Lifecourse Blog

I thought you all might enjoy this.  It’s the full text of a commencement address I gave last Saturday at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  It was a glorious spring day, and I got to sit on the dais next to UMW President Rick Hurley watching up close as student after student (roughly 1,100 of them) came forward with smiles and beaming faces to accept their diplomas.  Sometimes just being next to happy young people is does wonders for your mood and morale.  Anyway, here it is:

It’s a beautiful day here in Virginia, and I want to thank the University of Mary Washington for inviting me here.

At a commencement address, speakers often go on too long.  This I won’t do.  I may not succeed as well as Salvador Dali, who famously delivered the world’s shortest speech, only four seconds long.  He announced at the podium: “I will be so brief I have already finished.”  And then sat down.

Commencement speakers also like to intone about “today’s youth generation.”  And this is fine.  Except that they then go on to talk at length about their own experiences in their own youth—and tell you: Because this worked for me in my generation, it will work for you in yours.  Which should alert you that these speakers have no idea what a generation is.

Let me clarify.  A generation is a group of people who share a basic outlook on life shaped by their common age location in history, their common “generational setting.”  The renowned sociologist Karl Mannheim called this “eine Generationslagerung,” which I promise you is both the longest word—and the only German word–that you will hear from me today.

“Youth,” on the other hand, is just an age bracket.  It’s like an empty hotel room that different generations move into—with their own baggage—and then soon leave.  Sometimes that room swells with sweet music, sometimes it throbs with death metal, sometimes it’s utterly silent.  But it’s never the same.

Bottom line: All of you Boomer and Generation X parents are essentially unlike your children—and were not the same even when you were kids.  And you Millennial Generation graduates are essentially unlike your parents—and will not become like them as you grow older.

So how, exactly, are you different?  Well, start with the obvious—pop culture: Believe it or not, parents, your kids have never known that America, Chicago, and Kansas are the names of rock bands, not just places.  Or what about technology?  Ever notice the blank stares when you tell them roll up the window, or turn the channel, or dial a number.  Or what about current events?  For as long as Millennials can remember, NATO has been looking for a mission, China has been peacefully rising, Brazil has been building shopping malls, and Boomers Bill O’Reilly and David Letterman have been hating on each other in the plain view of millions.

Now these markers are interesting.  But if there’s one big I idea I want you to take away from my remarks, it’s that generational differences go much deeper.

Consider.

You Millennials grew up in an era of rising parental protection—never having known a time without bicycle helmets, electric plug covers, Amber Alerts, and 15 different ways to be buckled into your minivan seat.  We, the parents, grew up in an era of declining parental protection: Our moms and dads told us, we don’t care where you go so long as you’re home for dinner—and as for seatbelts, we were told if there’s an accident to just put up our hands like this.  As kids, we never saw a “Baby on Board” sticker.  “Baby Overboard” would have been more appropriate.

You Millennials were raised to be special—very special—and trust your counselors, support groups, and smart drugs to keep you feeling pretty good about the world, like a Sims character having just the right digital balance.  We, the parents, knew we weren’t very special, didn’t trust anyone to advise us, and thought staying away from counselors was a sign of resilience.  When you came to college, there were long orientations and immersions–and many of your parents clutched teddy bears and wept.  When we came to college, we jumped out of the car and tried to grab our suitcases before our parents sped off.

You Millennials were raised to be teamplayers—which you are, with community service, group projects in the classroom, and clubs for everything.  And, above all, with digital technology that connects you all to each other on Facebook, and smart phones that you go to bed with.  We, the parents, were a lot more into competition, rebellion, and defying the mainstream.  We did not “friend” each other.  Our generation invented the “personal” computer.  Personal, as in—mine and not yours, and certainly not part of the corporate mainframe our own parents bequeathed to us.  Growing up, our biggest fear was that Big Brother might someday install cameras in our rooms.  Our biggest joy was hearing Steve Jobs announce that “1984 won’t be like 1984.”  And now our biggest surprise is to see our own kids connect with each other by installing their own cameras in their own rooms!

As a generation, you Millennials have a surprisingly conventional outlook on life.  Surveys show that as you grow older you wish to become good citizens, good neighbors, well-rounded people who start families.  Violent youth crime, teen pregnancy, and teen smoking have recently experienced dramatic declines.  And for that we congratulate you.

Most startling of all, the values gap separating youth from their parents has virtually disappeared.  You watch the same movies as your parents, buy the same brand-name clothing, talk over personal problems with them—and, yes, feel just fine about moving back in with them.  When I travel around the country, I often ask people today in their 40s or 50s how many songs on their iPod overlap with what’s on their kids’ iPods.  Typical answer: 30 or 40 percent.  Let me tell you: Back in my days on campus (later known as “the days of rage”), we did not have iPods, but if we had, the overlap would have been absolutely zero.  Everything about our youth culture was intentionally hostile and disrespectful of our parents.  That was the whole idea.

Now people sometimes ask me: What does it mean that one generation is different from another—that Millennials, for example, are different from the Boomers or Gen-Xers who raised them?  Does it mean that some generations are better than others?

And I say no: There is no such thing as a good or bad generation.  Every generation is what it has to be—given the environment it encounters when it enters the world.  And history shows that whatever collective personality that generation brings with it is usually what society needs at the time.  As such, youth generations tend to correct for excesses of the midlife generation in power; and they tend to refill the social role being vacated by the elder generation who is disappearing.

To avoid speaking in code, let me rephrase this as follows: The Millennial Generation is correcting for the excesses of Boomers and Gen-Xers who today run America.  I need not remind you what those excesses are: Leadership gridlock, refusal to compromise, rampant individualism, the tearing down of traditions, scorched-earth culture wars, and a pathological distrust of all institutions.

The Millennial Generation is also reprising many of the hallmarks of the original G.I. Generation, the “greatest generation,” who are now passing away.  Like the Millennials, the G.I.s grew up as protected children and quickly turned into optimistic, consensus-minded team-players who saved our nation—in the dark days of the 1930s and ‘40s—from turning in the wrong direction at the wrong time.

Igor Stravinsky once wrote that every generation declares war on its parents and makes friends with its grandparents.  Yet again that happens.

So all of you parents out there: Be proud of this new generation.  They aren’t like you, but they are what America now needs.  They don’t complain about the storm clouds looming over their fiscal, economic, and geopolitical future; they try to stay positive.  They don’t want to bring the system down; they’re doing what they can to make it work again.  They worry about you a lot.  And they want to come together and build something big and lasting, something that will win your praise.  Beneath their tolerant, optimistic, networking, and risk-averse exterior lie attitudes and habits that may prove vital for our country’s healing and for our country’s future.

No one knows what challenges this Millennial Generation may eventually be asked to bear.  Hardly anyone expects them to become America’s next “greatest generation.”  But someday you can say you heard it from me: That is their destiny, to rescue this country from the mess to which we, the older generations, have contributed… perhaps a bit more than we ever intended—and in so doing to become a great generation indeed.

Thank you.

So why has Hunger Games broken so many box-office records in its first few weeks in theaters?  Sure, the trilogy was a huge YA reader hit before it became a movie.  But the books weren’t exactly Tolkien, nor did they have the same celebrity status as the Harry Potter series.  And even if the books did generate a lot of buzz behind the movie, that just begs another question: Why was the trilogy so popular to begin with?

I have no idea.  But I do think there are several themes in the film that strike an obvious resonance with 4T America.

Theme One is the overwhelming imagery of the 1930s.  In the film, we see images either of America’s dire want and deprivation—think of dirt-eating Appalachia before the TVA arrived—or we see images of National Socialism triumphant.  On the one hand, scenes of semi-starved District 12 are deliberately filmed as a black-and-white evocation of rural America in the middle of the Great Depression.  Think of the Time Magazine’s cover picture for October 13, 2008: A stark photo of breadlines in the early 1930s.

On the other hand, the computer-assisted scenes of the Capitol of Panem look like Berlin as it might have been redesigned by Nazi architect Albert Speer.  Fortunately, history did not allow him time to complete this task.  He did a brilliant job, however, with the Nuremberg rallies, which look like Panem’s Capitol on a smaller scale.  And what isn’t directly Nazi-inspired comes from Art Deco or Art Nouveau.

I’m certainly not the first one to point this out: See this article in the Atlantic for example or this very nice blog post.  I’ve even seen a youtube video pointing to the striking similarity between the Hunger Games Mockingjay pin and Herman Goering’s Luftwaffe badge.  I’ll show a couple of examples here, the most striking of which is the CGI movie image of “Avenue of the Tributes.”  The insignia for each district look disturbingly similar to badges handed out by the U.S. National Recovery Administration (NRA).  Note btw the task assigned to District One: “Luxury.”  Hey, it’s a job and someone’s got to do it.

Why is this important?  Because the specter of National Socialism loomed large over America at the depths of the Great Depression.  As government aggregated greater authority under FDR, many suggested (both on the populist left and the authoritarian right) that perhaps government should go further.  In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel It Can’t Happen Here about a fascist take-over of the United States, which was popular enough to be turned into a stage play in 1936.  In Lewis’ novel, it was not so much that large numbers of people really wanted a dictator.  It was just that no one any longer cared much for the liberal and democratic alternative.

Theme Two is the imagery of a vast gap or distance between the privileged and the subjected.  By most calculations, inequality by income in the United States (as measured by the Gini Coefficient) has recently reached the highest levels since the late-1920s and 1930s.

In Hunger Games, the rich are hi-tech and garish.  The poor are resilient and plain.  In the OWS era, the relevance is clear.

Theme Three is the imagery of a staged yet savage competition among the young for survival.  I think Hunger Games can be read as a metaphor for team-working and risk-averse Millennials entering a young-adult economy defined by survivalist Gen-Xers, who are accustomed to competing against each other in a no-holds-barred, winner-takes-all economy without safety nets.  Gen-Xers know all about Survival Games.  They think nothing of working for businesses governed by the Jack Welch managerial philosophy–which is to fire X percent of your workers every year “pour encourager les autres.”  Life is a gigantic Las Vegas casino.  ”May the odds be ever in your favor.”  How X can you get?  If Millennials fear anything, it is this future.

How things have changed.  When Boomers were young, William Golding wrote a much-discussed novel about kids killing each other that was quickly turned in a movie.  It was called Lord of the Flies.  And why were the kids killing each other?  Because they wanted to.  Because they were accidentally separated from the adults who would otherwise have enforced order and restrained them.  Hunger Games turns the story entirely around.  In this world, it’s the adults who deliberately stage the teen-on-teen gladiatorial contests.  Hunger Games is by no means the first in this genre.  During the Gen-X youth era, we’ve seen novels and movies like The Long Walk (Stephen King) and Battle Royale (a ‘90s Japanese classic).  And how many Xer “reality shows” have followed this same basic model—with Donald Trump or Simon Cowell or some other middle-aging Boomer yelling “you’re fired” at a young person?  The number is beyond counting.

If you’ve seen the film, then you recall the scene where the competition-trained blond jocks chase down and kill an unseen screaming victim.  An image came to my mind: Karate Kid I (1984), where the Aryan Cobra Kai kids (dressed in skeleton uniforms) chase down and catch Daniel-san and would have beaten him to a pulp had not Mr. Miyagi intervened.  This enormously popular movie persuaded countless millions of young Gen-Xers to practice martial arts, buy a gun, or do just about anything to defend themselves in a friendless world.

But here’s what’s changing.  In today’s new 4T era, what felt OK or normal for young Gen-Xers seems outrageous and unacceptable for young Millennials.  For a generation of kids so fussed-over and protected—now to be sent out with bowie knives and machetes to eviscerate each other from throat to gut?  No, the line has to be drawn somewhere.  And this is what adds a whole new edge (so to speak) to the movie.

I originally had a Theme Four in mind, which is the horrifying Oprah-style interviews of young victims about to be sent to their death.  Here is a glimpse of modern American decadence that deserves fuller treatment.  In the heyday of imperial Rome, gladiators once shouted “morituri te salutamus!” to the clamoring coliseum crowds (we who are about to die salute you).  In Hunger Games, the contestants confess personal secrets like they were on Jimmy Fallon’s ever-nice late-night show.  The effect is truly chilling.

But the hour is growing late.  I’ll come back to this in another post.

There is a story in this weekend’s New York Times about a growing movement among insurers and health-care system administrators to discourage doctors from prescribing so many opiate pain-killers to patients who don’t clearly need them.  This is indeed a big problem.  These opioids are powerful, dangerous, and extremely addictive.  Twenty or thirty years ago, they were very rarely used outside of extreme suffering, typically among patients with terminal diseases.  Now, thanks to aggressive marketing by big pharma, these pills are often dispensed like candy.  I am amazed at how often, after even the most routine procedure (like getting a cavity filled), doctors will offer to write me up a prescription for Percocet or Vicodin or whatever.

Don’t you ever just want to shout… Suck it Up, America!  And as for doctors, geez, do they really have to be told these drugs are dangerous?  Don’t they already know?

But the real reason the article caught my attention was this paragraph:

Medical professionals have long been on high alert about powerful painkillers like OxyContin because of their widespread abuse by teenagers and others for recreational purposes.

My question: Why single out teenagers?  In fact, kids in their teens and twenties are not the biggest-abusing age bracket for opioids.  Not even close.  Rather, the biggest abusers today are in midlife.  The media needs to wake up to some basic generational shifts here.  Accustomed to associating deadly drug use with youthful rebellion, journalists (even at the NYT!) are slow to recognize that drugs today are a much deadlier threat to the peers of Rush Limbaugh than to the peers of Lady Gaga.

It just so happens that we wrote a recent piece in Social Intelligence exploring this issue.  It looks at the bad breaking trend in fatal drug overdoses—and it compares and contrasts it with a good breaking trend… in motor vehicle accidents.  Here goes.

In recent years, the steady decline in traffic fatalities (now to a record low) has been a genuine good news story.  Going back at least fifty years, motor-vehicle traffic accidents had long been America’s leading cause of death by injury—so the big drop is welcome. Yet according to a new report by the CDC, this is actually a good news/bad news story. Between 1980 and 2008, at the same time that the traffic fatality rate decreased by nearly half, from 22.9 to 12.5 deaths per 100,000, the fatality rate from “poisonings” almost tripled, from 4.8 to 13.5.  This growth in “poisoning” deaths has been entirely driven by the growth in drug overdoses, which now constitutes roughly 9 out of every 10 “poisoning” fatalities.

Bottom line: As of 2008, drugs—not cars—are America’s leading cause of accidental death.

Let’s look at the good news first. The CDC summarizes the broad range of positive trends that have helped to make driving safer.  These include improvements in the safety of vehicles (air bags, auto-body “crumple zones”), improvements in roadways (better lighting and signage), increased use of seatbelts, stricter laws on child safety seats, reductions in speed, and a concerted law-enforcement effort to catch intoxicated drivers and keep them off the road. The rising use of child restraints in particular has been a great success. Researchers found that child safety seats have reduced the risk of fatal injury by 71 percent for infants (younger than 1-year-old) and by 54 percent for toddlers (ages 1-4).  Between 1975 and 2008, according to one estimate, almost 9,000 Millennial and Homelander lives were saved by child restraints.

The dramatic decline in teenage traffic deaths is also very good news.  Between 1980 and 2006, the motor vehicle death rates for teens (ages 15-19) declined from 42 to only 23 deaths per 100,000. Interestingly, the traffic death rate for teens today is down to the death rate for Americans of all ages back in 1980. One big reason for this decline is the spread of graduated drivers licensing (GDL) programs, which restrict (and often effectively delay) the teen use of cars. According to the CDC, these GDL programs are associated with reductions of 38 to 40 percent, respectively, in fatalities and injuries resulting from accidents involving 16-year-olds.  It also helps that the share of teens who consume alcohol is falling.  Today, the teen share of DUI arrests is only about half of what it was thirty years ago.

To be sure, teens and cars remain a dangerous mix: Auto accidents are still the leading cause of death among teens, and account for more than one in every three teen deaths.  Yet the trend over time has been very favorable.

This youth trend, btw, reflects not just how kids are growing more risk-averse in general—but more specifically how they no longer enjoy the association between driving and risk.  This has big implications for auto marketers.  Where Boomers and Gen-Xers once saw their first chance at the wheel of a car as an exhilarating ticket to freedom and independence, Millennials see it as something you do under the watchful eye of parents and family.  The iconic muscle car is no longer an effective youth attractor.  In fact, most Millennials actually take some pride in how carefully they drive.  It may make sense to design messages that appeal to that care and pride.

Now let’s turn to the bad news—the shocking rise in deaths by poisoning. Again, this increase in “poisoning” has been driven entirely by the misuse of drugs. (Indeed, poisoning deaths not caused by drugs have actually been declining.) And among drugs, most of the growth has been in one category: opioid analgesics. The brand names of these drugs (such as OxyContin, Percocet, Avinza, Darvon, Vicodin, and Demerol) have become familiar to many Americans, as have the names of celebrities (from Heath Ledger to Michael Jackson) whose lives they have claimed.

Back in the 1980s, opioid addictions and deaths were relatively rare. By 1999, opioids were responsible for 30 percent of all deaths where the identity of the drug could be determined.  By 2008, that share had risen to 54 percent.  By all accounts, this scourge has been enabled by the increasingly casual distribution of prescription opioids by doctors, typically for pain relief.  Medical use can then lead to addiction, and addiction to death.  The magnitude of this human tragedy vastly exceeds the 15,000 Americans actually died from an opioid overdose in 2008.  The CDC estimates that for every one prescription painkiller death, there are 10 admissions for addiction treatment, 32 emergency visits to the hospital, and 130 people who are chronically addicted.

Which generation has suffered most from opioid addition and death? Given lurid media accounts of youths who host “pharm” or “cocktail” parties (in which teens randomly mix prescription pills in a party bowl), one might suppose that it’s Millennials. Wrong. It’s Boomers. The overdose fatality rate for Americans ages 45-64 is now the highest and fastest-rising of all age brackets. Gen Xers are in second place. Millennials are last. Though overdose death rates have been rising over the last decade for the young as well as the old, the young started from a much lower level. Today’s 50-year-old is now over three times more likely to die of a drug overdose than today’s 20-year-old.

The good news/bad news story from the CDC thus reveals a generational subtext. Consider the good news on traffic fatalities. It wouldn’t have happened without a range of policies—from child safety seats to graduated licenses—that reflect America’s collective determination to protect Millennials and Homelanders, both as drivers and passengers. As for the bad news on drug overdose fatalities, here the important generational driver is Boomers (plus older Gen Xers) moving into their late 40s, 50s, and 60s. Throughout their lives, these cohorts have pushed up personal risk-taking in every age bracket they have passed through. When they were young, teens did more dangerous things with drugs than older people ever imagined. Now that they’re older, they’ve taken the danger with them.

Some generations come of age in inflationary eras, when midlife bond owners suffer but when young debtors can easily escape from the consequences of bad choices—since the real value of debt just seems to melt away under the impact of rising nominal wages. Boomers came of age in such an era. Other generations come of age in deflationary eras, when midlife bond owners are rewarded but when young debtors are relentlessly punished. Millennials are coming of age in such an era.

In this post, I’m going to publish one of our recent Social Intelligence articles, on “Why Young Adults Aren’t Buying Homes.” There’s a lot going into this mix, but pay special attention to the role debt is playing in slowing both this generation’s willingness to spend—and their ability to buy a home.

Note: the estimate of $870 billion in student loans made by the New York Fed a couple of weeks ago was superceded last Thursday by a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (a federal agency).  The CFPB’s new estimate is that total outstanding student loans passed $1 trillion late last year.

Young people who can’t buy a home are renting in larger numbers.  They are also moving in with their parents in larger numbers.  Increasingly, Boomer parents intervene to help their adult children buy their first home, either by cosigning the mortgage or by lending the money to them directly. Direct lending is not only good for Millennials, but also for Boomers parents who may enjoy getting a return of 4.0 percent on their assets rather than 0.4 percent on a low-risk CD. And as much as Boomers love their Millennial kids, they may also want their own space back—finally.

For anyone following the rising trend in multi-generational households (especially young adults living with their parents), take a look at this new Pew study.  Tabulating Census data, the study notes that whereas in 1980 only 11 percent of 25–35 year-olds were living with their parents or grandparents (a postwar low point), by 2011 that figure had doubled to 22 percent.  Millennials have now moved back to the way young adults lived before 1950 and the building of suburbia.  They’ve moved back to the “Frank Capra” household.

So what do most Americans think about the economic hardships facing today’s young adults?  While older generations usually resist any claim that young “have it harder” than they did, this time may be different. A recent Pew Research Center study found that a plurality of the public (41 percent) does indeed believe young adults are having the hardest time in today’s economy, and large majorities (70 to 80 percent) agree that it’s harder for today’s youth than it was for them to find a job, save for the future, pay for college, or buy a home.

Yet if older people may be worried about the economic future of today’s youth, Millennials themselves aren’t.  The Pew study also found that despite the difficult times they face, Millennials remain very optimistic about the future.  Nearly 90 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds polled in the study said that they either make enough money to lead the kind of life they want now, or expect to earn enough money in the future. Optimism is one of the most defining characteristics of Millennials, and in these tough times, it is arguably their best asset—that and their understanding and patient Boomer parents.

This is called a preemptive posting.  If there’s ever a question I get asked a lot, it’s this: When did the Fourth Turning start?  So rather than wait for someone to ask again, let’s get right to it.

Readers of The Fourth Turning already know that 4Ts in history are dated and internally subdivided into stages by four critical events.  The first event, the catalyst, triggers or starts the 4T.  It is “a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.” The second, the regeneracy, marks the beginning of “a new counter-entropy that reunifies and re-energizes civic life.” The third, the climax, is “a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and triumph of the new.”  The fourth is the resolution, “a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order.”

So to ask when the current 4T began is to ask, when was the catalyst?

Pending stunning new developments, I believe the catalyst occurred in 2008.  It’s a date that is looking better and better as time goes by.  The year 2008 marked the onset of the most serious U.S. economic crisis since the Great Depression.  It also marked the election of Barack Obama, which could yet turn out to be a pivotal realignment date in U.S. political history.

Let’s look at each of these separately.  First, the economy.  Yes, the U.S. recession technically started in December of 2007, but neither the public nor the market felt it until the spring and summer of the following year.  In fact, if I had to give the catalyst a month, I would say September of 2008.  The global Dow was in free fall.  Banks were failing.  Money markets froze shut.  Business owners held their breath.  Thankfully, America’s leaders succeeded in avoiding a depression by means of a massive liquidity infusion and fiscal stimulus policies whose multi-trillion-dollar magnitude has literally no precedent in history.  Today, for the time being, the U.S. economy seems safe again, though to be sure it has emerged weaker and more fragile—and certainly more leveraged—than it was before.

Yet at the time, behind closed doors, many of America’s top leaders believed that they were skirting the edge of a catastrophe that could have exceeded 1932 in its destructive potential.  And they were probably right.  Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson later recounted (in On the Brink) that in the last two weeks of September, 2008, they were only “days away” from “economic collapse, another Great Depression, and 25 percent unemployment.”  At one Thursday-evening meeting, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke famously urged legislators to “break the glass” and pass a bailout package with the simple admonition: “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”

And, to add even greater edge to this catalyst, we were at that time just six weeks away from the election of Barack Obama, who brought a new party to power and was America’s first African-American President.  Would he have won without the meltdown?  Who knows.  It would have been a much closer election.  Yet as time goes by, we may see something more important in the 2008 election—how it may mark the beginning of a new political realignment.  Admittedly, it’s still too early to say.  Obama’s approval ratings are still relatively low, and the GOP—though showing deep fissures and light turnouts in this year’s primaries—may still experience a resurgence.  This is a call that will be much easier to make a year or two from now.

People have asked me how confident I am about 2008.  All I can say is, the catalyst has to be sometime around 2008 given the generational dividing lines.  As a rule, a new turning starts a few years (typically 2 to 6) after each living generation (especially the new youth generation) enters a new phase of life.  2008 was 4 to 6 years after the oldest Millennials reached age 21 and graduated from college—and 3 years after the oldest Boomers (born in 1943) started to receive their first Social Security retirement checks.  In terms of phase of life, this is right on.

On the other hand, 2001 was too early—and Bill and I repeatedly explained this to many readers who once told us that 9/11 “must be” the catalyst.  We agreed that the mood shift was sudden and dramatic.  But we pointed out that it the living generations were simply too young: The oldest Millennials, for example, were barely college sophomores.  As time passed—and as the Greenspan bubble welled up under the U.S. economy and as public disillusionment set in over the U.S. invasion of Iraq—our initial doubt was justified.  9/11 will go down as one of the more famous crisis precursors in American history.  A crisis precursor is an event that foreshadows a crisis without being an integral part of it.  Other such precursors in American history include the Stamp Act Rebellion (1765), or Bleeding Kansas (1856), or perhaps the Red Scare (1919).  Incidentally, the media did several retrospectives on the 1919-20 bombings in the wake of 9/11—since they represented, prior to 9/11, the most destructive act of political terrorism by foreigners ever attempted on U.S. soil.

OK.  Now let’s move on to the next question: Where is the regeneracy?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the regeneracy has not yet started.  So how long do we need to wait for it?  And how will we know when it starts?  Those are good questions.  I recently went back over The Fourth Turning to recall how we dated the stages of the each of the historical 4Ts.  And I found that we were very explicit about dating the other three stages (catalyst, climax, and resolution) for each 4T.  But we were always a bit vague about dating the regeneracy, treating it more like an era than a date.  There is a reason for this.  We may like to imagine that there is a definable day and hour when America, faced by growing danger and adversity, explicitly decides to patch over its differences, band together, and build something new.  But maybe what really happens is that everyone feels so numb that they let somebody in charge just go ahead and do whatever he’s got to do.  I’m thinking of how America felt during the bleak years of FDR’s first term, or during Lincoln’s assumption of vast war powers after his repeated initial defeats on the battlefield.

The regeneracy cannot always be identified with a single news event.  But it does have to mark the beginning of a growth in centralized authority and decisive leadership at a time of great peril and urgency.  Typically, the catalyst itself doesn’t lead directly to a regeneracy.  There has to be a second or third blow, something that seems a lot more perilous than just the election of third-party candidate (Civil War catalyst) or a very bad month in the stock market (Great Power catalyst).

We are still due for such a moment.  We have not yet reached our regeneracy.  When it happens, I strongly suspect it will be in response to an adverse financial event.  It may also happen in response to a geopolitical event.  It may well happen over the next year or two.  Given the pattern of historical 4Ts, it is very likely happen before the end of the next presidential term (2016).  Which means we already know who will be President at that time: Either Obama or Romney.  (Or at least this is high probability: According to Intrade, it is now over a 96 percent bet, so if you disagree you can make 25-to-1 by betting against global future traders.)  It’s interesting that both men are temperamentally similar—cool, detatched, capable of gravitas–and that one could imagine either playing a Gray Champion role if history required it.  It’s also worth noting that Romney is the only GOP candidate who could steal a sizable share of the Millennial vote that would otherwise go to Obama.  (Romney has consistently done better in the GOP primaries with voters under 30; Santorum and Gingrich with voters over 50.)

Next question: When will the 4T climax take place?  To be honest, I have no idea.  On timing, let me toss out my guess based on the typical pattern of historical 4Ts: The climax may arrive around 2022-2025.

And when will the resolution occur and the entire 4T come to a close?  Again, there is no way to know.  If the 4T turns out to be of average length, I would say 2026-29.  At that time, an entire saeculum will draw to a close.  And the first turning of a new saeculum will commence.

Let me add one more thought.  Bill and I once explained the dynamic of seasonal turnings by applying a four-fold typology of social states invented by Talcott Parsons.  It seemed to work pretty well.  Parsons said that each state was defined by the demand and supply for social order, each of which could be high or low.  So here are how the four turnings may be defined:

Demand for Order        Supply of Order

1T     High                            High

2T     Low                             High

3T     Low                             Low

4T     High                            Low

The point here being that 4Ts are pretty chaotic.  During 4Ts, the future seems much less certain than in retrospect.  They are mostly defined not so much by how much institutions provide order, but by how much people want order.  Here’s where the Millennials will play a key role.