If you've been following politics and the concomitant study of human nature and history that goes with it, you'll be familiar with this old saw:
- Hard times make tough people.
- Tough people make good times.
- Good times make weak people.
- Weak people make hard times.
We've seen this play out time and again; the tough, determined veterans of World War II, for instance, made the good times in a post-war economic boom, which in turn gave rise to the following generations of weak, pink haired, nose-ringed Gender Studies majors of today.
This is a thumbnail of what's called the Strauss-Howe generational theory, developed and described by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and that last page, wherein the weak people make the hard times, is in what they would describe as the fourth turning, or the crisis stage:
According to the authors, the fourth turning is a crisis. This is an era of destruction, often involving war or revolution, in which institutional life is destroyed and rebuilt in response to a perceived threat to the nation's survival. After the crisis, civic authority revives, cultural expression redirects toward community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In January 2025, as then-President-elect Trump was preparing to return to the Oval Office, I wrote a piece on this theory, and on how I thought that the fourth turning was past, that we had dodged the worst of the crisis stage. I didn't yet think the fourth turning was completely behind us, but that we may have dodged the worst of it. In that estimation, I may have been leaning too far forward in the foxhole.
Here's what I said at that time.
There's an argument to be made that the rise of "woke" sensibilities and the concomitant presidency of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was the crisis. Unknown powers behind the scenes who, let's be honest, were running the show while President Biden's mental and physical deterioration became too obvious to ignore, as did Kalama Harris's incompetence, inflicted as many "woke" policies and DEI hires on us as they could manage, ranging from press secretaries to Supreme Court justices. The border was thrown open, the dollar was devalued, and the production of energy was hobbled. This has led to a crisis of competence at levels the nation can't afford.
That much remains the case. The Biden administration was an utter disaster in ways we didn't yet understand in early January 2025. The autopen scandal alone, along with all the suspicious pardons associated with it, was suspected but not yet known. The various scandals of the Biden family were still being dug out, like one digs out a rat's nest under the corncrib. We had just suffered four years under an incompetent, corrupt and senile man in the White House, and we didn't know yet how bad things really were.
And the Deep State, well, it was as deep as it has ever been. We've been learning more about that, too.
Now a new administration is coming in, in only 18 days, and we now have some hope for a return of competency to some of these offices - but the bureaucratic state that actually wields a great deal of power in the country, well, dealing with that is another matter. We also have the matter of our badly abused military to deal with.
Still - I don't think this is the reset. I don't think we are there yet. There is one more problem, a problem on a Pantagrulian scale, that has yet to be addressed, and within the last few days, we've seen that this crisis is still ongoing.
We're seeing it now more than then. I'm not just talking about the 2026 midterm elections, although that's certainly a part of all this. It may be an even greater concern how readily and how quickly the Left is to propose reprisal, even violence. That's not just a problem in the United States, either. Just look at what's been going on in Europe. So, what I wrote then may be worse now.
Political and sectarian violence is still seen by too many as an acceptable solution to problems, real or imagined. And as I wrote on New Year's Day, we haven't seen the last of it yet - and won't, any time soon.
Here's the thing: The last fourth turning, according to Strauss and Howe, began with the 1929 stock market crash that kick-started the Great Depression, and the conclusion of it was World War II. The theory also posits that each turning lasts, more or less, 21 years; the span of a generation. That makes each complete cycle 84 years, give or take. World War II ended 81 years ago. We could make the argument that this current fourth turning began with the "Great Recession" and COVID, and will end with... Well, we don't yet know how it will end. There are current conflicts, including the American actions against Iran and the Russo-Ukrainian War, but those seem, right now, to be more stagnant than not. But the Democrats have just seized control of Congress, and I would argue that these are the weak people that make for hard times.
The fourth turning hasn't peaked yet, in other words. The crisis isn't yet fully upon us.
So, in conclusion, I will say only this: Buckle up, folks. It's not time to break into a musical rendition of "happy days are here again" just yet. We've still got some interesting times ahead.
