Historical cycles: What if the big crisis we expected already happened?
Maybe the crisis is that the United States is incapable of responding constructively to a crisis.
As the first anniversary of this blog approaches, I’ve been reviewing my meager output to set my agenda for 2025. Quite of few of the posts were about cyclical crisis theories. The first five substantive posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) were about Neil Howe’s 2023 book The Fourth Turning is Here. I also wrote a couple of posts (1, 2) about Peter Turchin’s End Times, and his previous books about his cyclical theory of history.
I don’t normally spend this much time thinking about historical cycles. I bought those books because it certainly feels like Western society is falling apart, and it would be nice to know if there is a reason beyond the obvious fact that we keep electing malicious idiots. I’m back to the subject again because I came across an alternative interpretation of Howe’s Fourth Turning theory, and it ties in with the recent U.S. election.
A very short summary for those who haven’t read Howe’s book or my previous five posts: Howe and his co-author William Strauss predicted in 1997 that in the early 2000s the United States would enter a crisis period they called the Fourth Turning, based on a generational cycle theory of American history. The Strauss-Howe theory holds that a Fourth Turning crisis occurs about every 80 years (or so) and the foundations of the subsequent 80-year cycle are set when Americans overcome their differences and mobilize to meet the crisis.1
Strauss died in 2007. Howe’s solo 2023 book extended the early 2000s crisis timeline, predicting that the crisis might not be wrapped up until around 2032. But not all followers of the Strauss-Howe theory agree. I recently discovered the blog of historian David Kaiser, thanks to a fortuitous link on Naked Capitalism. Kaiser has been blogging about the Strauss-Howe cycle theory for 20 years, but has diverged from Howe’s interpretation since about 2010. Kaiser wrote in August of 2023:
In the previous great crises, the country pulled together under strong political leadership to solve the great crisis, which invariably involved winning a major war. One party—the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans in the early republic, the Republicans after the Civil War, and the Democrats after 1933-45—emerged as by far the stronger party in the next few decades. As Strauss and Howe showed in their earlier books, the great crises changed social relationships at home and created a new national consensus on various issues. That is what they called the "regeneracy" that succeeded the death of the old order. Nothing like that, needless to say—and here Howe and I do not disagree—has happened in the last 23 years—and as readers of my post from July 3, 2010 can confirm, I concluded a long time ago that nothing like that was going to happen. He disagrees.
In short, Kaiser suggests that the crisis of our cycle already happened, but it fizzled and the opportunity to unite the country and do great things is over. Our new agenda is Trump’s version of the agenda set by George Bush the Younger, but we haven’t achieved consensus, nor have we mobilized the resources necessary to accomplish any major domestic goals or win any major foreign wars.
I wanted to share some excerpts from Kaiser’s work because I felt his older posts on the Fourth Turning provided useful context as we all cope with the aftermath of another miserable election cycle. In the early 2000s, Kaiser and other fans of the Strauss-Howe cycle theory were debating whether the September 11 World Trade Center incident had started the national reset that would be expected in a Fourth Turning crisis period. We begin with Kaiser’s early posts describing the agenda pursued by Bush the Younger after the World Trade Center incident. Kaiser is writing about the Strauss-Howe theory specifically, so when he says “crisis,” he means an 80-year cyclical Fourth Turning crisis.
Every great crisis has winners and losers—and losers, as every sports fan knows, have longer memories and bigger incentives than winners. Bush, Karl Rove and the rest of the Republican establishment have managed to forge a coalition of the losers in both of our last two national crises—the business interests who resented the New Deal, and the white Southerners who have never been fully reconciled to the effects of the Northern victory in the civil war. Meanwhile the bi-coastal elite has made the natural but critical mistake of taking its parents’ victories for granted and assuming that nothing, really could change very much. The new conservative coalition, which initially emerged between the 1960s and the 1980s, now may be poised to set the direction of American life for most of our children’s lifetimes.
The Bush Administration, clearly, has a more ideological agenda than any in the second half of the twentieth century. That agenda has been honed and developed by thirty years of work in think tanks, conservative journalistic circles, and on K Street. It involves enormous tax cuts (designed to culminate in a flat tax), a virtual end to federal government regulation, the curtailing of the rights of workers in both the private and public sectors, an erosion of civil liberties, a multi-stage attack on the public educational system, an end to abortion, and an end to restraints on executive power. Abroad, it involves attempts to bring down all perceived enemies of the United States, the weakening of international restraints upon us, and the securing of energy supplies while forsaking conservation measures.
Skipping ahead to 2008, Bush’s agenda was clearly failing. The country was embroiled in Bush’s middle east wars plus a financial crisis, and Barack Obama was elected on a wave of hope for change. The Strauss-Howe crisis era was ongoing, so Barack Obama theoretically had the opportunity to mobilize the country for a different agenda.
He didn’t.
Kaiser wrote a series of posts starting in July of 2010 describing what Obama did instead, and raised the possibility that any national rebirth based on the Bush-Obama legacy would be weak by historical standards, somewhat akin to the contested politics of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age:
Back in the 1990s Strauss and Howe made another prediction: a member of our own Boom generation would lead us in a new world, like the Transcendental Lincoln and the Missionary Franklin Roosevelt. When 9/11 occurred—only 72 years after the beginning the last crisis in 1929—we all held our breaths to see if it might indeed be the beginning of the crisis, or, as they called it, "Fourth Turning." When George W. Bush failed to unite the United States most of us concluded that it was not. But now, I am not so sure—because it seems that George Bush did far more to put the United States on a different path, both at home and abroad, than Barack Obama will be able to do. Let us look, as Al Smith used to say, at the record.
Abroad, George W. Bush abandoned most of the principles that had governed our parents' foreign policies. He denounced a critical arms control treaty, the one that had banned ABMs, and began deploying missiles that still have not been proven to work. The Obama Administration has modified his plans, but it has not abandoned them. He invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on the grounds that we could not allow Al Queda to have safe havens, and we remain in Iraq while escalating our presence in Afghanistan, even though it is not clear that any of this has made us more secure. . . . In the Middle East Bush told Israel it could keep any territory it settled in a peace agreement, and the Obama Administration backed down from its first attempt to challenge that position. . . .
At home, the reckless pursuit of deregulation by every Administration from Reagan through George W. Bush gave us the financial crisis of 2008—but before Bush left office, Henry Paulsen, it is now clear, had managed to make sure that all the banks' losses on derivatives would largely be made good through the huge bailout of AIG. Most importantly, the Bush tax cuts destroyed the surplus that Bush inherited and recreated the permanent deficit so dear to the heart of Ronald Reagan. That, combined with conservative fiscal orthodoxy which Obama seems reluctant to challenge, has crippled the government's response to the highest sustained unemployment since the 1930s. . . .
Perhaps we were wrong; perhaps the crisis did begin with 9/11. Certainly George W. Bush took advantage of the shift in the national mood to move forward on a great many fronts, and his work has proven lasting. . . .
The politics of the Gilded Age were dominated by money. They were much more hotly contested than most people realize. U. S. Grant won two terms by huge majorities, but the next five elections—from 1876 through 1892—were all extremely close, all close enough to be decided by shifting a single state. The Democrats should have regained the White House in 1876 and did so in 1884 and 1892. Our politics may be similarly contested for the rest of my lifetime, since no government will be strong enough, it seems, to embark upon the kind of great crusade at home or abroad that will create a new consensus.
George W. Bush . . . took advantage of a situation not of his own making to transform the nation and the world. Certainly he did a wretched job of it and made the nation and the world worse places in which to live, but having studied many countries in which these great crises or "fourth turnings" have turned out badly, I am not too surprised by that outcome.
George W. Bush was determined to reduce the federal government's share of national income, just as his hero Ronald Reagan had tried (but failed) to do before him, and he had already passed his first round of tax cuts when 9/11 took place. He reacted rhetorically to that event in classic Fourth Turning fashion: he declared, in essence, a third world war, frequently comparing the Islamist threat to those posed earlier by Fascism and Communism. Yet he did not do what Lincoln and FDR did and mobilize large, unprecedented resources to meet that threat. It was the paradox of his rule that the Republicans had decided they could have whatever they wanted on the cheap, and rather than raise taxes, like every other long-term war Administration in American history, they cut them again. That created a permanent deficit of several hundred billion dollars a year. . . . As I mentioned last week, Barack Obama has now passed up two opportunities to return to the Clinton tax rates—under which the United States enjoyed prosperity that it has not known since—and has agreed to make most of those cuts permanent. . . .
In another move, Obama this week signed the Defense bill which guarantees that Guantanamo will remain open . . . . With the single exception of torture, the key aspects of Bush's war on terror, including indefinite detention, targeted killings of suspects, inroads upon civil liberties, and cases against "terrorists" who appear to have been entirely inspired by federal informants, have been either maintained or expanded. The Obama Administration has taken an even harsher attitude towards media leaks than Bush did. In this respect, too, Bush set the tone for the future.
Since the Republican take-over of the House of Representatives in 2010—which was clearly imminent when I wrote my critical post in July of that year—Barack Obama has been unable to accomplish anything significant other than to be re-elected. He has given in to the Republicans on numerous budgetary issues, and would have given in even further if they had been willing to compromise. He has not been able to cope with a series of crises in foreign policy, where he has never shown any particular talent or interest. This past week the New York Times reported that Democrats in Congress, led by Harry Reid, are disgusted by his unwillingness to stand with them and fight the Republicans more actively on almost anything. The story also said that the White House has concluded that presidential speeches on controversial topics do his popularity more harm than good.
Obama won two terms, but basically maintained the agenda set by Bush the Younger. Obama’s successor, Hillary Clinton, lost to Donald Trump. Trump cast himself as a populist rebel, but he also largely continued the Bush-Obama agenda. In a March of 2017, Kaiser summarized the bipartisan Forever Wars in the Middle East:
One function of a Crisis or Fourth Turning is to renew civic virtue and cooperation as the nation copes with internal or external threat. That was what Bush II was trying to do after 9/11, and what Barack Obama might have done, but didn't do, when he came into office. Alas, Donald Trump's new budget is only one more confirmation that 9/11 defined the threat that we would face over the next couple of decades once and for all. Unfortunately, it defined it wrongly.
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Fueled by a post-Cold War fantasy of ruling the world, a resentment of Arab states that would not obey the US, and devotion to the interests of the State of Israel, the Bush Administration also seized upon 9/11 as an excuse to begin a string of endless wars in the Middle East. These wars, too, could have brought the country together and created a new consensus—if they could have been successful. . . .
Meanwhile, using drones, the United States is now identifying and killing "bad guys" from Pakistan to many parts of Africa, even though these targeting killings haven't been any more successful in bringing peace to any areas than they have been for the Israelis who invented the tactic. And we have never had a serious national discussion of this "strategy" and what it is actually doing for us or for the countries where we are applying it. We have appointed ourselves judge, jury and executioner for the whole Islamic world.
Joe Biden beat Trump narrowly in 2020, but didn’t really change anything fundamental about the bipartisan agenda launched by Bush the Younger, and Kaiser’s view that the United States had failed to meet the cyclical crisis really began to solidify.
Two events—9/11 in 2001, and the financial crisis of 2008—did briefly galvanize the nation and offered our leadership the chance to put us on a new path and create a new consensus. Unfortunately, both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations—which in many ways marked a single new period in US history—failed to grasp the opportunity to do so. . . . Because the new crisis failed to solve any big problems in foreign affairs, domestic affairs, or within our political system, we are now sailing in uncharted waters with no idea what the next twenty years have in store. I am now inclined to believe that the whole period of 1774-1964 may, like the Roman Empire, have marked a great exception in human history in which, for various reasons, civic virtue was unusually widespread and civic achievements unusually striking. And because this crisis was a failure, we may have left that era behind, not to return for a very long time.
Importantly, Kaiser pointed out that the political campaigns of both parties during this period focused on socially divisive issues rather than unifying ones. Kaiser concluded that “[t]he nomination and election of Donald Trump, as I have written many times, documented the bankruptcy of our political system and our political elite. Neither party could produce a candidate who could defeat him.”
The GI generation became a Hero generation after it was mobilized for the Second World War, in which about ten million of them served and millions of women worked in factories. By 2012, if not earlier, it seemed obvious to me that while the Millennials might willingly have submitted to such a mobilization after 9/11 or to a different kind comparable to the New Deal's jobs programs after 2008, no such mobilization had taken place. The youngest Millennials, in my opinion, are now 26, and no such mobilization is going to take place.
Which brings us to the November 2024 post recently linked at Naked-Capitalism, in which Kaiser concludes that “on Tuesday we found out where history was heading.” The energy of the early 2000s crisis period has played out, but without producing a viable realignment or a durable majority. Consistent with the agenda set by Bush the Younger, taxes will stay low, deficits will stay high, and the U.S. will continue to cause pointless death and destruction abroad without mobilizing a military that could actually win a major war. Domestically, successive administrations have “failed to provide real relief to the American people” after the financial crisis, and it is clear that “corporate supremacy” is not going to be challenged by either party. Kaiser argues that Trump is a natural result of this sequence of events, and is therefore not a threat to democracy in the sense argued by the Biden and Harris campaigns.
To understand that vote we must put the question of threats to democracy into historical context. Both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were accused of such threats, and of actually becoming dictators, at least as loudly and widely as Trump has been. It is the nature of fourth turnings, when everything is up for grabs, for presidents to need, and use, emergency powers--something for which the Constitution even provides. Their opposition always reacts violently. People like myself endorse what Lincoln did and attack Trump because of their objectives. But we are less than half of the electorate now. Ironically, a New York Times headline this morning explains the result thusly: "Democracy Fears Lost Out to Everyday Worries." The headline is wrong. The CNN exit polls found that 35 percent of respondents thought democracy is "somewhat threatened" and 38 percent pronounced it "very threatened." But they also found that of that 73 percent of the electorate, 37 percent--half--voted for Trump! They hate our establishment for treating Trump, who has expressed many of their resentments as no one else could, as a threat that must be stopped by any means necessary. In that very real sense, Tuesday's election was a victory for democracy--the rule of the people.
Like Kaiser, I expect Trump to be a threat to civil liberties as we understood them in the 1990s, but that has been true of every president since Bush the Younger. But I see no reason to believe that Americans will lose their cherished right to vote every few years for one faction or the other of the quasi-authoritarian Bush-Obama uniparty.
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There seem to be three essential differences between Howe’s 2023 version of the Strauss-Howe theory and Kaiser’s version developed since 2010:
a technical issue of timing based on the generational nature of the theory,
the issue of whether this crisis era is now over, and
the issue of whether it is possible for an American Fourth Turning to fizzle.
With regard to timing, I am not particularly persuaded that the Strauss-Howe theory is exact enough to make mathematical predictions, so I will not address this aspect of the dispute.
With regard to whether the crisis period is over, all I can say is it feels over to me. That is not to say I am happy with the result, I just don’t see any chance that Americans will come together and create an age of renewal. My sense is that most people are exhausted and have had enough of this nonsense, even though the red team and the blue team still hate each other.
Americans have gotten worked up to a fever pitch and looked for leadership several times since 2000. Bush the Younger consciously tried to channel these energies to remake America, but did not mobilize the resources to win his Forever Wars nor did he build a solid economic base. Barack Obama, the Bartleby of American presidents, simply preferred not to. Trump and Bernie Sanders were the only contestants who tried to do anything of substance in the latter half of the crisis period. The Democrat establishment successfully stuck the shiv in Sanders. The Republican establishment failed to do the same to Trump, and here we are. But I don’t see Trump doing much besides implementing a Trumpier version of the Bush-Obama agenda, with more stunts and controversy but not with any different results.
The third difference between Howe and Kaiser is that Howe seems to believe it is impossible for Americans to fail a Fourth Turning test. Howe believes there must be a crisis sufficient to unite Americans, and we will rise to the occasion by 2024 2032. Kaiser obviously believes that we could and did fail.
The point of the Strauss-Howe cyclical theory is that a crisis occurring during the opportune Fourth Turning will convert a fractious population into a cooperative one, and the country will emerge ready for new challenges. But it seems hard to accept Howe’s view that this process must always succeed. Sometimes you lose a big foreign war, or a civil war starts and is never satisfactorily resolved. Or perhaps the whole thing just fizzles, as it seems to have done in our time. Assuming the cyclical theory describes a real phenomenon, it must be possible to waste the opportunity presented by the crisis, and we did.
If the Strauss-Howe theory has merit, and if the Fourth Turning crisis era is over, that does not mean nothing bad can happen. World War One, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all happened during non-crisis periods according to the Strauss-Howe chronology. None of those wars rose to the level of justifying or requiring political consensus and massive sacrifice—indeed, Vietnam did the opposite, destroying the consensus that had sustained a military draft after World War Two. If the Fourth Turning is over, it just means the United States is unlikely to succeed in launching a great war or other national project that requires consensus and sacrifice. That could be a very good thing for the rest of the world, but for the United States it might mean another 60+ years of unpleasant bickering and decline, with oligarchs like Donald Trump and Elon Musk (or Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg if you prefer) mostly in control.
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I started trying to work out a prediction tree based on these two versions of the Strauss-Howe theory, plus the possibility that the Strauss-Howe theory is not valid. That turned out to be a lot of possibilities, and it occurred to me that the Strauss-Howe theory might not be all that predictive—it might work better in hindsight, after the terms of the theory have been fitted to interpretations of the facts. Which would make it an interesting framework for thinking about history (as Howe and Kaiser have done), but perhaps not a predictive theory, at least not at its current level of specification.
Accordingly, rather than trying to map out all the possibilities, it seems to me that the most useful next step is to identify things Donald Trump would need to do if he is going to make a good faith attempt at consolidating power based on the low-voltage, post-crisis version of a political realignment that emerged from the 2024 election. That will probably be the subject of my next post.
The Strauss-Howe theory is much more complicated than that, which is why I wrote 5 posts about it. Turchin also predicts a cyclical crisis with potential for regeneration of civic society in roughly the same time frame, but tying in Turchin’s theory is more than I can do today.