The First Turning

February 8, 2025 Hunter Wallace History 4

I have been thinking about this too.

It is not just the whirlwind of executive orders. It is also watching an open attempt at regime change, rapid culture changes on race and gender and building a new civic order.

City Journal:

“And yet Howe is relentless in his cheerful optimism. By the 2040s, once we’ve passed through this crucible, all the trends we now lament will have reversed themselves, and we’ll enter a glorious new future as a nation transformed. The malaise will lift. Political gridlock and dysfunction will disappear. The economy will jolt back to life and achieve new heights of productivity and dynamism, delivering “dramatically higher living standards” and much lower levels of income inequality. Culture will flourish once more. A new moral consensus will be reached and enforced, commanding broad conformity. Millennials will have become the most communitarian generation in living memory, reenergizing civic society and committing themselves to family life. Religious participation will revive, though perhaps in unpredictable ways. Gender norms will swing back in favor of a new traditionalism. A sudden baby boom will end concerns about demographic decline. Crime will plunge to new lows, while social trust will reach new highs. As in the mythic 1950s of yore, by the 2050s, no one will lock their doors, and everyone will trust the government. This pattern has followed every one of our past centenary crises, and it will happen again, Howe insists. …

This is important, because Howe is perfectly clear about the nature and the stakes of the nation’s current divide: we’re headed for revolutionary regime change. The “old regime is weak and in peril,” he says. As in every historical parallel, “new values and ideas” have already emerged to fill the vacuum, with “rising generations” coalescing into factions around them. Soon, “one or more of the new factions will do everything they can to push the old regime aside and replace it with something newer and more powerful.” At that point, “once a powerful new regime is able to redefine the rules,” we will see “lasting constitutional change”—i.e., a “new American republic.” …

So we are witnessing an inevitable “clash of regimes.” And though the nation is currently defined by a deadlock between what Howe alludes to as “blue zones” and “red zones,” he is firm in his conviction that this stalemate will not last much longer. Quoting Lincoln’s observation that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he is certain that the United States is destined to “become all one thing, or all the other.” …”

This hits very differently in 2025.

It was impossible to look at Trump’s first term and his failure and defeat as a rendezvous with destiny. He didn’t attempt anything resembling a tearing down of the existing regime and building a new order.

“At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist —together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum. …

We may not wish the Gray Champion to come again—but come he must, and come he will. …

Eight or nine decades after his last appearance, America will be visited by the “figure of an ancient man … combining the leader and the saint (to) show the spirit of their sires.” Again will appear the heir to the righteous Puritan who stood his ground against Governor Andros, the old colonial governors of the American Revolution who broke from England, the aging radicals of the Civil War who pitted brother against brother with a “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” and “the New Deal Isaiahs” who achieved their rendezvous with destiny.

Whence will come the Gray Champion? Picture the Boomer Overclass of the Unraveling, aged another twenty years. Picture William Bennett’s “Consequence and Confrontation” missives; Al Gore predicting an environmental cataclysm; James Webb’s summoning a “ruthless and overpowering” retaliation against foreign enemies; James Fallows rooting for a “7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock”; “Apocalypse Darman” and “Default Newt” with their budget train wrecks; Earth First saboteurs, willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to save trees; and Army of God antiabortionists summoning the terminally ill to “use your final months to torch clinics.” Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, uncalmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade—all at a time of maximum public peril.

The full dimension of the Boomer persona will only emerge when today’s better-known 1940s birth cohorts (whose youth was marked by relatively few social pathologies) are joined in public life by the tougher-willed, more evangelical 1950s cohorts (whose youth was marked by many more pathologies). That is the mix that will beget this generation’s elder priest-warrior persona, vindicating the early Unraveling-era warning of Peter Collier and David Horowitz that Boomers are “a destructive generation whose work is not over yet.”

As the Crisis deepens, Boomers will confront the end result of their lifelong absorption with values. They will have laid a long trail of Unraveling-era rhetoric, much of it symbol and gesture, but now the words will matter. When James Redfield (or his elder equivalent) describes his peers as “a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a … great transformation,” the summons will no longer be for pensive spiritual reflection but for decisive civic action. Boomers will comply with

Cornel West’s suggestion that “the mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may.” Their habitual tendency to enunciate unyielding principles will now carry the duty of enforcement.

The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In domestic matters, old Boomers will recast the old arguments of the Culture Wars into a new context of community needs. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion—crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. In foreign matters, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms.

The same Boomers who in youth chanted “Hell no, we won’t go!” will emerge as America’s most martial elder generation in living memory. Whatever the elements of Crisis, old Boomer leaders will up the moral ante beyond the point of possible retreat or compromise. The same Boomers who once chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” will demand not just an enemy’s defeat, but its utter destruction. They will risk enormous pain and consequence to command youth to fight and die in ways they themselves never would have tolerated in their own youth. They will believe, as did Cicero, that this moment in history assigns “young men for action, old men for counsel.”

Old Boomers will find transcendence in the Crisis climax. As they battle time and nature to win their release from history, they will feel themselves in position to steward the nation, and perhaps the world, across several painful thresholds. It is easy to envision old Aquarians as pillars of fire leading to the Promised Land—but just as easy to see them as Charonlike monsters abducting doomed souls across the Styx to Hades. Either is possible.

As the Crisis resolves, elder Boomers will have not the last word, but the deep word. If they triumph, they will collectively deserve the eulogy Winston Churchill offered to Franklin Roosevelt: to die “an enviable death.” If they fail, their misdeeds will cast a dark shadow over the entire twenty-first century, perhaps beyond. Whatever the outcome, posterity will remember the Boomers’ Gray Champion persona long after the hippie and yuppie images have been forgotten to all but the historian.”

I read and reviewed this book two years ago.

For those who don’t remember Neil Howe’s argument, it goes something like this: there would be a huge defining generational clash between the Boomers in 2020s, it would be winner-take-all, one side would be vanquished for good in the crisis and young people would support the winning side.

In the aftermath of the Fourth Turning, the culture would shift and begin to regenerate. Individualism would begin to decline. Social trust and conformity would begin to rise. Gender norms would suddenly swing back toward a new traditionalism. The winner would begin to construct a new civic order while the values of previous era atrophied. Politics would begin to depolarize as the new social order strengthened toward a new high. A new mainstream would be forged that would last 75 years.

Anyway, the argument is that about 10 years from now we will have returned to something like the postwar era which lasted from 1945 to the mid-1960s.

It is more likely this is probably just astrology for history nerds and that we are in the Trump honeymoon period, but I wanted to share the forecast as a riposte to all the overly cynical takes. We will know for certain which direction we are headed in a year from now. Is the crisis over?

Note: Kyle Kulinski is complaining about DOGE’s regime change plans and rising conformity in the media. Another way of looking at this through this historical lens is that his side lost and this is what you would expect to happen when New Deal liberalism dies and is replaced by a new regime.

4 Comments

  3. The culture and to a lesser extent the politics are just getting somewhat more conservative after decades of liberals dominating culture.
    We’re not returning to the 1950s let alone the Victorian era but it looks like the culture is rejecting woke and open borders, that’s all.
    There’ll still be a ton of legal immigration, but Trump and his conservative successors may significantly reduce illegal immigration, time will tell.
    Free trade may be balanced with some protectionism.
    Millennials, Z and subsequent gens may get a bit more socially conservative but I highly doubt birth rates will increase much if at all.
    Various nation states all over the globe have been trying to reverse birth rate decline for decades without much success.
    We will still be reliant on legal immigration in order to maintain and expand our economic growth, in all likelihood.

    The bottom line is, I think we are seeing a Partial shift towards the right on borders and culture, but it’s nowhere near as idyllic and profound as some people make it out to be.
    The pendulum shifts back and forth between liberalism and conservatism, and while liberals have tended to win more in the long run, at least for the last several centuries, sometimes conservatives get some big wins.
    The liberals got a big economic victory in the 1930s and a big cultural victory in the 1960s.
    Conservatives got a big economic victory in the 1980s and what appears to be a modest cultural victory in the 2010s and 20s after decades of liberals dominating culture which was leading to the excesses of woke.

    We’re in a new conservative age of sorts it looks like, where conservatives are dominating economics and beginning to take the reigns on culture and borders but this will be a modest victory for the right, not a total victory, just as neoliberalism in the 1980s didn’t fully undo the new deal, the national conservatism of the 2010s and 20s won’t fully undo cultural liberalism, just curb some of its excesses.
    Decades from now, we can only speculate as to which direction the culture will shift, left or right, to what extent and in what ways, on what issues, only time will tell for sure.

    Oh, and as for imperialism, personally I’m not seeing any major changes on that front, but we’ll see, Trump and co are just as pro-Israel as the neocons, despite the culture souring on Israel a bit, and he hasn’t done anything about Ukraine yet despite rhetoric on getting a deal within 24 hours, it may all be talk.
    Politics often doesn’t align with what the public thinks, it’s its own animal, the ruling class largely dictates politics, not the proles, and the ruling class has never been more pro-Israel across the spectrum, from the liberal elite to the conservative inc.
    This is the main reason I couldn’t support Trump even a little bit, I will never support ethnic cleansing it’s a redline for me.

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  4. You can tell though that we’re firmly in the 21st century. Used to be major changes in governing ideology required spilling blood. Now, all it requires are the six brightest and energy drink addicted under 25 people in America writing code and AI to run off of daisy chained video cards.

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