Where We Are in the Cycle

The Long Crisis, Part 1

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. That line gets thrown around so often it’s lost its edge. But there’s a specific theory about how it rhymes, and right now, in the spring of 2026, it deserves serious attention.

In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning, arguing that Anglo-American history follows a predictable cycle of roughly 80 years, divided into four phases they called “turnings.” Each turning lasts about 20 years. Each has a distinct character. And the sequence never changes.

The theory has its critics, and some of that criticism is deserved. It’s pattern-matching across centuries of complex history, and it can feel like reading tea leaves if you squint too hard. I’m not going to pretend it’s a science. Treat what follows as a lens rather than a prophecy, a way of organizing what we’re seeing, held loosely enough to drop if the evidence turns against it. Used that way, it earns its keep. It tells you something useful about where we are and what kinds of futures are still on the table.

The Four Turnings

The cycle works like this.

The First Turning is a “High.” Institutions are strong. Civic life is vibrant. Individualism is suppressed in favor of collective purpose. People trust their leaders and their neighbors. The last American High was the post-World War II era, roughly 1946 to 1964. Strong economy, strong institutions, strong conformity. If you’ve ever wondered why your grandparents seemed to trust the government in a way that feels alien today, this is why. They lived through a High.

The Second Turning is an “Awakening.” The younger generation, raised in the comfort and conformity of the High, rebels against it. Institutions come under attack, not from external enemies but from internal critics who find them stifling and soulless. The last Awakening was the 1960s through the early 1980s. Counterculture, Watergate, the Jesus Movement, the rise of identity politics. The conformity of the 1950s didn’t just crack. It shattered.

The Third Turning is an “Unraveling.” Institutions weaken further. Individualism peaks. Culture fragments. Civic trust erodes. People retreat into private life, personal identity, and tribal affiliations. The last Unraveling ran from roughly the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s. Culture wars, political polarization, the hollowing out of civic organizations, declining trust in every major institution. Bowling alone.

The Fourth Turning is a “Crisis.” The accumulated institutional rot and social fragmentation produce a genuine existential threat that forces society to either rebuild or collapse. Past Fourth Turnings include the American Revolution (1773 to 1794), the Civil War (1860 to 1865), and the Great Depression and World War II (1929 to 1946). These weren’t just bad times. They were moments when the old order was destroyed and a new one was forged, for better or worse.

One honest caveat before we go further. The Civil War Crisis ran barely five years, not the twenty the model advertises. Strauss and Howe acknowledge it as the cycle’s great anomaly. That’s worth flagging up front, because a framework that has to wave away one of its own central cases isn’t a clock. It’s a rough map, and we should hold it like one.

We Are in the Fourth Turning Right Now

By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning, the current Fourth Turning began around 2008 with the global financial crisis. That tracks. The financial collapse didn’t just wipe out savings and crash the housing market. It destroyed whatever remaining trust Americans had in their core institutions. Banks, regulators, Congress, the media. All of them failed visibly and faced no meaningful consequences.

Everything since then has been consistent with a deepening Crisis era. Political polarization reaching levels not seen since the 1850s. A global pandemic that governments proved incapable of managing competently. The rise of populist movements on both the left and right across the Western world. The erosion of the post-World War II international order. A land war in Europe. A fracturing NATO. And, this year, open military conflict with Iran that the country couldn’t even agree on while it was happening. Any one of these would have defined a decade in calmer times. Stacked on top of one another, in barely fifteen years, they read less like a run of bad luck and more like the signature of an era coming apart.

How Fourth Turnings End

This is where the theory gets useful, because not all Fourth Turnings end the same way.

The theory holds that the era ends in a decisive resolution. The old order breaks and something new replaces it. (That “guarantee” is the theory’s boldest and most contestable claim, and you should keep a thumb on it. History has muddled endings too.) But even granting it, the theory says nothing about whether that resolution is good or bad. The quality of the exit depends on the choices made during the crisis and, above all, on whether the society going through it can generate enough solidarity to build something durable on the other side.

It’s worth being clear about what we can’t know from inside the storm. Fourth Turnings are supposed to accelerate toward a climax, a decisive moment where the crisis reaches maximum intensity. But those climaxes only become legible in hindsight. Nobody marched to Gettysburg knowing it was the turning. The temptation, living through this, is to crown each fresh shock as the climax and brace for resolution. That’s almost always wrong. We may be approaching the decisive moment. We may have already passed through one without recognizing it. Or the real reckoning may still be years out. Mistaking a symptom for the climax is the most common error a contemporary observer makes, so I’m going to try not to make it.

What we can do is ask which kind of exit the crisis seems to be building toward. There are two models, and they produce radically different futures.

The World War II exit is the good version. The crisis was severe (a global depression followed by a global war), but it produced genuine national unity. Americans of different classes, regions, and backgrounds fought together, sacrificed together, and emerged with a shared story about what they’d accomplished. That shared sacrifice gave the post-war institutions their legitimacy. The GI Bill, the interstate highway system, NATO, the UN, Bretton Woods. These weren’t imposed by a ruling class on a resentful population. They were built by a generation that had earned each other’s trust through shared suffering.

The result was a First Turning, a High, that worked. Strong institutions, broad prosperity, high social trust. It had real costs, including enforced conformity, suppressed dissent, marginalized voices, and a sharp expansion of state power that never fully receded. But it held together because the foundation was solid.

The Civil War exit is the other version. The crisis was decisive. The Union won. Slavery ended. But the resolution didn’t produce shared sacrifice or national unity. It produced a winner and a loser. The North told one story about what happened. The South told another. Reconstruction started with genuine ambition and was abandoned within a decade when the political will dried up.

The First Turning that followed, the Gilded Age, had all the surface markers of a High. Rapid industrialization, institutional expansion, economic growth, national confidence. But it was hollow at the center because it was built on an unresolved wound. Half the country never bought in. The “unity” was enforced, not earned. The prosperity was real but concentrated. And the thing that didn’t get resolved, racial justice and the integration of the defeated South, sat underground for decades, poisoning everything it touched, until it exploded again in the next cycle.

Which Exit Are We Getting?

Look around and make your own judgment.

Is the current crisis producing shared sacrifice? Is it generating the kind of solidarity across political, cultural, and class lines that would give new institutions legitimacy? Are Americans, or Westerners more broadly, coming together in response to the threats they face?

Or is the crisis deepening existing divisions? Is it producing winners and losers rather than a shared story? Is half the country looking at the same events and seeing something completely different from the other half?

The conflict with Iran is instructive, not because it was the climax but because it wasn’t, and still couldn’t unify us. The United States entered a major military operation against a sovereign nation with no Congressional vote, no broad allied backing, and no domestic consensus. Whether you think that was justified or reckless, sit with the fact that there was no agreement on something that fundamental. There was a time when a shooting war pulled the country together by reflex. This one pushed it further apart instead, and the next essay is largely about why that single fact matters more than the war’s outcome ever will. A war that can’t manufacture even a week of common purpose tells you more about where we are than any victory could.

NATO’s fracture says the same thing on a larger scale. The post-World War II alliance, the single most successful military partnership in human history, is straining because its members can’t agree on basic questions about when and how to use force. This isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s a civilizational divergence.

None of this looks like the WWII exit.

What Comes Next

If we’re headed for a Civil War-style resolution, the next 20 years look something like this. A decisive outcome to the current crisis that roughly half the population, and half the Western world, doesn’t accept as legitimate. New institutions built to serve the winning coalition rather than the whole society. Economic growth that’s real but unevenly distributed. A surface-level stability that masks deep structural fractures. And a buried wound, something fundamental that didn’t get resolved, that sits and festers until the next crisis cycle forces it back to the surface around 2050.

The Gilded Age that followed the Civil War wasn’t a disaster. For many Americans, it was a time of genuine progress and opportunity. The railroads got built. Industry expanded. The country grew. But it was progress without justice, growth without equity, and power without legitimacy. The bill came due a generation later.

For those of us who care about individual liberty, there’s a further reason to watch which exit we get. Every Fourth Turning ends by concentrating power. That’s how crises are resolved. The only question is whether that power is later constrained by broad, earned consent or wielded by a coalition that doesn’t have to answer to the half it defeated. An exit without legitimacy does more than commit an injustice. It treats freedom as a privilege to be rationed by the winners, and it leaves the individual with the least leverage at the moment he needs it most.

So the question for the next 20 years isn’t whether America, and the West, will be powerful. It almost certainly will be. The question is whether that power will rest on a foundation solid enough to last, or whether we’re building another Gilded Age, impressive on the outside, rotting on the inside, and setting up our children to fight the battles we were too divided to finish.

This series will explore that question across several dimensions: the geopolitics of the US and Europe splitting apart, the values divergence driving that split, the structural traps facing both sides, and what the next two decades most likely look like for both. The Strauss-Howe framework isn’t prophecy. But it’s the best map we have for the territory we’re entering, and right now, that territory is getting rougher by the day.

Next: Reading the Climax. Why we can’t know we’re in it until it’s over.