The Fourth Turning Is Here

The visionary behind the bestselling phenomenon The Fourth Turning looks once again to Americas past to predict our future in this startling and hopeful prophecy for how our present era of civil unrest will resolve over the next ten yearsand what our lives will look like once it has. Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, theyd uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four erasor turningsthat always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these erasthe fourth turningwas always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived. And so Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around usthe polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global warwill culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on Americas next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill. Illuminating, sobering, yet ultimately empowering, The Fourth Turning Is Here takes you back into history and deep into the collective personality of each living generation to make sense of our current crisis, explore how all of us will be differently affected by the political, social, and economic challenges well face in the decade to come, and reveal how our country, our communities, and our families can best prepare to meet these challenges head-on.