Book Review Part 4: The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil Howe
Issues with the Strauss-Howe long cycle historical theory
As I said in Part One, “[t]he hypothesis behind the book is that demographic generations spanning roughly 20-25 years interact with a historical cycle that lasts approximately 80-100 years.” Part Three looked at the generational part of the equation. This week covers what I regard as the more substantive part, the long-cycle theory of history.
I’ll start with a discussion by Spencer McDaniel that takes a pretty harsh view of Strauss & Howe. McDaniel calls the Strauss-Howe cycle theory “bunkum” and says that it
has virtually no credible evidence whatsoever to support it and it is mostly pseudoscience. Indeed, the kinds of predictions it makes are actually strongly reminiscent of astrology in a lot of ways, since they are vague enough that they sound meaningful without actually being meaningful.
This statement stings a little, but it is much truer of the Strauss-Howe generational descriptions than the historical cycle theory.1 When McDaniel gets around to the historical part of the historical cycle theory, he dismisses it out of hand because “Strauss and Howe identify various historical events as being of a certain kind simply because of when they happened and not on account of their characteristics.”
For instance, in the Strauss-Howe hypothesis, World War I was not a “crisis,” but rather an “unraveling.” Why? Because it didn’t happen at the right time for it to have been a “crisis.” Meanwhile, Strauss and Howe also classified the 1980s and 1990s as a time of “unraveling,” even though nothing remotely comparable to the scale of World War I in terms of devastation took place during that time.
I don’t find this persuasive at all. World War 1, strictly from the point of view of the United States, was an expeditionary war with relatively limited casualties. In that respect, it was closer to Korea, Vietnam, or the twenty-year Bush-Obama war than the Civil War or World War 2. For example, consider Battle Deaths for a selection of wars according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Civil War (N&S) 214,948
WWI 53,402
WWII 291,557
Korea 33,739
Vietnam 47,434
It is not at all difficult to see that two of these things are not like the others, and those two happen to be the events Strauss & Howe designated as big crises.
Howe argues in The Fourth Turning Is Here that wars can happen at any stage of the cycle, but “every major war in Anglo-American history has been shaped by the turning in which it arose.” (p.127) The Strauss-Howe theory mainly addresses how big events like wars affect the public mood, and how that limits the event and its aftermath. Korea happened during a period of relative national unity and seemed to have surprisingly little political aftermath. Vietnam happened during a period when the Boomers were supposed to be rebelling and inspired a lot of rebellion. The twenty-year Bush-Obama war started late in the period of unraveling and led to more unraveling.
Of course, the Strauss-Howe theory also suggests that a war during a fourth-turning crisis has a greater chance of escalating into something like the Civil War or World War II. If Strauss and Howe are right, our next war could be a big one and could involve major political changes, unlike wars that happen at other times in the cycle. That prediction does not seem unreasonable, based on what I see going on around me.
McDaniel, writing in 2020, dismissed the Strauss-Howe theory in part because
even though Strauss and Howe predicted that a major crisis was supposed to occur in the 2000s and 2010s that Millennials would resolve, the various crisis candidates that have emerged have nothing in common with previous “crises.” The previous “crises” identified by Strauss and Howe include the period of the American Revolution, the period of the Civil War, and the period of the Great Depression and World War II.
While we have undoubtedly seen crises of various sorts in the past twenty years, none of them rise to the same level as those previous crises. In other words, the Strauss-Howe generational hypothesis has no real predictive value.
As of late 2023, I am not nearly so sanguine about our prospect of avoiding a major war within the fourth turning time frame, which still has at least a few years to run.
McDaniel relied heavily on a 2017 Politico article by David Greenberg, which similarly concluded that Strauss and Howe failed in their attempt to create a deterministic and scientific theory of history. The main problem with Greenberg’s angle is that The Fourth Turning Is Here doesn’t claim to be either scientific or deterministic.2 Greenberg says that according to the Strauss-Howe logic, “it shouldn’t really matter whether the nation elected Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale in 1984, or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump last year, because history was headed in a certain direction regardless.” That’s not just wrong, it misses the point so badly I wondered at first if Greenberg had actually read any of Strauss and Howe’s books.
My understanding of the Strauss-Howe long cycle theory is that the stages of the cycle limit what is possible during a particular stage based largely on the mood of the public, but the cycle does not determine what path society will choose or what the outcome will be. So for example, according to Strauss and Howe, we would have had a fourth-turning crisis in the 1930s and early 40s regardless of who got elected in 1932. But the nature and outcome of the crisis could have been very different if Hoover had won in 1932, or if Huey Long had survived and led a populist insurgency in 1936, or if a Nazi-sympathizing isolationist like Charles Lindbergh had gotten elected in 1940.
By the same token, a fourth-turning crisis could not occur after the Reagan-Mondale election in 1984, but the particular path of unraveling during the 80s and 90s could have been different. Perhaps we would have gotten national health insurance if Mondale had won, but then perhaps somebody more radical than Bush the Elder would have been the Republican nominee in 1988. As Howe said in a recent blog post, “What I am saying is that the path open to any leader, good or bad, is constrained by the mood of the nation and the emotional energy of his or her supporters."
Greenberg’s 2017 article was entitled The Crackpot Theories of Stephen Bannon’s Favorite Authors. I suspect Greenberg’s criticism was more motivated by a desire to paint Steve Bannon as a crackpot than to engage in any serious historical debate about Strauss and Howe’s long-cycle theory. As you may recall from Part Two, anti-Trump writers played up Steve Bannon’s interest in Strauss and Howe as evidence that Trump was trying to bring on the apocalypse.
Another common criticism of Strauss and Howe is that they cannot predict world history because they fail to account for “different countries and cultures.” The Fourth Turning Is Here makes it pretty clear that Howe is talking about American society and history, and that different countries and cultures have different timelines. Somewhat disappointingly, Howe does not claim any expertise in predicting cycles for other countries or cultures, and he makes no attempt to predict how the Russian or Chinese cycles, for example, will interact with the American cycle.
You may have guessed by this point that I am sympathetic to the Strauss-Howe cycle theory. I don’t think long-cycle theories are scientific in the sense of being based on an experimental method, nor do I think they can predict precise outcomes, but long cycle theories seem useful to me in two ways. First, they can help with the challenging task of thinking about periods of time much longer than our individual lives. I’m sixty years old now, which is old enough that I have at least some ability to think about ten and twenty-year time frames. This is useful because, for example, it allows me to reject the recurring political party line that each four-year presidential election cycle is an existential crisis.
A framework like the Strauss-Howe cycle theory can help us think about history in a more meaningful way by relating the time frames we understand to longer time frames that are much harder to think about. The Strauss-Howe framework would have been particularly useful to me in my twenties, when I found it difficult to think in time frames longer than a year or two. Just thinking about how change plays out over a relatively long period of time might have provided useful insight.
Second, long-cycle theories of history are rhetorically useful. All interpretations of history are fundamentally rhetorical—the historian tells the story a certain way in order to make a point about the present or the future. Cycle theories support an argument that certain periods in history are particularly relevant today. If the cycle theory actually resonates with the public mood, then the argument will be more powerful.
An aphorism widely attributed to Mark Twain says “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Thinking about the rhyme scheme of history can be useful, even if the long-cycle theory is not precise, and/or cannot be experimentally proven. In another recent blog post, Howe makes a fairly typical reference to a fairly persuasive rhyme:
Permit me in this context to quote again . . . from historian Carl Becker’s essay “The Dilemma of Modern Democracy,” written in the winter of 1940. Becker was summarizing a few of the darker political lessons that the West had learned from the demise of democracy, and its replacement by dictatorship, in so many European nations during the 1930s. . . . Anyway, here is the crux of his message, stated with dry irony:
Democratic government, being government by discussion and majority vote, works best when there is nothing of profound importance, to discuss, when the rival party programs involve the superficial aspects rather than the fundamental structure of the social system, and when the minority can meet defeat at the polls in good temper, since it need not regard the decision as either a permanent or a fatal surrender of its vital interests. When these happy conditions no longer obtain, the democratic way of life is always in danger.
What was true among many of the world’s leading powers in the 1930s, I submit, is true again in the 2020s—namely, that “these happy conditions no longer obtain.”
Whether or not you like the Strauss-Howe long-cycle framework, I submit that some type of framework is necessary to prevent history from becoming “just one damn thing after another.”3 Your framework might be cycles, or it might be that the arc of history bends toward justice, or it might be that 1990s western corporatocracy was a desirable end state and no further progress is likely or appropriate.
In the end, what matters more than whether I believe in a historical cycle is whether U.S. policy makers believe in a historical cycle. As noted above, professional intellectuals aligned with the democratic party very much enjoyed dunking on Steve Bannon for believing in Strauss & Howe. As Greenberg put it, “The problem is that admiration for these kinds of crackpot theories reveal, or confirm, the dangerous amateurism about in the White House.” Greenberg’s professional managerial class (“PMC”) credentialism is fully on display: “Autodidacts like Strauss and Howe—or Bannon—tend to fall in love uncritically with the seductive insights they stumble upon. They tend to disdain the reasons that more expert students of their subjects may offer for rejecting their overly simplistic claims.”
Unfortunately for the PMC credentialists, it seems clear that Steve Bannon is not the only political actor following Strauss and Howe. Al Gore is alleged to have gifted a copy of an earlier book by Strauss & Howe to every member of Congress. In Part 3 we saw that the Obama White House was using the “Homelander” moniker from Howe’s previous work back in 2014. After thinking a lot about The Fourth Turning is Here and doing research for this review, I strongly suspect that Joe Biden’s handlers (and perhaps Joe Biden himself to the extent he knows what he is saying) may have taken the Strauss-Howe cycle theory to heart, and may be inciting foreign wars because they think it will unite and rejuvenate the country. I’m not talking about minor “Wag the Dog” wars for a public relations bounce, I’m talking about starting World War III against China and/or Russia because Biden’s handlers believe that America can regenerate itself by inciting a major foreign war during a fourth turning.
That will be the main subject of Part 5.
McDaniel is a pretty good writer. I didn’t realize until after I started digging into his discussion of Strauss and Howe that he was an undergraduate when he wrote it. On the boundary of Millennials and Zoomers.
To be fair, my understanding of the Strauss-Howe theory is based only on The Fourth Turning Is Here since I haven’t read the earlier books. Howe has made this his full-time job for forty years, so I would hope the theory has improved over that time. Perhaps the earlier books were less nuanced and the criticisms by McDaniel and Greenberg were fair, but I doubt it. If, as I suspect, fourth-turning themes continue to appear in the news in 2024, I may decide it is worthwhile to read some of the earlier books and report back on whether they seem to have any predictive value in hindsight.
The idea is attributed to Arnold Toynbee although he didn’t say it quite that way.