Thirty years later, the answer emerges

 In 1994, at my 25th Harvard reunion, I happened to meet Bill Strauss.  A lawyer by training and originally a congressional staffer by trade, Bill was now the co-founder of the comedy troupe the Capitol Steps and the other of several books, including Generations: The History of America's Future, co-authored by Neil Howe.  We talked about contemporary politics and I got some of the flavor of his generational thinking.  More importantly, when I returned to Rhode Island, I picked up Generations from the new book shelf at the Naval War College Library and began reading it.  I was so excited that I could hardly sleep for most of a week, and I found my life changed, changed utterly.  A terrible beauty was born.

Bill, who became a close friend until his very untimely death in 2007, later described the writing of Generations.  It began as an attempt to identify different generations of Americans and to evaluate their particular contributions.  In the midst of their research, however, they noticed a similarity between the political climate and generational constellation of the 1850s on the one hand and the early 1990s on the other.   A few more logical steps led them to their key finding. The history of the United States could be broken into 80-year cycles, starting in the early colonial era.  Each cycle concluded with a great crisis: King Phillip's War in the late 17th century, the Revolution and adoption of the Constitution in the 18th (1774-94), the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68 or so), and the Depression and the Second World War  (1929-45).  In each case, the crisis ultimately created a new United States, based on new values and institutions that endured for about 60 years.  As the generation that had been young adults during the crisis died off and the post-crisis generation began to come into power, those values and institutions began to crumble.  The crisis, an era of intense and sometimes violent political conflict, determined the shape of the new era to come.  In the last two crises of the Civil War and 1929-45, a particular strong leader--Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt--emerged to lead the nation and redefine its values.  Now Bill and Neil (as I have been calling them for nearly thirty years) predicted that something similar would happen between 2004 and 2024.  Shortly after I got to know Bill, they amplified that prediction in another book, The Fourth Turning--their synonym for crisis--that appeared in 1997.  History has vindicated that prediction, and on Tuesday we found out where history was heading.

As I have mentioned here many times, the publication of The Fourth Turning also led to the establishment of a remarkable online forum to discuss, and expand upon, its conclusions.  Another seven years later, in 2004, I started this blog.  Both have allowed me continually to refine my ideas about generations and "turnings" (the roughly twenty-year periods into which they divided each 80-year saeculum) and to assess where we were in the cycle.  When 9/11 hit--and this can be well documented on the archived online forum if anyone wants to--Bill Strauss assumed that this was the beginning of the crisis.  This has been hotly debated for many years since, especially after the financial crisis of 2008.  I am now quite convinced that the crisis actually began about ten months earlier, during the 2000 election controversy, but it really got going after 9/11 and it has been persisting--albeit in slow motion, in comparison to the earlier crises--ever since.  Now we know where it was going.

In 2001 and again in 2009, two presidents--George W. Bush and Barack Obama--had the opportunity to step into the role of the "Gray Champion," the generic term Bill and Neil used for history's Lincolns and FDRs.  Bush, I am convinced, consciously tried to do so.  I do not think that he had read Generations or The Fourth Turning, but I definitely think that Karl Rove had, and the speeches that Rove helped Bush draft for the whole of his presidency dripped with the rhetoric of previous crises.  Bush promised a worldwide crusade for democracy that would end terrorism and reshape the world, using American force to remove any hostile regimes that might pose a danger to the United States. (We must remember that we did not in 2001 regard Russia or China as threats.)  He explicitly echoed the rhetoric of the Second World War and the Cold War.  In the first two years after 9/11 our entire political establishment and most of the country lined up behind him as he announced the impending invasion of Iraq.  He also seized emergency powers, as Lincoln and FDR had, to deal with terrorism. His administration had every intension of following up the Iraq invasion with similar strikes upon the other members of his "Axis of evil," Iran and North Korea.  Two blind spots, however, doomed this project and ultimately turned the nation against Bush and what he stood for.  First, he tried to fight a global war on the cheap, cutting taxes instead of raising them and buying new military arguments that technology could take the place of manpower.  Secondly, the overthrow of regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq led to nothing but chaos.  Nonetheless, he created a new military-industrial-intelligence complex, and his successor Barack Obama continued much of the war on terror and the regime change policy himself, with new disasters in Libya and Syria as a result.  A similar policy has now brought the Biden administration to the brink of war with Iran in alliance with Israel.  None of this has done any good for the American people or the broader world, which now faces completely different threats.

Meanwhile, the abandonment of the New Deal's very successful effort to regulate financial markets and check the growth of wealth that had begun in the 1970s and accelerated under Reagan had led under Bush to a speculative catastrophe in the housing market and the greatest crash since 1929--exactly 79 years later.  That allowed the Democrats to regain both houses of Congress and then, behind Barack Obama, the White House.  He entered office with freedom of action comparable to that that Roosevelt had enjoyed in 1933--but he failed to use it.  The Democratic Party had abandoned the New Deal tradition, and Obama's advisers repudiated it as well.  They claimed to restore the economy "from the top down" instead of "from the bottom up," and substituted the Federal Reserve Board's massive infusion of credit, buying up worthless assets, for FDR's big public employment programs.  Obama made health care his biggest domestic priority, and although he passed it, it could not go into effect until 2013.  And, reflecting his own iron grip on his emotions, Obama failed to mobilize the nation's anger against the financial community--as FDR had--and allowed Republicans to mobilize it against him instead.  And so it was that just eighteen months into the Obama presidency, on July 5, 2011, I wrote what was until now the most important post that I have ever done here.  I could see that Obama was not going to undertake another New Deal, and that the era of corporate supremacy would continue into the High that would follow the crisis.  It was clear by then that he was about to lose the House of Representatives because he, unlike FDR, and failed to provide real relief to the American people in the first year and a half of the crisis.  And so he did, and he never regained it.

Neither I nor anyone else, however, realized how far the alienation of the American people from its bipartisan ruling elite had gone at that time.  Both Democratic and Republican politicians were still living off of the legacies of earlier generations--FDR, Kennedy and LBJ for the Democrats, and Reagan for the Republicans.  They had collaborated in the neoliberal policies of free trade and free markets that had stopped the economic progress of the lower half of the population while enriching the top few percent.  And the depth of their alienation from the voters opened up, for the first time, an opportunity for a complete outsider to upset the political order and move into the White House.

Much has been written about Donald Trump, but not enough of it, it seems to me, from a generational perspective--largely because the nation's editors don't want to recognize a fellow Boomer.  He (like George W. Bush before him, as I pointed out in one of my very first posts on this blog) is in key ways an archetypal Boomer, very reminiscent of the violent student radicals who first brought Boomers to the nation's attention in the late 1960s.  Like most of us, he owed his comfortable childhood to the successes of our parents' generation and specifically to his own father.  Like the protesters, he showed from the beginning of his career a complete contempt for established principles and ways of behaving.  Confronted by any opposition, he simply shouted it down, and he would never, under any circumstances, admit that he was wrong.  He turned himself and his name--not his buildings--into his product.  And he made a career of saying outrageous things--a key tactic of the student protesters who violated every language taboo as a means of disrupting society.  He started his presidential campaign in 2015 in exactly that way, and within less than a year he had wiped out the entire Republican establishment.  Using the same tactics in the general election, he won a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton, who like Kamala Harris embodied one of the principles of the new Democratic party: that gender and race were in themselves critical qualifications for high office, because women and minorities had earned high office to make up for centuries of oppression.

Trump in office repudiated three key tenets of status quo politicians: that immigration was good, that free trade benefited the US, and that we had a right and a duty to affect all critical conflicts overseas and to spread democracy.  None of those stances, as far as I can see, cost him any popularity among average Americans.  Because he was an outsider, he somehow grasped what no establishment figure ever has:  that much of our population no longer accepted much of what the establishment believed.  And he would almost surely have been re-elected in 2020, I think, had it not been for the third great crisis of the last 24 years, COVID.  The nation under his leadership took the critical step in combating that crisis, the development of an effective vaccine, but we were now so divided that the experience of the pandemic only made our divisions worse. Despite COVID, Trump very nearly did win re-election. When he lost, he violated yet another taboo, trying to subvert the electoral process and provoking an insurrection that led rioters inside the Capitol.

The election returned the Democratic establishment under Joe Biden--who had repeatedly failed to emerge as a national leader in his own right before becoming Vice President--to power.  The establishment now assumed that Trump had discredited himself among the voters by violating establishment taboos, and that they could safely ignore him.  When it began to be clear that he remained a threat, they turned to the criminal justice system to try to eliminate it.  Trump however had used his four years in office to pack the federal courts and the Supreme Court. Lower court judges have stalled or even tried to halt prosecutions against him, and the Supreme Court has now endorsed Richard Nixon's theory of the presidency--that presidents cannot, by definition, break the law in the execution of their duties.  A large portion of the population--at least 50 percent, as it turns out--views those prosecutions as politically motivated and unfair--and there is, I think, more than a grain of truth in those accusations, particularly as regards the New York state trial that convicted him.

Trump did threaten American democracy in November, December and January 2020-21, but the threat failed.  He had plans to threaten it again this year, but it turns out that he did not have to.  He has won a convincing victory fair and square, both for himself and for the Republicans in the Senate and in Congress.   And despite the loud wails of progressive op-ed columnists that have already begun, he did not win based on racism and sexism.  He won because, yet again, an administration had proven deaf to the needs of hundreds of millions of Americans--in this case, the need to combat inflation effectively--and had tried to insist that as responsible adults they had no alternative but to vote for Kamala Harris. Instead, 51 percent of them--including larger numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--voted for Trump, and large numbers stayed at home instead of voting for Harris.  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.

Trump is now, without question, the most significant American political figure of the twenty-first century.  He has reshaped American politics and will indeed reshape American government.  As much as anything else, he, with his Republican acolytes, want to go back 140 years and undo the first major reform of the post-civil war era, the creation of an independent federal civil service selected on merit and protected from political pressure.  He wants to further reshape our economy with new tariffs, and he wants to deport at least ten million immigrants whom our economy really needs.  He will also lift or avoid any new regulation of financial markets, including the new crypto market--steps that will surely lead at some point to yet another crash.  He has both a whole plan and a team-in-waiting to execute plans that may well change the federal government beyond recognition.  Elon Musk's emergence as a critical supporter and collaborator is tremendously significant--it unites Trump with one of the most powerful Silicon Valley disrupters and the newest, fastest-growing sectors of the economy. And as to what he will do in foreign policy, and what consequences it might have, I do not dare speculate.  His first challenge will be Benjamin Netanyahu's explicit desire--stated clearly months ago before Congress--to get the United States to join in a war with Iran.  That may turn out to be a hard sell, because Trump is a sincere isolationist and very risk-averse. Only time will tell.

It will have occurred to many readers that one question remains.  How has Trump, who has a very tenuous grip on reality, cannot absorb real information, and relies on intimidation to get himself through every situation he faces, won the allegiance of the American people?  Why has he not paid a penalty for his complete absence of self-restraint, both personal and political?  I have two answers.  First--trite though it may sound--there is a little bit of Donald Trump in all of us--as Sigmund Freud, among others, certainly understood.  All of us have chafed to some extent under traditional emotional and legal restraints and at some level have dreamt of denouncing them and letting ourselves go.  And indeed, that I think is why the media can't wait to headline Trump's latest outrage.  His rants are a new form of pornography--one apparently of which the public never tires.

More importantly, the loosening of those restraints--personally, culturally, intellectually, and politically--has been perhaps the biggest mission of the whole Boom generation since it reached young adulthood in the late 1960s.  Its first great political victory was the elimination of the military draft, that compelled young men to surrender two years of freedom--and perhaps their lives--for the common good.  They liberated the arts from restrictions on subject matter and language, and tore down successive strictures against various forms of sexual behavior.  They cut taxes and continued ending economic regulations.  They have legalized various forms of gambling.  They destroyed the respect for facts and traditions in my own profession of academia, with fateful consequences.  And under Bush II, they arrogated to the United States to undertake any war anywhere in the world that served its idea of a greater good.  Too many Boomers in too many fields have not allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted.  Seventy years ago, a giant of an earlier generation whom I had the great good fortune to meet, Edward R. Murrow, concluded his broadcast on the evils of another demagogue, Joe McCarthy, with a chilling quote from Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, was not in our stars, but in ourselves."  So it is again.  What my generation has done was only human.  The self-restraint which, as the Founders realized, was essential to make the American experiment work, had weighed upon too many generations for too long.  It could not, human nature being what it is, endure indefinitely, and it didn't.  It had indeed gone too far in some ways, and humanity has benefited from loosening some of those restraints.  Now it will fall to future generations to re-establish some of those restraints and enable us to live together and solve new problems in the large, cooperative communities which their vast numbers now need to survive.