In Part One of this (unreasonably long) review of The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil Howe, I said “[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.” I also said Howe’s generational theory was the sizzle being used to sell the steak of the more substantive but less buzzy long-cycle theory. The question I posed for myself last week, at the end of Part Two, was “do the generational classifications have any validity, and how much do they matter to the long-cycle historical theory?”
This article provides a quick summary of some straw-man criticisms of Strauss and Howe. The two most relevant for this post are:
“[C]ultural events determine personality more than life experience and circumstance [quote attributed to another author].” I looked, and I did not find anything resembling this assertion in The Fourth Turning Is Here. Howe clearly recognizes individual differences within generations. “Like any social category (race, class, nationality), a generation can allow plenty of individual exceptions and be fuzzy at the edges.” (p.80)
To say that you belong to your generation certainly does not mean that you think favorably of your generation. According to German historian Julius Peterson, every generation includes what he called “directive, “directed,” and “suppressed” members. (p.83)
Howe’s generalizations about generations can admittedly get pretty thick at times, but Howe’s theory, as I understand it, is that common experiences and cultural identities adopted in youth are important drivers of history, not that common experiences overwhelm individual personalities and turn people into identical automatons.
“Generational theory holds that people’s worldview and behavior — decided by the era in which they were born — remain static throughout their lives.” This criticism is closer to the truth, but still overstated. Howe observes that Early experiences depend on the era in which you are born, and you can’t change that. (p.79) Howe also notes that “people’s lifelong voting behavior is tilted according to which party was most popular when they reached their late teens and early twenties” and cites polling data (in an invisible end note). (p.82) As I understand Howe’s theory, early experiences are foundational and continue to have an impact on members of a generation, but Howe does not claim that people remain static throughout their lives. At a minimum they must adapt to their roles as they age and the stages of the historical cycle change.
Howe actually puts a great deal of effort into describing the foundational experiences of different generations and how individuals react to them. He also cites lots and lots of cultural references ranging from Aeschylus to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which seem intended to establish credibility with different age and educational cohorts. It must be admitted that the cultural references become sparser and sparser as we move from the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off era of the 1980s to the present day.
Six months or so after its release, The Fourth Turning Is Here hasn’t taken off like some of the earlier Strauss-Howe books did. Reviews are relatively scarce and it ranks in the top ten on Amazon only in narrow categories such as “demography.” But it did appear to have moved up when I checked it just now, compared to a few weeks ago. One reason for the slow start may be that Howe does not have as much insight or cultural pull with the current generation of young people, commonly called Generation Z or Zoomers (born from 2004-ish to about last week). Howe persists in calling them “Homelanders.”1 Howe says he picked this name on behalf of his marketing firm after conducting an online poll in 2006, when the first Zoomers were not yet old enough to talk.
Homeland Generation became the ultimate winner, apparently because the decade of the 2000s was marked by 9/11, the War on Terror, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and a sense that the “homeland” was no longer safe.
Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism had this to say on the occasion of the Obama White House adopting the term Homelanders for campaign purposes in 2014:
UPDATE Crack White House campaign team introduces new generation after so-called Millennials: “The Homeland Generation” [WaPo].
Words fail me. OK, they don’t. As of now, anybody who uses generational identification as a serious analytical tool should be… spoken to severely, because all these other so-called generations are just as solidly based as “Homeland Generation,” which the White House just made up out of whole cloth, for marketing purposes.
The author of the referenced Washington Post article, Philip Bump, had a fair amount to say on these issues over the years, and published a book in early 2023 called Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. I haven’t read the book, but Bump appears to accept the census bureau’s view that the Baby Boomers are the only American generation clearly defined by demography, and their sheer numbers are the demographically important thing about them. He describes the Boomers as a “pig in a python” and discusses how their numerosity has affected American politics and social programs.
A few weeks before the 2014 article linked by Naked Capitalism, Bump wrote in another Post article that the word “homeland” entered the American lexicon as patriotic rhetoric immediately after 2001. Bump credited a New York Times article that mentioned biblical roots, but in modern usage “the term became commonplace during World War II. The Nazis referred to Germany as their heimat -- home or homeland. (Hence the title of that Times piece: "Prickly Roots of 'Homeland Security'.")” Bump went on to describe how American use of the term mushroomed starting on September 12, 2001, especially among politicians.
When the Zoomers made headlines recently for disseminating Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 Letter to America virally on TikTok, it seemed pretty clear the worm had turned away from Howe’s Homelander prediction, at least in the sense Howe originally intended it. My personal hope is that if Zoomers become obsessed with homeland security, they will seek a solution based on less bombing of countries halfway around the world rather than the ABB (Always Be Bombing) approach that characterized the Bush-Obama twenty-year war against everyone in the name of “homeland security” from which Howe adopted the name.
In the 2014 article referenced at Naked Capitalism, Bump said “The White House gets to lay down a marker on a lot of things. What generation 2-year-olds (or 32-year-olds) belong to is not one of them.” The same is true of Neil Howe. As Howe himself points out, generational identity is shaped when members of the generation are coming of age and start to perceive themselves as a generation. (pp. 79, 83)
The Zoomers are not scheduled to be a particularly rebellious generation like the Boomers, according to Howe’s cycle theory, but defining their own identities seems to be pretty critical to the formation of any durable generalization about a demographic age cohort. I will offer my own experience as an example. This ties in with another common criticism of Strauss-Howe generational analysis—that boundaries cannot be precisely defined.
The fact that the boundaries are fuzzy does not seem like much of a criticism to me, but perhaps that’s because I am personally invested in one of those boundary disputes. I was born in 1963, at the tail end of the Baby Boom by the census bureau definition. I did not feel a lot in common with the Woodstock generation, and I was pretty resentful of the crappy economy that I joined in 1981 as a restaurant worker making slightly above the minimum wage (which promptly stopped rising in 1981 and remained at $3.35 an hour until 1990).
Philip Bump, in the 2014 Washington Post article quoted above, said “Gen X didn't get named Gen X until Douglas Coupland wrote about it in 1991.” But the book Generation X wasn’t about what we call Generation X. It was about tail-end Boomers (like Coupland and me) who felt aimless and alienated because the giant wave of Boomers who went before them consumed all the good stuff like locusts, especially jobs and houses. In Generation X, Coupland called the younger siblings of the protagonists “Global Teens,” and they seemed to have more of a common identity. A major point of the label Generation X was that the protagonists felt invisible, and trying to be a young adult in that transition period was alienating.
For me personally, Coupland’s Generation X was an epiphany and seemed right on point—both the part about transitioning to a new generation, and the part about me and my immediate age cohort slipping through the cracks. Frankly, one of the things that caused me to be positively disposed to The Fourth Turning is Here is that Howe starts Generation X in 1961, making me officially not a Boomer. When Howe correctly says “the term ‘Generation X’ was a self-label first coined and popularized by young literati born between 1961 and 1964” I feel seen. (p.83) But this exemplifies why the transition process is messy, because it is driven by tens of millions of individual reactions by people in their teens and twenties to their perception of the economic opportunities and the cultural identities on offer at a particular time. I don’t see any reason why any post-hoc classification would be less messy.
It seems obvious to me that some people are inclined to follow their older siblings more than others. It makes sense that a generational boundary will be drawn when the number of people who don’t want to follow the people a few years older reaches critical mass. The boundary will ultimately be drawn by the members of the generation themselves when they are in their teens and twenties, as Howe acknowledged even back when he was trying to pre-define the Homelanders (“You can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age”).
Of course, if you’re in the business of drawing generational boundaries, which Neil Howe and his consulting firm definitely are, you are going to compete to identify the new generation as early as possible. The exact tipping point will be hard to define. But since it is a tipping point rather than an abrupt, universal state change, there will be people on both sides of any arbitrary boundary who would rather be on the other side of it. That does not mean that perceived generational cohorts do not exist, or that they have no analytical value.
Many smart commentators have also dismissed generational analysis as “just marketing.” As Lambert Strether has said, “Generational tropes, except in marketing collateral, are a sign of lazy writing and sloppy thinking.” Neil Howe is definitely in the business of marketing, and it shows. But the reason this stuff works is because people care about it. In the internet era, people who are not famous influencers grasp for any sort of identity they can get.
Joe Firestone wrote a guest post at Naked Capitalism back in 2014 about neoliberals stoking generational warfare.
Some of the favored children of the economic elite who have a public presence, work hard in their writing and speaking to divert attention from inequality and oligarchy issues by raising the issue of competition between seniors and millennials for “scarce” Federal funds. That’s understandable. If millennials develop full consciousness of who, exactly, has been flushing their prospects for a decent life down the toilet, their anger and activism might bring down the system of wealth and economic and social privilege . . . .
Firestone goes on to explain why seniors on social security are not the villains. Dean Baker made a similar point here, and so have many others.
Part Two of this series talked a little bit about classifying Howe politically, so it is worth noting that Howe actually wrote a book with leading generational warfare proponent Pete Peterson called On Borrowed Time: How the Growth in Entitlement Spending Threatens America's Future. (Routledge 2004) I don’t plan to read it and won’t link to it, but at the same time I am not willing to toss out the concept of generational analysis just because it has been used for nefarious purposes. To the contrary, I think it is important to figure out what makes generational tropes so compelling.
Good marketing can be extremely powerful. In a time of political volatility, marketing could be the difference maker. And when it comes down to it, even Mr. Strether recognizes that generational differences exist:
As reader know, I strongly deprecate treating (fuzzy-bounded, marketing driven) generations as entities with political agency. (Where is the Boomer lobby on K Street? Does it really make sense to throw a stooped-over, white-haired Walmart greeter into the same bucket as Warren Buffet? And so forth.) That said, there are experiences that people of one age cohort (we’ll call it) have, that others do not. For example, an old-codger like me cannot imagine going to a school with metal detectors at the door, or active shooter drills.
It seems to me the question is not so much whether people from different eras have different experiences (they do), it is whether you can draw boundaries that add something to the analysis, and whether people adopt the labels as part of their identities.
The details of generational analysis are certainly highly debatable. As I said in Part One, “[t]he generations function as a kind of epicycle to keep the cycle on track, but I am not sure whether dividing each cycle into three or five generations might not work just a well.” But it seems indisputable to me that succeeding demographic cohorts drive much political debate and are a major factor in historical and cultural change, largely because the members of each cohort perceive themselves as different from their grandparents, their parents, and sometimes even their older or younger siblings. Maybe that perception is largely driven by media and marketing, but what isn’t these days?
To be fair, Howe recognizes the term Generation Z but argues it is different from his Homelander generation, and the people who use Generation Z are wrong. (pp.86, 167)