This is a review of Neil Howe’s new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here. This part, above the line, I’m writing in early July, before the book is out and before I’ve read any part of it.

Neil Howe has been writing about generations for a long time. He and his late coauthor, William Strauss, wrote a series of books about their concept of generational cycles starting with Generations in 1991. Their second book, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, in 1993, is a study of what we now call Generation X, and it’s the one I read first. I thought it was really interesting and hunted up their other stuff, and when their third book The Fourth Turning came out, I (along with a lot of other people) spent a lot of time on the message boards of the book’s website. This eventually led to a series of get-togethers in Washington and Nashville where we met Strauss and Howe, and also to some of our bons mots being quoted in their fourth book, Millennials Rising.

A quick description of Strauss-Howe generational cycles. First, a stage of life is about 20 years long. You’ve got youth (0-20), adulthood (21-40), midlife (41-60), and elderhood (61-80). Roughly speaking. This is all roughly speaking. Second, a generation is about 20 years long. A Strauss-Howe generation is a group of people in the same society who were born within about a 20-year period, who therefore shared similar coming-of-age experiences, and who therefore largely share a similar generational personality.

Third, a generation will give to society what it perceives to have been missing from society during its youth. (History produces generations; generations produce history.) Fourth, there’s a four-stroke cycle of generational types that repeats, always in the same order, and this generational cycle is visible in history, art, literature, and legend.

Fifth, this cycle produces 20-year eras (or “turnings”) that can be characterized by which generational type is in which age bracket at the time. Like, at one time you’ll have type 1 in youth, type 2 in adulthood, type 3 in midlife, and type 4 in elderhood. Then forty years later the type 1s will have aged to midlife, the type 2s will have aged to elderhood, and we’ll have new type 3s in youth and type 4s in adulthood. And their respective personalities will be one of the things that make these eras feel different from each other.

Sixth, this gives us a repeating 80-year cycle of historical eras. Again: all very roughly speaking.

This isn’t science, and yet it also isn’t historicism. Howe and Strauss think they’ve found a pattern, and they’ve identified a mechanism that they think produces it and will continue to produce it. They haven’t been afraid of making predictions, and a lot of their predictions look pretty good after a couple of decades. But a lot of what they’re talking about is inescapably subjective, and as such I don’t think it’s really falsifiable.

Many will say that this is a crackpot theory and that generations aren’t really a real thing anyway. I get that. I don’t agree, but I do think there are things to be said on that side. Anyway, I won’t argue; you don’t need to agree with me. There are other objections that can be made, of varying levels of validity. That’s all fine.

My perspective is, I think Howe and Strauss are on to something. The generational cycle makes sense to me, and since the mid-’90s, when I first learned about it, it hasn’t stopped making sense to me. It has vastly increased my understanding of history, by giving a shape to it. It’s fun to talk about. If you want to look into it, you can.

Some specifics. The “fourth turning” that Strauss and Howe refer to is one of their types of historical era, also called a “Crisis”, in which visionary Prophet generations (like Boomers) are in elderhood, pragmatic Nomad generations (like GenXers) are in midlife, capable Hero generations (like Millennials) are in adulthood, and sheltered Artist generations (like Zoomers) are in their youth. In this kind of era, society goes through a drastic and dangerous fundamental change that makes everything after it different from everything before it. Like the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or the Depression+World War II. Their book The Fourth Turning (1997) was a warning to everyone that such an era was coming and we would do well to get ready for it. The meaning of the title of the new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, is obvious in this context.

I’m wondering, first, what the writing is going to be like in the new book, now that William Strauss is no longer with us. Both Howe and Strauss wrote books separately on other subjects, so it’s not like Howe can’t do it on his own, or anything. But my experience of them was always that Strauss was the showman of the two (he’s the same William Strauss who cofounded the Capitol Steps troupe), while Howe was quieter. It could make a difference.

But mostly I’m wondering what Howe is going to tell us about what’s going on. See, I think, and I’m not the only one, that the Crisis era began with 9/11 in 2001. I think that’s when Everything Changed. It’s true that that would mean that the Crisis came early; it gives us a pretty short third turning (or Unraveling era), from 1984 to 2001. That’s not necessarily a problem, though; something similar may have happened around the Civil War, depending on who you talk to. But my understanding is that Neil Howe considers the financial crisis of 2007-08 as the inciting event of the Crisis. He probably has a good reason for this.

But it has implications about where we are now. If the Crisis started in 2001, then here in 2023, after more than 20 years, we ought to be about ready to come out of it, if in fact we haven’t already. And I think it’s plausible that we have! But if it started in 2007, then we’re almost certainly still in it, and we’ll have to brace ourselves for a few years more of this nonsense.

Understand what I’m saying, because I’m not interested in sounding any more cracked than I actually am: I’m not saying, “we have this pattern, it says we’re in a Crisis era, therefore we’re going to do this and this and this”. It’s not deterministic like that. The generational cycle pattern is trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s more like, “we have this pattern, it suggests that people have an appetite for doing this and this and this, and that we won’t get tired of it for another few years, and until we do we’ll still be able to describe the era as a Crisis”.

I don’t want to speculate (one prediction I’m very confident about: there will be advice on how to prepare ourselves for the next turning!) too much about what’s in the book, but that’s what’s going to be at the top of my mind when I read it. A few more things I want to touch on while we have time:

• Strauss and Howe have many prominent readers from the upper echelons of U.S. government circles. In the ’90s the cover blurbs made much of the fact that both Newt Gingrich and Al Gore liked Generations, for instance. Bipartisan, you see. More troublingly, the Project for the New American Century, Paul Wolfowitz’s group, were way big into the generational cycle, presumably trying to find a way to bend the arc of history in favour of their own nefarious ends. And of course ol’ Steve Bannon is also a fan, probably for the same reason. I swear you don’t have to be evil to like this stuff! If I could kick Bannon out of the club I would.
• Strauss and Howe write from a U.S. perspective, and here I am up in Canada. I’m not the researchers they are, but what reading I have done has always suggested to me that Canada is on the same cycle as the U.S.A., give or take a couple of years here or there. If I’m right that the Crisis ended in the U.S. on January 6th, 2021, when Trump’s coup failed, then I would say that the Crisis ended in Canada on February 21st, 2022, when the convoy was finally cleared out of Ottawa, for instance.
• Strauss and Howe may use different generational boundaries than you’re used to. It’s the least interesting thing to argue about, but I’ll list theirs just so we can proceed on a basis of shared understanding. Note the boundary between the Boom and GenX in particular. Today’s living generations:

The G.I. Generation (often called the Greatest Generation) (Hero): 1901-1924 (2023 age 99-122)
The Silent Generation (Artist): 1925-1942 (2023 age 81-98)
The Boom Generation (Prophet): 1943-1960 (2023 age 63-80)
Generation X (formerly called the 13th Generation) (Nomad): 1961-1981 (2023 age 42-62)
The Millennial Generation (Hero): 1982-2005? (2023 age 18?-41) (or, my speculation: 1982-1997? (2023 age 26?-41))
The Homeland Generation (often called Zoomers) (Artist): 2006?-?? (2023 age 0-17) (or, my speculation: 1998?-2018?? (2023 age 5??-25?))
a new Prophet-type generation (Prophet): 2019??-?? (2023 age n/a) (or, my speculation: 2019??-?? (2023 age 0-4??))

• One thing about this generational stuff is that the best way to do it, by far, is in retrospect. There’s obviously no way to look at a newborn baby and say, “this baby is clearly going to end up with a different generational take on life than that two-year-old over there”. A lot about how we view the Millennials and Zoomers will depend on how we come out of the Crisis era into the first turning (or High era). We’re using the generational pattern to pretend we know more about what’s going on than we really do. Again, these generations and eras are purely descriptive: people will do whatever they do for whatever reasons they do them, and the generational terms are for making sense of it afterwards.
• I suppose I should point out, if it wasn’t clear already, that I hold both Howe and Strauss in high regard, that their ideas have been very influential on me, and that both men were very kind to me the times we met. (At the same time, I like to think that I’ve still got enough healthy skepticism to disagree with them, or split with them entirely, if and when I think it’s warranted.) So this review is certainly not going to be a big slam.

Now for the part I wrote after reading the book.

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Okay, I read it. I went through it pretty fast, but just flipping through it again while writing this, I think I might need to take another pass at it. I can do the review, though!

First things first: I wasn’t sure how different this book would be from the four previous books Howe and Strauss wrote about the generational cycle. I’m pleased to report that the narrative voice is the same, and the presentation of the material is as good or better than those other books. Should I have taken this for granted? Anyway, I didn’t.

Part of this is because Howe continues to reuse descriptions and citations that he and Strauss have used many times before. In how many different places have I read their metaphor about GenXers walking on a deserted beach that’s been ruined by Boomers? It’s here again (although significantly altered!). This is fine, for two reasons. First, every comic book is someone’s first. (That’s an expression. I’m not saying this book is a comic book.) Most of this book’s readers will be encountering the generational cycle for the first time. You have to write for them and not for the small clique of eccentrics who’ve been with you for decades. Second, how many different ways does one need to describe the same things over and over again? It’s a big book; no need to reinvent the wheel.

But, longtime Howe-and-Strauss readers, be warned: there is a great deal of material in this book that you’ve seen before.

Some of it’s better than it used to be, though! I was always dissatisfied with how Strauss and Howe dealt with music in their books. There would be a passage of, “This generation listened to this kind of music, and that generation listened to that kind of music, and…” and my reaction would be, yes? I’m sure they did; what of it? But in The Fourth Turning Is Here, Howe expands on this with some intriguing ideas about generational types and music. I don’t know if the subject is fully developed yet, but Howe has at least taken a definite step forward with it. That’s one example. Overall I would say that, yes, this book is worthwhile for generationheads.

In the first half of this article I described my disagreement with Howe about the timing of the Crisis era. Now that I’ve read The Fourth Turning Is Here, I understand Howe’s position much better. First, he manages to fit 9/11 into his ideas about a third turning (Unraveling era). Second, if I can interpret him here, you can’t have a Crisis without a lot of drastic action and chaos and death, which we have not yet had. Sure, the last fifteen years have been plenty eventful, but they haven’t been, from a U.S. perspective, World War II eventful. And, according to Howe, that’s the kind of scale that Crises operate on before they’re done. In this light, my argument about how the Crisis may be already over is like I’m trying to fulfill the technical requirements of a Crisis without actually having one.

I don’t know if I agree. I think it’s possible that Howe is insisting that this Crisis will resemble previous Crises more closely than he can know for sure. I’d say the same about his characterization of the Millennial generation, which doesn’t remind me of any Millennials I know. I’d say the same about his continued prediction that a Gray Champion figure will emerge to lead society through the worst of what’s to come. To quote Dennis Miller (another Boomer), when talking about Bill Clinton in a context remarkably similar to this one, “Maybe!… but I’m not getting that vibe.” The good news, and the bad news, is, we’re all going to find out. (Except, some of us might not.)

(I do have a dog in this fight. I have two sons, of an age such that if I’m right about the timing of the Crisis, they’re Homelanders, or Zoomers, who spent the Crisis at home not catching Covid. If Howe is right, they’re Millennials who have not yet seen the end of the Crisis. Since the role of Hero generations like Millennials is to be footsoldiers in the Crisis, that’s a prospect that scares me more than a little, so I’d rather I was right.)

A couple of things I wasn’t enthusiastic about. First, Howe deals with the current political climate with that kind of both-sides-ism that never fails to put me off. I don’t think it’s responsible. I do, grudgingly, understand it, though. First, Howe is trying to sell this book to conservatives as well as liberals (and has a day job in which I imagine he has to deal with a lot of conservatives). Second, he’s not dealing with “who is right” as much as he’s dealing with the question of “what are people going to do”, and that is a separation that can be made. I still don’t like it, but I’ll let it go.

Second, I think Howe underestimates the role that climate change will play in the Crisis. He mentions it, but focuses more on politics and economics as the things that the rest of the Crisis will be about. Maybe he’s right, but I think it’s a huge oversight.

At one point, Howe writes that the dominance of superhero movies is coming during a Crisis era, just as comic-book superheroes were in their Golden Age during the previous Crisis era. And that is an excellent point that, somehow, entirely escaped me up until the point that I read it. How did I miss that? I of all people should have clued into it. Maddening. Thank you, Neil Howe, for showing me how to tie my shoes. I’ll try to pay better attention.

When illustrating the personalities of the generations, Howe and Strauss have often used pop culture references to make their points. And I don’t think this has ever been their strongest suit. The characterizations often seem a little off. One example that struck me in this book is Howe’s reference to “works for me!” as a GenX catchphrase of the ’80s. Which… I mean, we said it, sure. It was around. But on the one hand I feel like their must be better examples of the kind of stuff we said, and on the other hand I mostly associate “works for me!” with the title character of the cop show Hunter, where Hunter was played by (Boomer) Fred Dryer. So: a little off, but nothing that really damages an argument.

But then there’s Howe’s repeated description of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X as “sardonic”. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any Coupland. He has a sense of humour that he isn’t afraid to use, and he likes his pop culture references… but he isn’t sardonic. He’s one of the most earnest writers I’ve experienced. Douglas Coupland has some things he wants to get off his chest. Generation X in particular is (loosely) about characters who are trying to leave ‘sardonic’ behind, and who eventually arrive at a point of genuine affirmation. It’s still a very GenX book! But it doesn’t help to get things like this wrong.

I had one criticism in mind for this book that I’m going to back down from. Originally I was going to say that a big problem with this book is that it’s not really telling us anything about what’s coming. That it’s no different from The Fourth Turning in that it gives us the same prediction about what the Crisis will be like, but doesn’t give us any details, even with a quarter-century more information about it. But when I was flipping back through the book, I decided that that wasn’t true. On one hand, the generational-cycle theory has been developed some more, and Howe gives details about the structure of a Crisis that do shed more light on what it is we’re up to at the moment. This is one reason I have to reread it; I have to pay more attention when he writes about things like “regeneracy phases”. On the other hand, Howe and Strauss made their names by predicting only as much of the future as they thought they could, and no more. Unrealistic of me to hope that Howe’s got some kind of crystal ball now.

I predicted above that Howe would give us advice in this book for how to prepare for the upcoming first turning (High era), and he doesn’t exactly. He discusses that future extensively, but he doesn’t give us a checklist to consult. Fair enough. I’ll call my prediction a wash.

Overall it’s a well-written book that made me think hard about a subject I already knew a lot about, and made me want to read it again. Bonus: it may give us a way to navigate a decade of danger. What more could I ask from a book?

Conclusion: if you’re interested in this generational-cycle idea, and you can only get one book, this is the book you want. I think you should be interested, but you must be the final judge of that. Whether Strauss and Howe are right or wrong in their theory, Howe has done an admirable job of presenting their case. I give The Fourth Turning Is Here a strong recommendation.