THE FOURTH TURNING IS EMERGENT.

Sarah Hoyt sees a secular Perfect Storm brewing.

We are, facing a perfect storm. And it is worldwide. And I can’t see or feel a path through it much less what comes out at the other side.

No, this is not precisely true. I had a — not a vision — but a strong feeling; I was vouchsafed a certainty that America comes out the other end of this as America, and closer to what it was meant to be than it was in 2019. Now, like all woo woo, this might be all in my head and wishful thinking, but it was given unasked, before I knew there was any reason to ask. As it turned out, it came to me in the very last day before lockdown, in Colorado.

Sometimes this is all I hold onto in the dark of night, at 3 am, when I’m staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep or think clearly about anything.

Because I know what we’re facing, I know what we’re going through, and I understand completely there is no way back.

That sounds a lot like "saecular entropy cannot be reversed," doesn't it?  A passage from my review of The Fourth Turning is Here expands on her observation.

There are still unresolved policy challenges from the American Founding and from the institution of the rules-based international order.  Maybe, though, each reset of the values regime builds on the successes of the previous values regimes and there's less to reset.

This time, Neil Howe admits of the possibility that the new values regime will be emergent, subject to false starts and errors along the way, and whatever implants will sow the seeds of its own destruction.  Although commencing at page 421 he anticipates broad consensus on the goals and policies of that new values regime (think "rules-based international order" as established in 1945) at page 423 he notes, "Just as strength of community loyalty reaches its saecular flood tide, the reach of community authority surges over its usual boundaries."  And thus does the push-back begin.

From that perspective, her "aha" the day the lockdowns ended is salient. "During the corona tyranny, there were people who embraced it."  Yes, mostly the neurotics, and the push-back, which has only been further inspired by the Jarrett regency's Incompetence in Diversity staffing and policies, is well under way.  "What would we ever do without experts? What's the over-under on 'we'd do better?'"

That appears to be Ms Hoyt's stance as well.

Let me make things very clear. First, if you feel like the world is falling apart, that’s because it is. Second, the world that is falling apart, and the US that’s shaking apart like a ship in a storm is not the US as founded. It’s the socialist, statist, center out, top down model of the twentieth century, now almost 100 years old.

I don’t care how how misty colored your memories of your childhood, the America you grew up in was more or less intentionally subverted from the design of the founders and the Constitution. In many ways — at least at the culture level — we’ve been reclaiming it for 20 or so years now. And before you squawk the insane is mostly being pushed from up to down, from center out, and is a symptom of the socialists losing power and trying to destroy what they can’t hold. (Though it started before, at the behest of the USSR, their beau ideal.) But you see the real America coming back in the fact that we’re no longer swallowing the dictates from above with no skepticism, the fact that they keep losing control of the financial system (particularly the gig economy, which yes is why they also hate it.) or gun rights. Look at the latest insanity they’ve been trying to push in the culture war and how hard the push back is.

Now America is not coming back because it wants to. It was so far submerged that it wouldn’t ever see the light of day again. But the fact is that the same way the technology changed so that it encouraged both the late 19th/early 20th century’s illusions of the efficacy and superiority of central government control and silencing of the “uneducated populace”, it changed again, so that now technology encourages a society more dispersed, more weighed towards the individual, not the same but closer to the society of the 18th than of the 20th century.

And to an extent we are prepared to go through this storm better than the rest of the world for a variety of reasons.

Yes, the established saecular order circa 1948 is not suited to the new set of challenges. Somewhere between taxing and spending to provide stuff for the people who paid the taxes (Social Security and Interstate Highways) and taxing some people to spend on people who don't pay the taxes (the Great Society, or, more frivolously but no less accurately, streetcars and bike lanes) the "blue social model" ran out of other people's money.

The first front driving the storm is the decay of what I’ll call “the blue model” from the color used for the leftist states in the US (and yes, I fully appreciate the irony of their not wanting to be associated with the color red. And manipulating things accordingly.) The blue model is decaying because even with the super-centralized technology that provided it the illusion of working, it never worked very well.

That's a point people who complain about Ronald Reagan unleashing that "unfettered capitalism" never grasp, do they?  Blackboard economics never works in practice.

I do not concur with the political economy and electoral analysis that follows.  And yet, she has the outlines of the second source of grievance about right.

The second front of the storm is that unfortunately the color revolution in 2020 put into power people who believe the way to make the rest of the world rich is to make the US poor. This idea that the US is rich because other places are poor, and vice versa, is an article of faith with them. It was in my kids’ schoolbooks 15 years ago.

So having seized power, and not liking the US very much — I mean we refused to vote them in and made them fraud — they decided to make the rest of the world very rich. By destroying our economy.

The problem is that economics doesn’t work that way. So, when we stop having the money to say buy trinkets from China, China collapses.

We aren’t doing well but it’s one of those things: when America coughs, the world catches pneumonia.

So the rest of the world also dependent on the blue model and convinced of it — to an extent we spread it to the world after WWII under the amiable impression we were thwarting communism — is falling apart much harder. It’s part of what’s fueling the farmers revolt.

Yes, and disaffected Chinese migrating to the United States, whether to breathe free or to get a date, ought be viewed as assets, and intellectual capital to point out the logical failures of dirigisme.

What comes next will be a new saecular order.  Nobody knows exactly what it will look like.  We can guess at the outlines.

The next front of the storm is what’s driving the ability to fight against the blue model: the more distributed production and communication model. The internet, three d printing (in its infancy), online commerce; places like this blog.

All of it, every bit of it is accelerating and reverberating other change, a lot of it unforseen — except by some of us — 20 years ago.

Its exact form, though, will be emergent. Expect surprises, not all of them pleasant.