WHEN THE SAECULAR ORDER LOSES ITS LEGITIMACY.

That's what a Fourth Turning is all about, even if the people noticing it don't use the expression.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sees the institutional failure.

For the last half century, we have been steadily losing faith that the people in charge of government, law enforcement, business, religion, and nonprofits have our best interests at heart. If America was already a dumpster fire when we rang in the new year, the last few months have been a jug of lighter fluid squirted on the flames. We are in the midst of an ongoing horror show of bad, stupid, incompetent, and downright evil behavior by the folks who are in charge.

Tom Engelhart, who will come to a different conclusion, sees the same thing.

Here, in fact, was the strange reality of that moment of ultimate triumph in 1991: the American political ruling class, the people who had seemingly won it all, would prove remarkably brain-dead in a way few grasped then or we wouldn’t be in Donald Trump’s America today. Back then, the one thing they couldn’t imagine in a world without the Soviet Union was an all-American world of flatness, peace, and democracy.

The only thing they could imagine was another version of the militarized style of dominance that had long characterized the American Century, to use the famous phrase Life and Time publisher Henry Luce first put into the language in 1941. Those managing the imperial system that had dotted the planet with military garrisons in a historically unprecedented fashion, while creating a global economy centered on the accumulation of staggering wealth and power, had no idea that the United States would prove to be the second superpower victim of the end of the Cold War.

The Atlantic's David Thompson comes closer to identifying what is happening: people of one saecular order failed to think carefully about the succession.

Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020? In part because they are choking on the dust of a dead century. In too many quarters of American leadership, our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s.

Sometimes, that's because the very people still running the existing institutions are the very same Victory Babies who had the Victory Dividend to squander.

The failures of our law-enforcement agencies and public-health systems are not one and the same. But our orientation toward militarized overpolicing and our slow-footed response to fast-moving pandemics both stem from an inability to adapt our safekeeping institutions to the realities of the 21st century. Lost in the anxieties and illusions of the past, United States institutions have forgotten the art of change in a changing world.

Ordinarily, that's not bad, change for change's sake gets you New Coke or the Edsel.  Until it doesn't though, such as when the Back Row Kids lose patience with the Front Row Kids.  Chris Arnade had occasion to use those terms this week.  It's easy enough to understand what he saw.

The “I am tired of playing by your rules” energy that flipped enough back row whites to make Trump President, reached critical level with back row minorities. Without a candidate to channel their anger, they protested, then rioted, and then looted. How much of each became another source of disagreement and anger among everyone.

When a saecular order fractures, electoral politics might be irrelevant.

Certainly everyone is sick of those at the very top telling them what to do. The highly credentialed, whose smug certainty never ebbed during the pandemic, despite doling out one inconsistent proclamation and toothless platitude after another, have lost a level of trust that will be hard to win back. They got it so wrong so often, with such awful consequences, that it has been impossible to ignore. Perhaps globbing onto Black Lives Matter will save them.

If he's right about the globbing on, all that does is patch the Liberal Plantation together for a while longer.

As far as the fracturing of the saecular order is concerned, Mr Gillespie might be closest to anticipating what is yet to come, although that's not necessarily consolation for libertarians.  "[W]e can perhaps take some comfort, naive as it might be, that Americans eventually figure out the right way forward after trying all the others." That's a bet on emergence, but there's no guarantee that emergence is benign, or that the conventions of bourgeois order and the Scottish Enlightenment will be part of the procedural infrastructure.