Still traveling on family business, but before I move on from Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here, it occurred to me there is one thing I didn’t emphasize enough in my review: Howe predicts a bloody crisis within the next ten years or so, but reading his book actually made me feel more hopeful about the future.
Howe is not the only one who thinks we’re headed for a crisis. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are hammering the big red “crisis” button as hard as they can, just as they have every election year since at least 2000. But it’s not only the politicians this time, it’s most of the electorate. This lamestream news story (NY Times via Yahoo) says the zeitgeist in Iowa this weekend is a “dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”
“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades . . . .
Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”
* * *
“There’s civil war coming; I’m convinced of it,” said Mark Binns, who had heard from two Republican candidates, Haley and Ron DeSantis, earlier that morning.
Binns was hardly the image of a radical: He’s a 65-year-old chemical engineer who lives in Kentucky and was in town for the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit. He voted for Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure whom he will vote for this year.
* * *
Recent polling shows Americans have a gloomier view of the future and express a new openness to political violence.
Of course, the New York Times is openly shilling for Biden. The article labels the concerns of Trump supporters as “false claims” based on “lies” from “conservative media.” The article somehow fails to mention the many legitimate reasons to be concerned about Joe Biden, even as he unleashes genocide in Palestine and stumbles toward World War III in Ukraine without even knowing where his own defense secretary is.
To be clear, I do not support Donald Trump, I do not support Joe Biden, and I do not support the reasoning commonly given by supporters of either old fool. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and all of their supporters appear to be floridly delusional or perhaps in some cases just grifting. Hard to tell these days, but either way our leaders are spectacularly dishonest and incompetent, and there are no emerging alternatives because our fellow citizens do not seem open to anything better.
I started writing again in 2023 because of this sense that “western leadership is failing spectacularly on all the important issues of our day.” My frameworks for looking at the situation are different from the people mentioned in the Iowa article, but the overall sense of impending doom is the same.
So, compared to impending doom, Howe’s prediction that the crisis will probably be over in ten years is a positive breath of fresh air even if I might not like the outcome very much.