Welcome To The Fourth Turning

May we live in interesting times.

They woke up to one flag flying over the Kremlin. They went to bed with another flag flying over the Kremlin. All in a day.

Wherever you go, I’m calling
Even when you’re breaking my heart
Wherever you go, I’m crawling
Even when we’re falling
Even when we’re falling apart
Yeah, looks like we’re falling apart
- “Fallin’ Apart,” The All-American Rejects

I often wonder what it must’ve felt like for the people of the former Soviet Union on the night of December 25, 1991, watching their country’s flag lowered for the final time, replaced moments later by the flag of the Russian successor state. I wonder if people felt relief? Shock? Anger? Sadness? Joy? Most important, how did people view the future? Did they feel hope? Or was it a sense of doom?

One thing is for sure: everyone felt a strong sense of uncertainty. When life as you know it ends, you have no idea what comes next. We can look to history all we like, and we should, but every society needs to live through its trials and tribulations, the same way we as our parents can’t protect us from every instance of adversity they endured.

I think the lesson the Soviet Union’s final day 33 years ago is that we all need to start imagining a timeline where Old Glory is lowered at the White House or U.S. Capitol, to be replaced by a different flag. It’s hard to imagine, I know. It’s something I didn’t think was possible in my lifetime. But with everything happening at the moment, with the internal situation spiraling out of control throughout the West, previously unthinkable possibilities need to be given serious consideration. If you’re not convinced, just remember: many in the Soviet Union thought the hammer and sickle would never come down from the Kremlin.

Until it did, of course.

Nothing Makes Sense Anymore

For the second time in over half a year, the top leadership of our military have disappeared from public view.

After almost a week, President Joe Biden finally emerged from hiding, delivering an address to the American people from the Oval Office, a message laden with his trademark hyperbole and lies. His absence from the spotlight wasn’t entirely unjustified: he did have COVID, after all, and needed time to rest and recover. No reasonable person expects him to do much work when ill, especially at such an advanced age. Beyond that, I don’t know if this is the last time I have anything to say about Biden, but for now, I have nothing more to add. There’s nothing remotely useful Biden has to offer in word nor deed. I’m content with the fact he won’t be in power past next January, if he manages to finish his term.

The problem with this latest episode is that nobody, outside his inner circle perhaps, knew what Biden’s disposition was that entire time. When the announcement came that he wouldn’t be seeking re-election after all, his staff learned via X, not from the president himself. Speculation ran rampant, including suggestions that he was knocking on death’s door. It appears Biden is alive and well, but apparently, the Regime no longer sees it necessary to make it clear who’s in charge of the country. Note that power was never transferred to the vice president during this time, meaning, even if Biden were incapacitated, Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been able to exercise presidential authorities.

It makes you wonder: had a major military crisis occurred during this time, exactly who’d be making the decisions? Who’d be acting as commander-in-chief of the armed forces? I’ll allow readers to speculate on that.

It’s hard to believe, but it was only earlier this year that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin went missing due to a potentially life-threatening medical emergency. Though he delegated power to his deputy, the White House wasn’t informed and it wasn’t until three days later that they became aware of what was going on. This occurred at a time when tensions were rising in the Middle East due to fallout from the Israel-Hamas war.

The problem here is that the president and the Defense Secretary form what’s known as the National Command Authority, the very top of the military’s chain-of-command. Imagine a front-line military unit’s commanding officer and executive officer (second in command) both going AWOL for days. That’s basically what happened here. The military, like the rest of the administrative state, “runs itself,” as the saying goes, but big decisions need to be made by their commander-in-chief and his second-in-command, the Secretary of Defense. Up to a certain point, the military knows what to do without being told, but there are also certain actions it won’t carry out without explicit orders from top leadership. Examples include force deployments, major retaliatory action, or, at worst, nuclear strikes.

The only conclusion I can draw is, at this point, the Regime cares very little about outside perception. After all, approval ratings are low across the board, our allies aren’t going to abandon us, and our enemies are going to try to hurt us, either way. Politics is a cynical game, but it seems the Regime has decided to fully internalize that principle. So what if the commander-in-chief disappeared from public view a few days? Or the Secretary of Defense, for that matter? You don’t even like them anyway, so what do you care?

We should care because it tells us which stage of the lifecycle our empire (a term I employ loosely) is in. It’s not a recent phenomenon, but comparisons between the U.S. today and late-stage Soviet Union have hit become popular lately. It’s one I’ve struggled with due to the enormous differences between the U.S. and USSR, but I now understand better why people make the comparison.

For one, the USSR was the last superpower to collapse. Imperfect as it may be of a parallel, it’s the closest real-world example of what it looks like. The British Empire, by comparison, declined rather than collapsed, no doubt the result of the U.S. effectively taking on burdens once managed from London. The next superpower to collapse will likely be the U.S. In the absence of a better example, we’ll have to rely on the experience of the former Soviet Union.

The last few weeks have been quite illuminating in terms of validating suspicions many of us have had since the beginning of the Trump administration: America isn’t run the way you think it is. It’s instead ruled by an administrative state under the direction of the Democratic Party. Similarly, the Soviet Union was run by a vast bureaucracy under the control of the Communist Party. While the U.S. isn’t anywhere nearly as totalitarian a system as the USSR was, it has increasingly become a single-party state, where the Democrats possess a disproportionate amount of power not just within the halls of federal governance, but also in other major civil institutions, like the media, higher education, and even the military. The Democratic Party’s influence can be seen far and wide and has probably affected your life in ways you couldn’t imagine.

Now, they’ve proven they can just replace presidential candidates at will. At the risk of speculating, it doesn’t seem like Biden’s withdrawal from the race was entirely on the level. While Kamala Harris is the logical next candidate by virtue of being vice president, the way she seemed to have been given the nomination through some internal process beyond public view is highly suspect. By contrast, Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had to work his way to a nomination, eventually winning it in 1968 after Johnson withdrew his re-election bid. The way the Democrats selected Harris as their nominee has parallels to the way the Communist Party picked the USSR’s leaders, especially during the tumultuous period of 1982 to 1985, when three Soviet leaders died in office, exposing the fragility of their system to the world in the process.

It’ll be a long time before we learn exactly what went on behind closed doors that led to Biden withdrawing from the race. But perhaps the more important way in which America today resembles late-stage Soviet Union is how little life in America makes any sense any longer. We’re at a time when the people in charge make extensive use of numbers to tell us what’s really going on, but the numbers increasingly don’t match reality, making it impossible to decide what’s real and what’s not.

Niall Ferguson, when making the U.S.-is-USSR comparison, said recently:

Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.

Maybe that could partly explain why the economy feels like it’s in a recession when, according to data, it isn’t?

More from Ferguson:

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

Combined with the most serious recruiting crisis in generations, you have to wonder what would happen if the U.S. military had to fight a major war. My sense has been, for a while now, that the military is hoping nobody actually calls us on our bluff. Fortunately, we’re still in a place where most of the world still fears the U.S. military enough that they’re not willing to take the risk, but the law of averages says someone, at some point, will be gutsy enough to do so. The U.S. military is still living off a reputation it earned over 30 years ago. That’s a long time.

Money is a big part of the story. America’s GDP is the envy of the world, but we’re increasingly spending more of it servicing debt:

According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.

In other words, the reason we can’t have nice things, like universal health care, isn’t because we spend too much on defense.

Speaking of health care:

Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

You can see a similar phenomenon in other areas of life. Goods and services are more expensive than ever before, but the quality hasn’t increased along with the cost. In some cases, they’ve declined, forcing us to pay even more for something as simple as shopping in tranquility. It seems as though we’ve arrived at the dreaded point of diminishing returns.

You can identify many other examples. Americans are spending money like there’s no tomorrow, but with what money, exactly? I thought Americans had high levels of debt (credit card, especially) and low levels of personal savings? Where’s the money coming from?

The airports are as busy as ever. Americans are going on increasingly expensive vacations, their kids going to increasingly expensive universities. Concerts and sporting events routinely sell out at exorbitant ticket prices. On the topic of concerts, I remember cover/tribute bands gaining popularity during the Great Recession due to financial hard times. Nobody’s wants to see an imitation act now.

Housing costs and rent aren’t going down. They keep going up, in fact. This despite the fact most people cannot afford mortgages or rents at these prices. Exactly who is able to afford the prices that are keeping the market at such an elevated level? How does anyone run a business in a major metropolitan area with such high commercial rents, taxes, on top of a high cost of commerce these days? None of this makes any sense.

By the way - exactly what makes our economy productive? Obviously, service economies are a thing, but how can an economy that creates so few “real” goods generate so much capital? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it seems like the U.S. is basically a massive information technology and wealth management firm that creates nothing of any real value to most Americans. The reason we once had the world’s largest, most affluent middle-class is because of manufacturing. The reason America became the most powerful economy in history was due to industrialization in the 19th century and manufacturing in the 20th century. We’re living off the largess created by generations who’ve all but completely left the world for the next. Today, unless you belong to the professional-managerial class, you’re going to have a hard time enjoying what used to be a middle-class lifestyle. If someone can explain how an economy like this works, I’d love to hear it, because I don’t understand it, not any longer.

To bring it back to politics, the Regime constantly harps about Democracy™ being so important. Yet they’re most unresponsive to people’s concerns, often acting in direct opposition. You can see this most starkly on the issues of crime and immigration. It’s a whole lot of excuses for why they can’t do anything about a problem. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, replaces presidential candidates at will. If this is how they run the party, imagine how they’d run the country if they do manage to turn America into a one-party state.

I’m open to any good-faith explanation for all this. But my gut sense is that this is all a sort of last-ditch emptying of the tank because everyone knows intrinsically that none of it makes any sense and that reality will eventually rear its ugly head. Better have your fun now while we still can.

As a final word, when you have time, check out the documentary TraumaZone, created by Adam Curtis. It’s a narration-less documentary and instead a chronology using footage filmed by the BBC throughout Russia and the now-former Soviet republics from 1985 to 1999, chronicling the downfall of communism, its tumultuous post-Soviet transition to capitalism and democracy in the 1990s, ending with the election of Vladimir Putin. It’s a fascinating documentary, if for no other reason than that we get to see, step by step, what happens when a superpower collapses.

You can watch the first episode, covering 1985 to 1989, here:

Remember: this was all within the last 30 to 40 years, within the lifetimes of the majority alive today. When the U.S. superpower collapses, will someone create a similar documentary about us? What will it show?

It’s bewildering to think the footage for that documentary is being shot today.

We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here

Writer John Michael Greer, a favorite among those who study how societies collapse, said recently:

Source

Greer is also a favorite among preppers, survivalists, and the litany of commenters who say the U.S. is at the literal End. I have a sense that comment didn’t sit well with many of them, but since he’s viewed as an authoritative voice on the matter, unlike me, I’d guess many are biting their tongues in response.

I tend to agree, with a caveat, as you’ll see in a moment. First, it’s important to understand Greer speaks in civilizational terms. He’s not speaking of the state, specifically. So while he’s on record as saying the U.S. is becoming undone as a superpower, he doesn’t foresee a collapse coming for another few hundred years. None of this is to say the U.S. couldn’t collapse during that time, but Western civilization is probably going to be here long after we’re gone. I suppose that’s good news, but that’s also a different conversation altogether.

Back to the present. A conclusion I’ve arrived at while studying and writing is that collapse and decline are related, yet separate concepts. Collapse is when the old ways of doing business become untenable, when the old rules no longer apply. Decline is what we often think of when talking about collapse, the gradual degradation of the quality of life, the standard of living. This distinction is important, not just so we understand what’s being talked about, but to understand what collapse and decline look like. I think decline is something that can be seen in a tangible sense - economic hard times, for instance - while collapse is marked more by a dramatic moment followed by a period of uncertainty where we collectively ask, “What now?”

Here are two recent examples of collapse. This is what the Soviet Union looked like in August 1991, when the Communist establishment attempted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power:

The actual moment the USSR collapsed was non-violent. In many ways, however the August 1991 coup attempt was the moment the tenability of the Communist state was seen to be in serious jeopardy. It’s one thing for a country to frequently experience coup attempts - it wouldn’t be a stable political system, anyway - it’s another for a stable system to suddenly begin experiencing coup attempts. Clearly, these aren’t normal times any longer.

Here’s what South Africa looked like as the pre-1994 order collapsed:

When a state unravels, it unravels rather quickly. Societal unraveling takes longer, and a political undoing might take years to culminate, but when it does, it happens in a short period of time.

Through the entirety of this blog, I’ve been predicting the U.S. will collapse as a superpower in 2025 - next year if you forgot what time it is. The U.S. itself won’t collapse, but the post-1945 order that’s been the driving force not just in this country, but in world affairs, will come to an abrupt and unsatisfying end. Events this year have me more convinced than ever before 2025 is the year it goes down.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio recently explained how the Trump assassination attempt shows America is close to a tipping point:

2. The assassination attempt brought the country a quarter of an inch away from some type of civil war. Chaos would have occurred because of anger and violence being in the air at the same time as the leaders of both parties would have been out of the picture, so there would have been no clear path to agreeing on the country's leadership.  Instead, “by a miracle,” Trump and the country appeared “touched by God” to some and Trump appeared a strong fighter to most everyone.  The contrast with the frail President Joe Biden was striking.

He then explained what he thought the worst-case scenario would be the election:

These developments reduced the odds of a close and contested Trump-loss scenario, which is the highest risk scenario for some type of civil war, and shifted in favor of a big Republican-Trump win followed by a dominant and controlling Republican-Trump government. However, while the odds of a close Trump loss have gone down, they haven’t gone to zero and, it should be recognized that if a close Trump loss occurs the odds of a big fight happening are even higher because the Democrats denying Donald Trump the presidency would be, to many Republicans, akin to Democrats preventing the second coming of Christ.

I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. Personally, I find a close and contested Trump-win to be the highest-risk scenario for civil war because of the Left’s propensity to violently lash out when it doesn’t get its way. Dalio appears to be basing his assessment on January 6; I understand why the incident was jarring, but I believe that to be a one-off, given the Right generally doesn’t engage in political violence unless strongly provoked. It’s amazing to me how even otherwise intelligent, well-informed individuals gloss over the violence the Left reflexively engages in. The only way a close and contested Trump loss would result in civil war, in my view, is if Trump challenges the election results, which is met by counter-moves by the Left to obstruct his appeal, or they resort to violence to coerce the state into certifying the election results.

More:

The bigger picture is that we can be confident that the country will remain deeply divided by irreconcilable differences and the biggest question that will remain until after the election is whether the domestic order in which election results and the tripartite constitutional system of rules will be respected in the face of seemingly irreconcilable differences. The developments of the last month have moved the odds in favor of the election of Trump-led, ultra-conservative, nationalist, protectionist, isolationist, God-fearing administration which Republicans will certainly accept and Democrats will probably accept reluctantly. This reduces the likelihood of a contested election-prompted civil war, but it is not a sure outcome and if the Democrats are able to manage the transition of candidates well and Trump loses as a result, it is probable that we will see some form of civil war. By the way, the markets are increasingly reflecting this shift.

I don’t think Trump’s chances of victory are as high as he thinks and I certainly don’t think a Trump loss increases the risk of civil war, unless the Left gets stupid and uses their victory to provoke the Right. However, I think this election will go a long way towards finally drawing the long-awaited line in the sand. Sobering as it is to say, I think the votes Americans cast in November will constitute a picking of sides, whether anyone realizes it or not.

One big reason I enjoy the commentary of Dalio and financial analysts in general is because they influence us to take ourselves out of the equation by focusing on the broader forces driving events, allowing us to judge the situation more objectively and dispassionately. I think this is a hard thing for most of us to do, since humans are emotional creatures concerned first and foremost with ourselves. It’s difficult for me to do at times. That said, even though I make my personal feelings known on a range of topics, I also hope readers can see that not only do I not expect anyone else to agree, but that I’m also able to remove myself and look at things from a larger perspective. I’d hope, if nothing else, everyone understands that how we feel about matters personally doesn’t matter. History doesn’t conform to our desires and expectations.

In his latest episode, retired hedge fund manager Erik Townsend echoed concerns similar to Dalio’s. In a discussion with geopolitical specialist Marko Papic, Townsend cited the failure of Secret Service to protect Trump and assessed the likelihood someone may try to assassinate Trump again [from transcript]:

If the Secret Service is not ready to do their job, and you had public officials, in some cases, and a lot of Hollywood celebrities, lamenting that the shooter missed, wishing that it had been successful, there's plenty of people in the country who still want to conduct a murder of President Trump. And they've got plenty of time left to do it. And frankly, in my opinion, President Trump's personality is such that he's not likely to cower and hide behind the glass shield to make sure he's safe, he's likely to be out on stage where he’s at risk taking that chance. So it seems to me that there's a very real risk that we could end up in a situation where President Trump is assassinated before taking office, either before being elected or after being elected, and before taking office. And if that were to happen, given the lack of confidence, or the shaking of confidence that's already occurred in this presidential race, I think it would open the United States up to a moment of vulnerability where it could fall into hard Civil War, actual fighting in the street stuff.

Townsend underscores the danger America is headed towards:

And if you’re worried about those things, if ever, there was a moment of vulnerability when another nation might try to disable or disarm the United States, it would be when you're in this mayhem, where you're not sure who the next President of the United States is, both of the two guys that were running that nobody was particularly impressed with either one of them, one got killed, and one dropped out. That would be a really bad situation that I think could throw the entire world into a complete financial upset and markets don't like uncertainty and uncertainty doesn't get any more uncertain than that.

Marko Papic offers his view on the risk of civil war:

Now, whether a civil war would occur because President Trump was shot, I think, the probability of civil war in America as, again, as Peter Turchin has written and as I’ve also opined, certainly, it’s not zero. I also don’t think it's as high as in, for example, where I was born in my homeland of Yugoslavia, and one difference between, say Yugoslavia and the United States of America is state capacity. And so, one thing I would say is that, if one of the candidates was assassinated, I don’t see the cleavages within the various institutions in the United States of America, mainly the military and law enforcement, I don’t see the cleavages within those institutions that will allow it to become a civil war. Now, whether you’re listening to me on this and believe me or not, let’s say you do believe me, you’re like, oh, Marko Papic makes a good point. I’m not sure to what extent that's going to make anyone feel better about the society they live in, but I don’t see a civil war breaking out. I don’t think you can have an organic civil war in the United States of America, because state capacity, which is a political science term is overwhelmingly powerful.

It’s a fascinating exchange between the two, well worth the listen. I hope you’ll all find time to do so, because they talk about so much more which helps to contextualize where America currently finds itself in its historical lifecycle.

At the moment, I happen to share Papic’s view that a civil war remains an unlikely scenario. A point I’ve made frequently is that civil war/revolution comes at the end of a social order’s lifecycle. This means that when a civil war/revolution does happen, a society has run out of road and there’s no alternative but to fight it out to see who gets to run the show, who gets to have their way.

I often cite Ray Dalio’s empire lifecycle, but let’s use a different model this time. I don’t know where this one came from, but notice that it’s quite similar to Dalio’s:

Source

We are unquestionably in the “Decline” phase of the cycle, aren’t we? Our debt situation is beyond recovery, we’re beginning to print money more liberally, and we’re now in the opening moves of an internal conflict. The addition of this event is why I find this particular model especially useful, since it shows that a civil war isn’t the only way a country can become embroiled in armed conflict. Internal conflicts are quite common, but civil wars less so.

This is all to say we have a long way to go before something really bad happens. If we’re going to use the USSR as an example of what the fate of the U.S. will be, note that a civil war didn’t occur during the final years of the union’s existence. It was after collapse that the risk of civil war skyrocketed (it was a genuine concern at the time), underscoring that civil war/revolution is the result of a state being damaged beyond repair, not simply a product of internal divisions. If a civil war or revolution is going to happen in America, it too will come after the U.S. undergoes a similar series of events as the Soviet Union did. Not before.

2024 has been a crazy year and I’m sure it’s still got some unpleasant surprises left in store. Unless the U.S. manages to go through hyperinflation, an internal conflict, lose reserve currency status in just a few months time, 2024 isn’t the year it’s going to pop off. I’m not sure that’s exactly good news, since it implies that the worst is yet to come and we’re running out of road to keep kicking the can down the road. But it does mean we still have time to prepare. Nothing should take us by surprise at this point.

All said, once the election concludes and we enter 2025, it should be obvious to all there’s no saving the country. I hate to be so dramatic, but I titled this blog We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here for a reason. The end may be a good ways off, but only the willfully blind can’t see it coming at this point. I think 2025 will prove to be to America what 1991 was to the Soviet Union: the end of an era. I’m not going as far as to say that the Stars and Stripes will be coming down all across the country on the night of Christmas 2025. I sure hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s in 2025 that it won’t be a big mystery to all that the America we once knew is dead and buried, and it’s only a question of how much worse it can get before the new order emerges.

Once more, I turned your attention to what Dr. Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said 14 years ago:

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

And:

If America’s decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

2025 is next year. May we live in interesting times.

The Fourth Turning? It’s Here.

So what comes next for America? A wild ride, that’s for sure. We’re now living through the proverbial “Fourth Turning,” the period of time identified by scholars Neil Howe and William Strauss, as the end of a roughly 80-year cycle culminating in crisis throwing the prevailing order into question, ushering in a new order that’s at once better and worse than the one it replaces. In some cases, it can collapse society, though I’ve pretty much ruled that out as a possibility at the moment. I consider a civil war a higher risk than a societal collapse, though the risk of that too, remains low for now.

But don’t get too comfortable. The Fourth Turning is a chaotic, uncertain time. Let’s discuss what our Fourth Turning will look like.

The U.S. will enter a window of vulnerability between November and January, as the results of the election are sorted out. I do anticipate some violence will occur, with the possibility of a 2020-like quasi-civil war occurring during this time. For now, I remain skeptical that this violence will be exceptionally bloody, though it’s worth noting others, like Rudyard “Whatifalthist” Lynch, who is a level-headed observer of current events, predicts we’ll see blood in the streets in November. It depends on how contentious the election becomes; at the moment, things seem quieter than they could be. It seems like it’s only the hard partisans who are really talking about the election still. Whatever the case may be, I think November to January will be a tense, uneasy period for the country. If another attempt is made on Trump’s life, like Erik Townsend predicts, or God forbid, someone takes his life in the process, that’d change the situation dramatically. But let’s keep the “what-ifs?” to a minimum here.

In 2025 the combination of a chaotic election, regardless of outcome, and the consequences of two big wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will result in a moment of vulnerability for the American state. A military crisis will occur demanding a U.S. response - think something like Ukraine on the verge of defeat, Iran’s nuclear program, or China moving on Taiwan - and we’ll be paralyzed or fail to commit to a response. This is what Alfred McCoy speaks of, a moment when the vulnerability and impotence of America is totally exposed, finishing off the superpower overnight. It’s worth noting that Neil Howe and William Strauss originally predicted the Fourth Turning would end by 2025. It truly does seem as though 2025 will be a historic turning point, if more than one scholar keeps pointing to it.

Regardless of who wins this November, I think we’ll see the Left and the Regime, by extension, become much stronger over the next four years. During times of crisis, regimes can either cede power or tighten their grip, often choosing the latter. America’s institutions are still stronger than that of most countries with an abundance of state capacity, as Marko Papic put it, so it’s difficult to imagine the Regime not exploiting its advantages to increase its power. To do otherwise is suicidal.

Throughout the remainder of the Fourth Turning, which Howe and Strauss consider to have begun in 2008, America will be convulsed by a series of “quasi”-civil wars occurring every few years. These are periods of high levels of crime and civil unrest, with 2020 a perfect example of what it looks like, and it’s during these moments America will be brought to the brink of civil war, while not going as far as stepping over the brink. I anticipate an especially severe quasi-civil war will occur in the 2027 to ‘28 time-frame, leading up to the next presidential election. By then, events will have stored up a tremendous amount of anger & discontent that’ll be unleashed by an even more contentious election. If 2024 is about who gets to hold the bag when the U.S. superpower collapses, 2028 will be about who gets to rule over the remnants of the empire.

Beyond 2028, things get blurry. The only prediction I’m willing to make here is that the U.S. will probably not have experienced a civil war/revolution by this point. But if it doesn’t occur despite all that’s set to happen during the Fourth Turning, when will it?

Our friend

Kulak

has a good idea when:

The most likely cause of a US Civil War isn’t the woke regime left, it’ll be their collapse. They’re like Trump the man, paradoxically stabilizing. Their blend of Tyrrany and incompetence is perfect for managing US decline and financial insolvency.

When the woke-neocon regime types collapse it won’t result in a return to American greatness… it’ll result in a power vacuum and desperate struggle between all the surviving factions.

unlike the Bourbons or the Romanovs they dont have any great virtues that will make it tragic when they go… but all the problems and untenability of the US state and the factions that make it up will be vastly more apparant once they go and once Trump’s struggle has ended in victory, a sham defeat, or martyrdom

Just as I think the Regime will become more powerful in the years following the end of the post-1945 order, I also believe it has two more election cycles left in it. There needs to be time for all those events - hyperinflation, internal conflict, loss of reserve currency status - to happen, but, more important in my view, there has to be no way for the Regime to outsource blame to anyone else.

By then, Trump will be yesterday’s news and even many of the names and faces who dominate the scene today may be non-factors by that point. Two more election cycles past this year puts us at 2033. I think this will be the year the Regime collapses or goes into terminal decline. As a result, I think 2033 is also when a civil war/revolution is most likely to occur. Ironically, in his latest book, Neil Howe revised the end of the Fourth Turning from 2025 to 2033. Without tooting my own horn too much, great minds do think alike, meaning there’s something to 2033 that makes it a pivotal year, just as there’s something to 2025 that makes it a pivotal year in the eyes of many.

So we’ve got about 10 years. 10 years to prepare, 10 years of increasingly difficult times to endure before we learn how it all ends. Living through history is harrowing, but we have no choice. The Fourth Turning comes for us all, the same way it came for our fore-bearers. There’s no hiding from it. The Strauss–Howe generational theory was controversial for its time, but I think they’re being vindicated as we speak.

One last point before the big wrap-up. What troubles me most about the Fourth Turning is that it inevitably involves the military. There’s not a single Fourth Turning in American history that didn’t, you can look it up. Every one of them ended in some form of major military conflict incurring a tremendous amount of casualties, disproportionately young men. It seems hard to believe now, but between now and whenever the Fourth Turning ends, something will happen that involves the military, lots of men under arms, and carnage leading to the deaths of many. Let me say again, the majority of the deaths will be men. The significance of this is due to increasing discord between the two genders, along with the fact that anecdotal data indicates young men are increasingly becoming alienated, angry, or in some cases, demoralized. Having millions of alienated, angry, demoralized young men is a tried-and-true social destabilizer.

At some point, something will need to be done about them. Either they get sent off to fight a war to fight an external enemy, or the guns get turned inwards against them.

Do You Feel The Collapse All Around You?

If I can give you any advice right now, it’s this: don’t get caught up in the hot topics of the moment. Current events matter, but only with respect to how they fit in with longer-term trends. By all means vote this November, but understand that it’s not going to alter the trajectory of the country. No president has been able to avert the Fourth Turning; I doubt neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump will be the first to do so. We’re stuck on this ride and we’ll just need to see where it takes us. Ensure your personal affairs are in order at all times; prioritize the personal over the political, always.

Speaking of the personal, if you want to bridge the divide between yourself and anyone in your social circles standing on the other side of that increasingly bold red line, it’s to tell them what I told you: it doesn’t matter whom you vote for. It doesn’t matter what you personally believe. There are inescapable realities, trend lines which supersede the headlines of the day, along with events like the Fourth Turning which are as inescapable as death and taxes.

Maybe if we all realized our votes and personal opinions don’t matter all that much, we’d find out there’s no use in fighting one another. Wishful thinking, I know. But I’ll never allow myself to be accused of not trying to bridge the divide.

Over to you: what are your thoughts on anything discussed? What are your thoughts on the Fourth Turning and its applicability to our current moment? When do you think the Fourth Turning will end? What do you think will happen during that time? What’s the great cataclysm, in your mind, that’ll consume the lives of many? What’ll become of the country at the end of it?

Let’s share our thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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