sphere because you want them to explode quite high up, not when they hit the ground.

A financial crisis might do it. If social security, medicare, and welfare all just stop, it might not result in a civil war by the technical definition, but there would be massive civic strife.

A civil war would definitely do it – it has once, already. One of the major arguments made against the civil war scenario is that the sides are not geographically separated. Interestingly enough (I didn’t know this), that was an anomaly of the US civil war. Most civil wars are fought with the sides intermixed.

The reason I’m even interested in this is that the end of the fourth turning results (supposedly) in a respect for authority and a stronger government. I’m not necessarily against a stronger government, but I am vehemently against a larger government. My interest in this subject is how can we get out of this (assuming there is a “this” to get out of) without willingly being crushed under a micro-managing authoritarian government?

That gives me three scenarios to contemplate: Infrastructure crash (either via cyber or EMP), financial crash, and civil war. There’s also the megacrisis of all three together, which is not as far fetched as each in isolation. For example, rumblings of civil war cause a cyber attack because we look weak, which brings down infrastructure, which causes a loss of confidence in the dollar because of the cost of repair, which causes a financial crash/hyperinflation because we cannot borrow, which causes the rumblings to become actual civil war because people are hungry in the dark and killing each other is what hungry people do. That’s a rather terrifyingly plausible scenario.

On the bright side, if the book is correct, we’ll come out of it better, stronger, and faster than before.