FOURTH TURNINGS ARE EMERGENT.

I closed last year's collection of book reviews with some comments on Generations, 3^e, er, The Fourth Turning is Here.  Early in that review, I complained,  "Since then, there have been more redefinitions of saecular boundaries than there have been revisions of the Biden era employment figures. Was the hung Florida election of 2000 the trigger for a Fourth Turning? The terrorist attacks in September 2001? In The Third Edition, the trigger is the collapse of the overleveraged financial sector in 2008. Deferents upon epicycles."  I recommend Jesse Walker's recent "How the Political Spectrum Turned Inside Out" in Reason as an elaboration or expansion on the following points I raised in my review.

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.  There's an instructive Sasha Stone essay offering a two-stroke cycle of history as an alternative to the four-stroke cycle of Generations that offers, "Humans always take a good thing too far, creating enough misery for the pendulum to swing again."  Thus does civil rights become the diversity bureaucracies, for instance.

Another possibility, as Joy Pullmann of the Federalist suggests, is that there is more than one way to conduct a "regeneracy" as the institutions break down.  Fourth Turning focuses on governmental efforts, including (sadly) asset relief and social distancing as trials of new methods of governing.  The small platoons might have a say.

In Mr Walker's essay, you get swinging pendulums, misfiring strokes, and learning.  First, at any time, there are people who distrust "the established political order irrespective of partisanship and ideology."  Second, there has been partisan sorting by levels of education, which interacts in unpredictable ways with the distrust.  "If some of those voters are closer to the antiestablishment orientation than to the conventional left or right, that will intensify the effect."

Then come the series of events that have been pointed to as possible triggers of the saecular crisis.

The third reason is a series of three events, each of which threw U.S. institutions into crisis mode: 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID pandemic. Besides their immediate direct effects on the country (by, say, killing nearly 3,000 people and destroying an iconic part of the New York skyline), these allowed the government to adopt emergency powers, reshaping society in more sweeping and pervasive ways. That put a different set of issues at the center of our debates, sparking rapid changes in our political coalitions. And since many of those new policies enriched or empowered large, hierarchical social institutions, the antiestablishmentarians were especially open to finding new allies.

Each of those events also coincided, more or less, with a switch in which party occupied the White House, making the landscape even more fluid. The 9/11 attacks came just eight months after Bush entered the Oval Office, transforming what until then looked like it might be a low-key presidency whose biggest foreign policy concern would be trade with Mexico. The Great Recession began while Obama was running for president, and it arguably ensured his election; Joe Biden, similarly, took power while the pandemic was underway.

With all that churn in the national government, and with that diversity of triggering events each activating a different set of contrarians, the possibility of all those tumblers of gridlock falling in just the right way to make that magical implantation of a new values regime sees remote indeed.  There's a lengthy elaboration in the article, concluding with  "Beneath that static surface, elements were shifting, evolving, reassembling themselves, like a new consensus struggling to be born. You shouldn't expect the alliances of today to be the alliances of five years from now. And after another 20 years and who knows how many crises, who can say how the landscape will look?"  Perhaps there will be no consensus.