BEYOND THE FOURTH TURNING.

We've previously noted Via Media's use of the saeculum.  A recent essay calling for a fifth understanding of liberalism recognizes the long cycle, intentionally or not.

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

It's not yet clear which dimension of the secular crisis will provoke the response that will shape the social order that is to come, let alone the unresolved tensions that it will bring.  At Via Media, the tensions of the existing order are past resolution.

Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.

Thus the stresses. The essay also notes the impossibility of restoring a High (known in these pages as The America that Worked^(TM)) or an Awakening.

We can’t get back to the 1890s or 1920s any more than we can go back to the 1950s and 1960s. We may not yet be able to imagine what a post-blue future looks like, but that is what we will have to build. Until we remove the scales from our eyes and launch our discourse toward the future, our politics will remain sterile, and our economy will fail to provide the growth and higher living standards Americans continue to seek. That neither we nor the world can afford.

It's a lengthy exegesis on the nature of the internal contradictions of the order after World War II, and the discussion of the evolution of the word "liberal" is worth your time.