REVEALED PREFERENCES. Don't you know there's a war on?

Pajamas Media photograph.

The events of the past few weeks prompt me to revisit a column Fourth Turning authors William Strauss and Neil Howe posted in October 2001, with commentary in green.

Within the next year, we'll know. Here's a checklist. If the following trends deepen, then America will be in the Fourth Turning, a new era of crisis.

• Are leaders describing the problem in larger rather than smaller terms, proposing grand solutions, and seeking to destroy (and not just contain) enemies?

Buzz. Non-binding resolutions of disapproval, non-defeat defeat, and nation-building efforts no more effective with a Democratic Congress and a Republican President than they were with a Republican Congress and a Democratic President.

• Is there a shift away from individualism (and civil liberties) toward community purpose (and national survival)?

Buzz. Resurrected "Fairness Doctrine" arguments and campus speech codes from the right to counteract those of the left neither unify nor revitalize.

• Are the old "culture wars" arguments beginning to feel lame, ridiculous, even dangerous to national unity?

Buzz. Unity?

• Is the celebrity culture feeling newly irrelevant? Is youth fare becoming less gross and less violent?

Buzz. Messrs. Strauss and Howe held Kato Kaelin forth as exemplar of the trashy mid-1990s "celebrity culture" and a former Mouseketeer named Britney was supposedly the leading edge of that more wholesome youth fare.

• Is immigration reversing? Are mobility and openness declining? Is there more nativism in our culture and less "globalism" in our commerce?

In some circles, immigration is the source of lessened social mobility, but none dare raise nativist objections that can be construed as racist, and the objections to "globalization" remain on the fringe.

• Is there a new willingness to pay a human price to achieve a national purpose? Will we harness technology only to reduce casualties and inconvenience, or also to achieve a total and lasting victory.

Buzz. The cosmic weight-and-balance scale on which military deaths correspond one-for-one to World Trade Center deaths appears to be more influential than any calculation of whether those deaths could either have been avoided or incurred in more forceful actions.

• Is each generation entering its new phase of life with a new attitude? Are aging boomers overcoming narcissism? Are Gen-Xers on the edge of midlife, circling their wagons around family? Are Millennials emerging as a special and celebrated crop of youth?

Buzz. The Silent Generation's Watergate Caucus, continuing that cohort's string of unearned triumphs in securing a Democratic majority for not being Richard Nixon, now calls the shots for a new Democratic majority secured for not being George W. Bush. Baby Boomers? Look at the latest crop of pension advertisements: redefining retirement, pensions for people who serve the greater good, pensions that the ex can't mess up. Thirteeners? Family? Millenials? Hookups, binge drinking, I-pods?