When even painters and plumbers working on your house volunteer that the world is going crazy, and can’t continue this way, something’s up. Cleverclogs Twitter boss Elon Musk would agree, having recently tweeted a tumbling gladiator, with the headline ‘Watching the Roman Empire collapse again, but with wifi and memes this time’. He commented, ‘Anyone feeling late stage empire vibes?’ Eminent military historian Victor Davis Hanson predicted recently, ‘the next 12-18 months are going to be the most explosive in our history since the Great Depression’. This sense of fin-de-siècle is apparently commonly felt, and not only in my circles.

None of this would surprise US historian and demographer Neil Howe, not even the latest atrocities in Israel; the Blackstone advisor has long expected these years to be destructive and crisis-ridden, and indeed, predicted it back in the 1990s. We are in Howe’s ‘Fourth Turning’, which is the end of our social era. He fleshed out his predictions last July, when his first new book for 20 years, The Fourth Turning Is Here, came out. He argues we are in the winter of our social order, when decaying institutions, political polarisation, financial failure and rising social discord reach a rupturing climax, which will sweep away an old era and birth a new. The last Fourth Turning in the 1930s gave us the Great Depression and the second world war. Our most perilous years lie just ahead.

Howe is building on his earlier 1991 and 1997 works with William Strauss, which proposed a generational theory of history, positing that every 80 to 90 years the West passes through a society-smashing crisis, that ushers out an old status quo and brings in a new one. This once-cult, now influential theory has been praised by figures as diverse as Al Gore, Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich. Previous Fourth Turnings were the American Revolution (1770s), the Civil War (1860s), the Great Depression and World War II. Each turning lasts roughly a generation, 20 to 25 years, and the four turnings are analogous to spring, summer, autumn and winter. Our era’s First Turning, or spring, was the post-second world war High, a time of strengthening civil order and strong norms, the Second was the Awakening (spiritual values, campus revolts), the Third the Unravelling (strong individualism, civic decay) and the Fourth Turning, or Crisis era, when things fall apart, is now.

These Turnings created four generational archetypes: Idealists (think Baby Boomers), Reactives (Gen X), Civics (Millennials), and Adaptives (Gen Z). Baby Boomers are self-indulgent and moralistic, Gen X children are underprotected and pragmatic, Millennials are protected, team workers, while Gen Z, growing up in dangerous times, are overprotected and oversensitive – think safe spaces.

Like any theory-of-everything, the Strauss-Howe theory can be appealing in the broad sweep, and founder on specifics. It is US-centric, treating the US as the centre of empire, which is mostly but not entirely true. I haven’t the expertise to critique their analysis of Western history going back to the 1500s, but Strauss-Howe’s core notion, that generations are moulded by their experiences as children growing up, and end up sharing certain outlooks and behaviours, seems self-evident. Indeed, any discussion of Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and so on assumes this fact. Given that human nature is a constant, it is conceivable that shared environments produce a semi-predictable recurring cycle of history. As the old saw goes, history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme.

This is not to say that generations are monochromatic, or that individuals lack agency. Shared experiences will always be moderated by family environments, individual proclivities, religious values, cultural and national factors, technology and more. And doomsayers are always about, amplified now by a crisis-crazed media, so perhaps society will persevere, normalcy will overcome.

However, the signs of decrepitude in the US are epic; one cannot look away from this slow-motion train wreck. Runaway spending, forever wars, massive debt and a crashing bond market, uncontrolled illegal immigration, systemic government corruption, incompetent political elites, such outrages appear daily, and the public’s disgust grows ever deeper.

Recently the Biden regime suddenly reversed its long-standing opposition to a border wall, and said yes, the need for a barrier was ‘acute and immediate’, and 26 laws would need to be waived. The very next day the regime changed course again and said, no wall. On the political persecution front, Newsweek revealed that a unique new category of domestic terrorists had been created by the FBI, and surprise, surprise, it exactly fitted Trump supporters. Is it yet a criminal offence to criticise the Ukraine war, or the shovelling of much-needed billions in to the meat grinder?

And while physical appearances are not determinative, they can be symptomatic. The US’s feeble, geriatric rulers mirror the broken systems and decayed moralities of the nation, an obvious point but one that is rarely made. These frail ancients die in office, or sputter and seize up, wandering in circles like clockwork toys running down. There is no vigour and energy in these incompetent elites, but weakness welded desperately to power, and the more dangerous for that. Too many still see the US through movies and history as something of a Norman Rockwell fantasy, which may always have been doubtful, but its undeniable brokenness these days is the more bitter for the contrast with its magnificent ideals.

What does Howe predict comes next? He says the US is in a mood of ‘almost unrelieved pessimism’ with economic prosperity ending, irreconcilable civil discord, and aggressive global challengers. Typically of Fourth Turnings, we have one-party dominance. The cleansing period of Ekpyrosis, or firestorm, is coming in the late 2020s; this will involve either a financial collapse, a civil war of some kind (half of Americans think civil war is likely, Howe says), an external war, or some combination thereof. And it will involve much of the globe, not just the US, with a high risk of catastrophe.

Yet the hardship will lead to a renewal of national community, likely starting in the early 2030s, and the first turning of the next cycle, when community will replace individualism, equality will replace privilege, authority will overcome defiance, and strong conventions will emerge. Life will renew.

Howe’s analysis, whether it proves right or wrong, tells us that the hour is late. This explains the recent GOP dumping of House Speaker McCarthy, in an historic first that was condemned by out-of-touch pundits, but celebrated by the base. The days of patience are over.