In 1991 and 1997,
two amateur historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe, published two books presenting
a new scheme of American history, Generations:
The History of America’s Future, and The
Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy.
Strauss was a lawyer who had worked in Congress and become a very
successful entertainer as producer of the Capitol Steps comedy troop; Howe had
abandoned graduate study in history and become a speechwriter for the Concord
Coalition think tank. No contemporary professional academic would ever have
attempted, much less completed, books like these. They divided the American people into
generations and American history into eras of approximately 80 years in length,
what they called a saeculum. Each
saeculum concluded with a great crisis, what they called a Fourth Turning,
which marked the death of an old order, the triumph of a new set of beliefs,
and the creation of a very different America.
These crises had indeed occurred at regular intervals: the Revolution
and the Constitution (1774-1794), the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (about
1861-8), and the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War
(1929-45). Doing the math in the early
1990s, they predicted a fourth one beginning sometime between 2005 and
2015. That prediction--that the United
States would in the early years of the 21st century find itself in
another great crisis that would reshape American life at home and our role
abroad—has now come true. It has not,
however, turned out in the manner that they had hoped, for reasons which they
could not foresee.
The reception of
Strauss and Howe’s ideas has varied widely.
The reviews of their books were decidedly mixed. Their most enduring contribution will
apparently be the term the Millennial generation, which they coined in the
early 1990s to describe children born since 1982, and whom they expected, quite
correctly, to be very different from Generation X. With the exception of myself, one other now-retired
professional historian and a few social scientists, professional academics have
taken almost no notice of them. I have
incorporated their insights into two books on different eras of recent history,
and have also applied their model to Western Europe.[1] The corporate world, on
the other hand, became very interested in their generational analyses, and
Strauss (who died of cancer in 2007) and Howe have been much in demand as
corporate speakers, discussing the managerial and marketing implications of
their views of different generations.
And meanwhile, thanks to social media, a nationwide network of acolytes
has grown up, continually exploring the implications of their theories for
history, literature, films, education, and just about everything else.
Again and again
in American history, new generations have destroyed an old order. In the second half of the 18th
century, a new King, George III, tried to impose larger burdens on his American
colonies. They disputed his right to do so, fought a war against him, and
eventually won their independence and wrote a new Constitution. The Founders generally viewed slavery as an
unfortunate evil, confined it to where it already existed, and expected it to
die off, carefully omitting any explicit mention of it from the
Constitution. But the generation born
after the birth of the new Republic—the Transcendental generation, as Strauss
and Howe called them—put slavery at the center of our political life. While northern abolitionists demanded its
extinction, southern fire-eaters praised it as a positive good and demanded
that it be extended both to the west and to the south. The Webster and Clay generation, the
Compromise generation, had been born early enough to remember Washington in the
White House. They fought valiantly to
keep the Union together, but when they died the civil war became
inevitable. One key American who had
foreseen this was Abraham Lincoln, who anticipated Strauss and Howe’s theory
very accurately in a speech he gave in Springfield, Illinois when he was not
yet 30 years old.[2] In 1861, Lincoln defined the secession crisis
as a test of whether a democratic government could maintain itself against a
rebellion. Thanks to him, the war ended with the reunion of the nation and the
end of slavery. Unfortunately, determined white southerners restored white
supremacy within another decade, while corporations and urban machines took
over politics in the north.
Corporate
America ruled the world left behind by the Civil War. The Gilded Age saw the growth of huge
fortunes, frequent booms and busts, and widespread poverty. Two new generations, the Progressives
(children during the Civil War) and the Missionaries (born in its wake) reacted
by arguing that science and reason could reorder modern life and create a
better world. When economic catastrophe
struck the country in 1929, the leading member of the Missionary Generation,
Franklin Roosevelt, led a crusade to remake our economic life based upon moral
principles, rather than the pure pursuit of private gain. Banking was tightly restricted, labor unions
won federal protection, the New Deal built new roads, bridges and schools, and Congress
passed social security. Then, when the
world war broke out, Roosevelt, as I showed in my last book, recognized it as a
struggle to define not only the future of the United States, but of the whole
planet. We prevailed.[3] Roosevelt had an even more acute sense of the
80-year rhythm of American history than Lincoln, and more than once he compared
his own era to the period of the Revolution and that of the Civil War.
In the wake of
the victorious war—and especially in the early 1960s—another generation, the GI
or “greatest” generation (Strauss and Howe used GI), extended Roosevelt’s work
still further. They built interstate
highways, ended legal segregation, and vastly expanded public education. They also put American troops on the borders
of Communism around the world. They had
numerous progeny—the Boom generation—whom they simply assumed, as parents so
often do, would follow in their footsteps.
But that was not to be, largely, but not solely, because of the GIs’
catastrophic mistake, the Vietnam War.
The Boom generation was questioning by nature, and eagerly sought out
the flaws in their parents’ edifice.
They argued that women enjoyed inferior status, that civil rights
legislation was not enough, and that, as one of their most famous members
argued in a valedictory address in 1969, we needed “more immediate, ecstatic,
and penetrating modes of living.”[4] Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they
insisted on defining good and evil according to their own lights. In academia, they rapidly concluded that no
one had had a truly important idea before about 1968. While the Missionaries and the GIs had tried
to organize society and the world, the Boomers focused above all on individual
self-expression. They also led a
religious revival and an unprecedented growth of religious influence within
politics. Meanwhile, they took their parents’
and grandparents’ economic and social achievements for granted. In 1993, a Boomer reached the White House.
It was at this
point that Strauss and Howe—two Boomers who had grasped that history had not
begun with their own generation--stumbled upon the overarching pattern of
American history and predicted another coming crisis. The
Fourth Turning in particular focused on the immediate future. Written in the midst of the economic boom of
the 1990s, after two decades of sexual license and bitter conflict over social
issues, it anticipated that some striking event, a catalyst, would force the
nation to organize to save itself. Once
again, they expected a leader like Lincoln or FDR to emerge, and once again
they thought the heroic virtues of courage and sacrifice would become crucial
to the nation’s survival. In the
concluding chapter of The Fourth Turning,
which appeared in 1997, the authors tentatively listed five possible scenarios
that might trigger the crisis. In the
first, one or more states laid claim to federal revenues and defied the federal
government. In the second, terrorists
threatened American cities with nuclear weapons. In the third, an impasse between the Congress
and the White House led to a government shutdown. Their fourth scenario turned on an epidemic
of a new virus, and in the last, Russian attempts to regain former Soviet
territories brought Russia and the United States to the brink of war. Perhaps at this point, even skeptical readers
will have to agree that Strauss and Howe were on to something.
Now, nearly
twenty years after The Fourth Turning
appeared, students of generational theory agree that we are in the crisis they
predicted, but they differ over when it began, how far along it is, and how it
is going to turn out. Neil Howe dates
the beginning of the crisis only to 2007, and until July 2010, I agreed. But at that point, I decided that he and I
had been mistaken.[5] It was suddenly clear that Barack Obama was
not going to reverse any of the major changes in American domestic and foreign
policy that had been undertaken by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Bush was, in fact, the Lincoln or FDR of our
time, however much he may have differed from them in values, vision, and
ability. He, not Obama, created the new
order that replaced New Deal America, and the changes his Administration
implemented will define American life and our role in the world for decades to
come.
When 9/11
occurred it was tempting to believe that it was the catalyst for the new
crisis. Both Strauss and Howe speculated
about this possibility, but when 9/11 failed to lead to the kind of changes
they had in mind—specifically, a more civic spirit and a decline in the
importance of social issues—they both decided that it had not. So did I. Now I would date the beginning of the Fourth
Turning not on September 11, 2001, but in November and December of 2000, when
the Republican Party, taking advantage of its control of the government of the
key state of Florida and the conservative majority that it had put in place on
the Supreme Court, managed to thwart the expressed will of the voters of
Florida and the nation and get George W. Bush into the White House.[6] That, like the prior impeachment of President
Clinton on truly laughable grounds, confirmed that the Republicans had no
respect whatever for competing views, the law, or the traditions of the nation,
and that they would do whatever was necessary to get what they wanted. Our fourth great crisis, it turns out, has
been a second, non-violent civil war, in which Republicans have fought to undo
the history of the twentieth century with far more zeal than Democrats have
fought to preserve it. That is why they, rather than the Democrats,
will emerge as the victors in the current crisis—whether they regain the White
House in 2016 or not.
Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld and their extragovernmental allies such as Grover Norquist did not
wait for 9/11 to begin implementing their agenda. Cheney’s energy task force, which met in
secret, evidently laid out the strategy for US energy independence, partly with
the help of fracking, that we have been pursuing ever since. In 2003 the Republican Congress slipped an
amendment to the Clean Water Act into a larger bill that made fracking exempt
from regulation by the EPA. Inheriting a
budget surplus, Bush immediately put through the first of several rounds of tax
cuts, most of which remain in place, and created a permanent federal deficit. His
Administration, as is well documented, began planning the invasion of
Iraq. Then came 9/11, a shock probably
without parallel in American history—and George W. Bush knew what to do with
it.
Bush himself may
never have read Generations or The Fourth Turning, but I would not be
at all surprised if Karl Rove had. A
Texas friend of mine has pointed out that John Sharp, a Texas politician close
to Bush who is now the Chancellor of Texas A & M, frequently mentioned
Strauss and Howe on his website. When I personally queried Rove’s
administrative assistant as to whether Rove had read the books, she said his
schedule was too full to respond. Certainly
Bush’s response to 9/11—to declare a generational struggle, a global battle
against terrorism that might last for decades—was very much in the spirit of Lincoln
and FDR. More importantly, Bush
immediately and explicitly repudiated some of the key foreign policy principles
of earlier generations. He approved the
torture of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, his Administration
kidnapped and incarcerated people, some of them completely innocent, from all
over the world, and he decided to invade Iraq on a flimsy pretext which the UN,
crucially, would not endorse. That was
why his own father, acting through Brent Scowcroft, tried to head off the war,
and several Foreign Service officers resigned in protest. But in the post-9/11 wartime mood, the
opposition to the Iraq war was limited to a tiny minority of the House and
Senate. Bush evidently saw himself as
the new Franklin Roosevelt in at least one respect: he honestly believed that
he need only topple a few dictators, and democracy would spread through the
Middle East. High-ranking Administration
officials spoke freely of impending wars against Iran and North Korea, after
Iraq was taken care of. Bush lined up
behind Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party in Israel, publicly repudiating the
traditional American support for the 1967 borders. A new national security
strategy replaced the philosophy of the old nonproliferation treaty with a
declaration that the United States would unilaterally decide who could possess
certain weapons and who could not.
The results
have, of course, been very different from what Bush anticipated. When things began to go badly, beginning with
the failure to find a WMD program in Iraq, the Bush Administration undertook
vendettas against troublesome domestic opponents like Joseph Wilson. Bush’s response to the opening stages of his
great crusade makes an interesting contrast with both Lincoln and FDR. In 1861 both the North and the South
confidently expected the war to be over by Christmas, but when things went
badly, Lincoln set about mobilizing armies of unprecedented size. Roosevelt, as I have shown, asked in July
1941—five months before the United States entered the Second World War—for an
estimate of what it would require to defeat all
our potential enemies, and that estimate was ready by September and became the
basis for our war plans and our victory.
Bush, confronted with the inadequacy of our forces to achieve the
results he had in mind, did nothing and continued cutting taxes. Convinced, like so many of his contemporaries
all across the political spectrum, of his own moral rectitude, he apparently
believed that he could have anything he wanted just by wishing for it. Meanwhile, in response to the “global war on
terror,” a new military-intelligence complex grew up in the Washington suburbs,
draining away money from domestic needs and creating a permanent lobby for a
permanent war.
After winning
re-election in 2004 by quite a narrow margin, Bush hoped to privatize Social
Security. He could not however do so, and
meanwhile, Hurricane Katrina exposed the inability of the federal government to
function effectively. The war in Iraq
reached its most critical stage in 2006-7, but General Petraeus managed to
bring the Sunni areas under control.
Still, the Bush Administration was so unpopular that it lost control of
Congress in the 2006 elections, and some of us looked forward to a New
Deal-style Fourth Turning under a Democratic president. Then, in 2007-8 came the Great Recession.
The collapse of
our major financial institutions was also, of course, a very generationally
inspired event. Roosevelt and the
Congress had separated investment and commercial banking with the
Glass-Steagall Act and had imposed such strict regulations on banking that for
several decades, banking was no longer a good way to get rich in America. But those regulations had begun to loosen in
the 1980s, and the Clinton Administration, itself utterly in thrall to Wall
Street, had overseen the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Since then we have entered a
new era of booms and busts, of which 2007-9 was of course the worst. Meanwhile, income inequality has reached
staggering proportions. To many of us,
in 2009, when Barack Obama entered office with 60 votes in the Senate and a
substantial majority in the House, it seemed time for him to revive the spirit
and some of the measures of the New Deal.
That, as it turned out, was not to be.
Several
important factors kept the nation going in essentially the same direction in
economics and foreign policy. To begin
with, the combination of Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
had created a permanent deficit of about $500 billion a year even before the
crash, and the government therefore lacked the available resources needed for a
successful countercyclical policy that would do more than simply stop the
economic bleeding, as the stimulus did. Secondly—in
sharp contrast to 1933—there was a great shortage of even moderately left-wing
economists, reformers and politicians who would provide the advocacy for real
institutional change, and the energy to make it work. The New Deal had begun approximately 40 years
after the dawn of the Progressive Era, but liberalism, and especially
government regulation, has been on the decline since the late 1960s. The Republican Party, meanwhile, decided to
do everything it could to make Obama fail, and completely opposed everything he
did, making it much harder for him to accomplish very much even in the first
two years of his Administration, when he controlled Congress. It was impossible in any event to undo many
of the Republican achievements of the previous 40 years, such as the re-shaping
of the judiciary, and thus, the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United
decision, with fateful consequences, during Obama’s first term.
Last and hardly least, there was Barack Obama
himself—a man, it rapidly became clear, who trusts the system which has been so
good to him for the whole of his adult life.
The appointments of Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury and Larry
Summers as his chief White House economic adviser told us all we needed to know
about his plans. Obama agreed, in
effect, that the system that they had created under Clinton merely needed a bit
of tinkering and a huge bail-out from the Federal Reserve. As a result, and despite Dodd-Frank, that
system remains in place today. That was
not all. Obama, temperamentally, is not
a crisis President. Both Lincoln and
especially FDR knew how to arouse the nation’s anger against enemies foreign
and domestic. That is not Obama’s
style. He is not a Boomer, and has made
clear that he wanted to put Boomer conflicts behind us.[7] Because he wanted to put an end to the
partisan divisions of the 1990s, he allowed the Republicans, and especially the
Tea Party, to turn most of the nation’s anger at the big banks and mortgage
holders against his own Administration. Obama
never wanted to be FDR. He wanted to be
a combination of Eisenhower and JFK, as shown, very revealingly, by his
declaration some years ago that we faced a “Sputnik moment.” “The shadow of
crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong,” he declared early in
2015. He would have been a fine
President in an era of consensus—but that is not the nature of our times.
Obama in 2009 made a fatal political miscalculation. When Roosevelt entered office after three
years of depression in 1933, he managed to help millions of Americans improve
their lot during the next two years, and was rewarded by even larger
Congressional majorities after 1934.
Obama had to do something similar, such as providing relief for
delinquent mortgage holders—but he did not.
The Republicans swept House elections and took over key state
governments in 2010. Any chance of a liberal regeneracy died for the remainder
of his term and the foreseeable future, thanks to relentless Republican
gerrymandering in states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. And the Republican propaganda machine has
managed to define the public debate on several important issues, scaring
Democratic candidates away even from taking credit for the Administration’s
biggest achievement, Obamacare.
Bush’s
influence, meanwhile, has been even more enduring in foreign policy. Obama has ordered that torture cease, although
he did so in a way the leaves any future President free to resume it. He has also reached a nuclear deal with Iran
and opened diplomatic relations with Cuba.
But at the same time, he has retained two crucial elements of Bush’s
disastrous policies in the Middle East.
During the Arab spring he assumed, like Bush, that the fall of any
authoritarian regime must be a good thing and a step towards democracy. These hopes have been seriously disappointed
in Egypt and even more in Libya, where his successful attempt to bring down
Qaddafi has led to anarchy. For years he
has advocated the removal of Bashir Assad in Syria, even though this would
almost surely be followed by bloodbath comparable to what happened in Iraq. He has done nothing effective to stop
Israel’s move towards the annexation of the West Bank and a one-state
solution. And although he pulled
American troops out of Iraq, he has now committed us to war against ISIS. Make no mistake: George W. Bush is largely to
blame for ISIS. Removing Saddam Hussein
ignited a very bloody civil war between the majority Shi’ites and the minority
Sunnis, and it is now well documented that Iraqi Sunnis turned to ISIS when the
Maliki government continued to persecute them.
ISIS—a direct offshoot of Al Queda in Iraq-- is now a magnet for
disaffected young Muslims all over the world, and American attacks only make it
more so. Obama has not come close to
acknowledging that the nations of the Middle East will have to work out their
political problems on their own.
The nature of
today’s Democratic Party has also militated against any fundamental change of
course in either economic or foreign policy.
Simply put, those are not the things that Democratic activists care
about, and have not been for decades.
They care about climate change and the environment, and the status of
women, minorities, immigrants, and gay men and women. And indeed, this crisis is going to end,
apparently, with gay marriage firmly established within our culture, and with
the rights of upper-class women very much intact. As a result, the Democratic Party depends for
its victories in presidential elections upon cultivating those communities, and
upon young people, the majority of whom also support these positions. This coalition won Obama a solid re-election
victory two years ago, but it is not at all clear that they will do the same
for another Democrat in 2016.
Bernie Sanders’s
emergence as a serious candidate has interesting generational
implications. Sanders is nearly old
enough to FDR’s death, and like Roosevelt, he is making a moral attack on our economic system which evidently has a good deal
of appeal. But even so, there does not
seem to be much chance that next year’s election will undo what has happened in
the last fifteen years. If a Republican
wins next year’s election, the dismantling of the Great Society, the New Deal,
and the Progressive Era will accelerate.
If either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is elected, more stalemate
is likely, since the Republicans are almost certain to control the House and
retain more than 40 votes in the deadlocked Senate. All-out Republican political warfare has
continued during the last three years.
The Benghazi investigation, we now know, was an attempt to once again
use subpoena power to embarrass a presidential candidate named Clinton. Even if Clinton wins, her track record
suggests that she will be just as much a free-marketeer and foreign
interventionist as Bush or Obama. Sanders would try for new policies, but he
could not do much without a Republican Congress.
In the
Strauss-Howe historical cycle, Crises give way to Highs—consensus periods in
which the differences between the two parties shrink, ideology fades into the
background, and respect for institutions rises once again. The Highs of American national history
include the period from Jefferson to Monroe, the Gilded Age, and “the fifties,”
really the years 1946-64. The first and
third of those eras were relatively prosperous and institutionally
creative. The Gilded Age was much less
so—and it is clearly towards the Gilded Age that we seem to heading. Writing in 1870 about how financiers Jay
Gould and Jim Fisk had nearly brought down the currency of the United States
with irresponsible speculation, Henry Adams concluded that their Erie Railway,
a typical example of great new corporations, had “shown its power for mischief,
and has proved itself able to override and trample on law, custom, decency and
every restraint known to society, without scruple, and as yet without
check. The belief is common in America
that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than the Erie. . .will
ultimately succeed in directing government itself.”[8] Now we have reached that point once again.
If the Crisis
ends sometime between 2016 and 2020, the next twenty years will see America
more and more in thrall to its corporations, with inequality increasing still
more. While the upper reaches of society
will be open to women, minorities, and gays, the lower reaches will
increasingly have to fend for themselves, regardless of race, creed, gender, or
sexual preference. Undocumented
immigrants may well continue to make up a substantial portion of the work
force. The energy industry and the
financial sector will essentially control government at every level, just as
the “trusts” and railroads did in the late nineteenth century. The endless war in the Middle East will
continue. Periodic terrorist attacks at home will occupy much too much of our attention, and keep that war going as well. Protests will be shrill,
relatively unorganized, occasionally violent, and generally ineffective, like
the Wobblies and Coxey’s Army. Indeed,
the Occupy movement and the Black Lives Matter movement already fit this
pattern, as observers such as Oprah Winfrey have noted. Intellectual life will stagnate, in part
because rampant individualism rules the academy as well. We cannot yet say what the effect of the
decline and fall of magazines, newspapers, and even serious films will be, but
there is little cause for optimism. It
is possible, of course, that some genuine national catastrophe or even a
massive foreign war could still force the nation to pull together, but I will
be very surprised if it does. We lack
the capacity for mobilization and organization that earlier generations had—and
so, for better or for worse, do the other major states of the world.
There are many
broader lessons from what we have been through.
The Republicans have won a series of spectacular victories on the
economic front because they have been trying so much harder than the Democrats
for the last forty years. Conservative
business interests saw themselves as the losers in the last crisis, and their
children have been fighting hard and well to redress the balance since
1964. Liberals, meanwhile, took their
parents’ achievements for granted and focused upon a relatively narrow set of
issues. Strauss and Howe argued that the
movement of history is cyclical, but not linear. The decline of civic culture was very
noticeable to older, educated observers after the Civil War, just as it has
become obvious to many of us now.
Meanwhile, by the time the new Crisis ends, a new generation of
Prophets, parallel to the Transcendentals, the Missionaries, and the Boomers,
will have begun to be born. Growing up an
era of inequality and chaos, they will, I predict, grow up to be young adults
dedicated to order and justice. Slowly but
surely, they may begin to reverse these trends by about the middle of the
century. That is the way in which man,
again and again, has restarted the clock of history, and we owe it to William
Strauss and Neil Howe for bringing it to our attention in time at least to
understand the troubling times in which we live.
[1]
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy,
Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War(Cambridge, Mass., 2000); David
Kaiser, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led
the Nation into War(New York, 2014); and David Kaiser, Neither Marxist nor
Whig: The Great Atlantic Crises, 1774--1962, and the Foundations of Domestic
and International Order" by David Kaiser, The Monist, vol. 89, no.
2, pp. 325-355.
[3]
See Kaiser, No End Save Victory.
[4]
This was, of course, Hillary Rodham.
[5]
See my blog post, “The Regeneracy may not be televised,” July 5, 2010, http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html.
[6]
For the record, it is clear, to begin with, that the government of Florida, led
by Jeb Bush, had purged more than enough minority voters from its rolls in the
months before the election to have given Al Gore a clear majority. Secondly, in one of the more influential
accidents of history, the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County cost Gore
another several hundred votes. Lastly, the most thorough study of the voting,
completed well after the election, found that a complete recount of the state
would in fact have shown Gore to be the winner.
[7]
Before Strauss and Howe the Baby Boom generation was defined demographically,
to include those born from 1946 through 1964.
They described the Boom generation based on life experience, and dated
it from 1943 through 1960—in other words, anyone who does not remember FDR, but
does remember JFK. Obama, like the vast
majority of Americans born in 1961 or later, does not identify as a Boomer, and
he had a classic Generation X childhood, raised by a single mother, a
stepfather, and his grandparents.
[8]
Henry Adams, “The New York Gold Conspiracy,”
in George Hochfield, ed., The
Great Secession Winter of 1860-61 and other Essays(New York: Sagamore
Books, 1958), p. 189.
