The Fourth Turning Crisis Has Arrived

Jeff Lukens
5 min readMay 18, 2021

By Jeff Lukens

Sweeping political and cultural transformations occur during times of crisis. Our nation is in such a time now, and significant change may soon be coming whether we want it or not. Whether America reaffirms itself as a land of Constitutional freedom or whether it becomes just another plot of ground in a new socialist world order remains to be seen. This is a time for choosing. How we address this crisis in the next few years will define who we are as a nation for the rest of the century. The consequences for all Americans will be enormous, and especially so for Millennials.

Exactly what crisis are we in, you ask? Well, consider the staggering debt and looming economic collapse. An ever more aggressive China threatens confrontation and possible war. The Covid pandemic continues to rage around the world. Big Tech and Big Media are restricting free speech and fixing elections with the compliance of the administrative state in Washington. The border is being overrun. Schools no longer teach our history or what it is to be an American. At the head of it all is Joe Biden and his gang of race-baiting socialists purposely dividing the country, driving it into collapse, so the great reset into a Marxist world government can begin.

So yes, we are in a crisis where the future of our way of life hangs in the balance.

Portland riots — The Oragonian

In their seminal 1997 book, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, William Strauss and Neil Howe surveyed history through a generational prism. Their chronicle forms Anglo-American history into recurring sequences over the generations. The authors make a weighty claim that generational characteristics follow a similar series of phases, or turnings, that climax in a major crisis every 80 years or so.

In their book, each cycle is characterized by the First Turning or the High (which most recently occurred from 1946 to 1964); followed by the Second Turning or the Awakening (1964–1984); then the Third Turning or the Unraveling (1984–2008); and finally, the Fourth Turning or the Crisis (2008 to late 2020s). Each generation comes of age during a different time and consequently views the world differently than the other generations.

The last historical crisis we faced was the Depression and World War II, where The…

Jeff Lukens