Are We Approaching the "Fourth Turning"?

Will a terrible war force America to sober up and restore common sense?

Perhaps it’s just an association of ideas, but the slaughter of the Ukrainian girl, Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, and President Trump writing “Here We Go!” on his Truth Social account in response to a breach of Polish airspace by Russian drones, made me wonder if the “Fourth Turning” is upon us.

The United States can’t even keep known homicidal maniacs off its public transportation, but it still wants to control the world. The murder of Iryna Zarutska from Kiev on a train in Charlotte is especially ironic, given that the U.S. has been fervently baiting the Russian Bear to attack Ukraine for at least a decade. As Hillary Clinton once stated, the objective of this Bear Baiting was to turn Ukraine into a Russian graveyard along the lines of the Soviet Afghanistan adventure in 1979, when the CIA armed “valiant Mujahideen” like Osama bin Laden to teach the Soviets a lesson.

For those unfamiliar with the “Fourth Turning” concept, it comes from Strauss–Howe generational theory, devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describing a recurring generation cycle in American and Western history.

The four turnings are as follows:

1. The High

   • Characteristics: An era of social cohesion, institutional strength, and confident expansion.

   • Societal Mood: Upbeat and collective.

   • Example: The post-World War II era in America.

2. The Awakening

   • Characteristics: A period of spiritual exploration, moral awakening, and social activism.

   • Societal Mood: Passionate, with a focus on individual values and renewal.

   • Example: The counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s.

3. The Unraveling

   • Characteristics: A time when individualism flourishes, and institutions weaken or come under scrutiny.

   • Societal Mood: Discontented and cynical, with a focus on personal rights and consumerism.

   • Example: The period from the 1980s leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

4. The Crisis (The Fourth Turning)

   • Characteristics: A period of profound crisis and upheaval, when the nation faces existential threats and must reinvent itself.

   • Societal Mood: Urgent, with a focus on collective action and rebuilding institutions.

   • Example: Events like World War II or the American Civil War, as well as the predicted period beginning in 2008.

American institutions have been unraveling for some time, and an alarmingly large number of Americans—especially those who infest the mainstream media—have been acting like scalded chimps with zero critical reasoning faculty.

Going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be the apotheosis of deranged folly. President Trump is apparently unwilling or unable to do what John and Robert Kennedy did in 1962, when they defused the Cuban Missile Crisis through a negotiated settlement with Soviet Russia.

In this respect, President Trump has proven to be a colossal disappointment. If it comes to war with Russia, all his achievements in domestic policy will have been for nought, and he will go down in history as just another stupid puppet of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

Could an immensely destructive war—along the lines of World War II, but with much bigger nukes—be the “Fourth Turning” that restores reason to the Americans who survive the conflagration?

An extremely unfortunate feature of the human race is that many of its most intelligent members are incapable of resisting our most destructive instincts. A notable example of this was the extraordinary genius, John von Neumann, who may have been the most intelligent man who has ever lived.

And yet, he vociferously advocated a first-strike nuclear attack on Russia, including Moscow, in the fifties. Von Neumann’s strategic idea of taking out the Soviet Union and totally destroying Moscow and all of its inhabitants was identical to Hitler’s reasoning when he launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

Von Neumann apparently inspired the titular character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece—the greatest depiction of human intelligence unmoored from reasoning, unable to resist our archaic impulses.

Here We Go!