The Fourth Turning
“Lunatic fringe,
I know you’re out there.
You’re in hiding,
And you hold your meetings.
I can hear you coming,
I know what you’re after.
We’re wise to you this time,
We won’t let you kill the laughter.
Lunatic fringe,
In the twilight’s last gleaming.
But this is open season,
But you won’t get too far.
‘Cause you’ve got to blame someone,
For your own confusion.
We’re on guard this time,
Against your final solution.”
I was first introduced to the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe and their books “Generations” and “The Fourth Turning” around the year 2000. The concept that history has a rhythm that repeats made total sense to me and their study of Anglo-American history going back as far as 1485 provided evidence that such cycles have been quite regular for some time. William Strauss passed away in 2007, but Neil Howe has continued their work. I pre-ordered his book “The Fourth Turning is Here” when it came out in 2023 and read it as soon as it arrived. I follow his continuing work on Substack.
Many of you may be unfamiliar with Strauss and Howe’s thesis and what a “Fourth Turning” is. Very briefly, they conclude that history runs in cycles of roughly 80-100 years. Within each cycle, there are four “turnings” that are each roughly equivalent to a “generation” (20-25 years) that have followed a similar pattern for over 500 years. These patterns repeat in a similar fashion to the changing of the seasons. A “Fourth Turning” occurs when pressure is building on the existing political, social and economic systems such that something breaks and a new system is ushered in.
The first such Fourth Turning they identify starts with the defeat of the Plantagenet King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and the ushering in of an entirely new and different Tudor dynasty. In American history, the first Fourth Turning is obviously the American Revolution when a whole new nation and system of government is installed to replace the failing colonial ways. “Four score and seven years” later, the Civil War ends slavery and as importantly, establishes a more powerful federal government replacing the greater power that had been held by the individual states. The next Fourth Turning was the depression and World War II. The “New Deal,” federal safety net and the establishment of the United States as a world power was a dramatic shift from what had existed prior to 1935.
Washington, Lincoln and FDR were the presidents who presided over the termination of the old ways and the ushering in of the new. Howe makes the point that it is not that these particular individuals caused these changes to occur. Forces had built up such that the “old ways” were already unsustainable. These presidents presided over and pushed forward the change to something new.
Neil Howe believes we are in the next Fourth Turning. So do I.
Think about the five dimensions of chaos that we discuss in this blog. The international order is in flux and is poised to enter a new era. Our culture and society are in the midst of undergoing radical change. Our politics are as polarized as they have been in any of our lifetimes. Even our economic system is under strain from record amounts of debt and uncertainties. Trust in our institutions is eroding. The Supreme Court said Biden could not forgive student loans and he did it anyway. Today, a Federal Judge says Trump can’t delete federal websites on gender and give DOGE access to government data and Trump is ignoring him. All of this is screaming that the “old order” since World War II is breaking down and needs to change. There is little doubt about that.
But what will it change to?
One certainly about Fourth Turnings is that they do not turn back. They change into something new. Loyalists during the American Revolution would never again see what they had before the war. Even if the revolution had failed, something entirely new would have replaced it. Antebellum Southerners wanted the pre-civil war life they had to return. But they were not to get that. Even had the Confederacy prevailed, the North American continent would still have looked very much different than it did before. My parents hated FDR and the New Deal. They wanted the America of Calvin Coolidge back. But it was not to be. Even had Hoover managed to solve the depression and be reelected in 1932, he would have only done so by changing everything.
So, if you are a Clinton Democrat or a Bush Republican, I am sorry but you will not get your party or your era back. Those ships have sailed like the Confederacy and the Hoover GOP. You can express your displeasure with both the Trump Republicans and the Neo-Marxist Democratic Party, but one of those is going to set the future path of the country because what has been has already failed. I’m talking to you Peggy Noonan, and others at the Wall Street Journal and many more.
Trump understands that everything needs to change and that he is in a generational position to do so. We have already seen very bold moves from his administration in less than a month’s time. He wants to change the world order as well as reorient American culture and society. He has not yet scratched the surface on economics but some of the whispers within the administration include dramatic changes like a new Bretton Woods agreement or even using Gold or Crypto to shore up the dollar. And our post-Trump politics will never be the same.
But just like the Washington, Lincoln and FDR, he has to win. To put the Trumpian new order in place, his policies must succeed. If they do succeed, he should be able to maintain majorities in the 2026 midterms and see J.D. Vance succeed him in 2028.
But there is no guarantee that he will succeed any more than there was any guarantee that those pesky patriots would defeat the most powerful country on earth at the time. And there is another vision for what the future should look like within the Democratic Party. They are ready to pounce on any opening or weakness.
It is clear that the Democrats are not only not turning away from Neo-Marxism, but their leaders are doubling down. They attribute their losses in 2024 to the price of eggs. I am not making this up. Many point to that. They do not think that immigration, the border, the S2LGBTQii+++ agenda, racism through DEI, crime, the deficit, international wars or their corruption had anything to do with their failures at the ballot box. They are vociferously defending USAID, which we can now see is basically a money laundering campaign wherein government money goes to Democrat constituencies who then donate some of that back to Democrat campaigns. It’s completely corrupt. But they are not backing off. You also see that only two out of over 200 Democrats in the House support having only women in women’s sports and locker rooms. The Dems are basically now a “lunatic fringe,” hence this week’s song (which album I bought when it came out in 1981). Except that they are not a fringe. That is where the “mainstream” of elected Democrats are now. The song lyrics are nearly perfect to describe today’s Democrats.
In prior Fourth Turnings, the future was a binary choice. Richard III or Henry VII. America or part of Britain. Union preserved or a United States adjacent to Confederate States. The New Deal or a Hooveresque approach to the world and the economy.
Today we have a binary choice as well. Trump is going to tear down institutions and systems that have existed for decades and replace them. Obviously he is not shy about this. If the public perceives that it is working, the next 10 years may be ones of populist Trumpian GOP dominance as the period from 1932 until 1945 was one of FDR Democratic dominance. After the Civil War, a Democrat was not again elected president for 24 years.
But there’s no guarantee that he will succeed, just as the outcome of wars and elections and the economy in prior fourth turnings wasn’t pre-ordained. If Trump does not succeed, the Neo-Marxist left will see this as their opportunity to seize power and to keep it by any means necessary. Ronald Reagan warned us in the 1980s of “a thousand years of darkness” if the Communists prevailed and dominated the world. Today’s Democratic Party is little better than the the people who controlled the Soviet Union. Their objectives are the same. Elites will control our speech, thought, economic output and family dynamic. God will only be allowed to the extent that He supports the mores of leftism. I don’t know if it will be 1000 years of darkness, but darkness indeed it will be.
Almost every election, I hear someone say that “this is the most important election of my lifetime.” That is rarely true. However, the next 4 years may be the most important years in the course of public policy in our lifetimes because the stakes are so high.
The way this country has gotten off track, we do not deserve His countenance. But may God, in His grace, grant this administration the wisdom to succeed so that this great American experiment can continue as a beacon of liberty for another century.
Until next week, I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
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