I was reading The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, after my daughter recommended it five years ago.
I agree with its notion of historical cycles, and that they tend to be about the length of one full human life, eighty to one hundred years. And that it is convenient to break up the cycles into 20-year generations.
But I'm not sure I agree with grafting Jungian archetypes onto the generations: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.
And I don't agree with the idea of distilling hundreds of topical best-sellers as a real view of social and cultural reality. The picture that Strauss and Howe paint is really the ebb and flow of educated-class fashions. It does not really deal with politics as the ebb and flow of who-whom, to coin a phrase.
I'd say that a better way to understand history is to think about how the ruling class, living in its bubble, is often clueless about the miseries it is committing on the rest of the society. Let us rather say that a cycle begins with a new elite dishing out loot and plunder to its supporters, and then dealing with the unanticipated consequences of its actions. For instance, it might have seemed like a good idea to offer loot to senior citizens with Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, but what happens when these programs end up eating the budget? And the well-to-do seniors make sure the politicians know that they'd better not mess with their entitlements.
The basic fact is that the ruling class, any ruling class, is nothing but a bunch of Snobs. The ruling class thinks it is the fount of all wisdom, and no wonder when nobody dares to challenge it, because consequences. In our case we have a ruling class that is endlessly coming up with cool ways to buy votes and launch impressive projects of self-admiration. But what happens to the ordinary middle-class Schmucks on the receiving end of the ruling-class brilliance?
For instance, take California, please. In the 1970s, my first decade in the US, California was already in the lead in controlling suburban development and saving the coastline from development. But the result was to make housing brutally expensive for the young'uns just starting out. It was clear to me that I could never afford to live and work in California. But the existing residents of California that I met seemed to be copacetic with the new order: they accepted the importance of saving the environment for future generations.
No wonder. Because the new California worked well for the establishment Snobs, and for minor Snobs, people already enjoying modest positions of honor from the ruling class. Ordinary middle-class Schmucks, not so much.
And then there are the lower orders, people just trying to get by, somehow. The Snobs have spent the last century telling the helpless victims how much they care for them and how much welfare and housing and benefits they are going to get. But in truth the Snobs do not care about the Scum; they only care about their votes.
I wrote 20 years ago that a truly enlightened elite would set up the culture and the economy -- a Road to the Middle Class -- to encourage the lower orders to acquire the skills and the culture of the middle class and rise up from indigence and the lower-class culture of subordinate serfdom or rebellious gang-dom into the responsible culture of middle-class work, home, family, and order. That is not the policy of our ruling-class Snobs.
The result, as Charles Murray described in his Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, is an America where the Snob class of educated professionals has great careers and merger marriages, a Schmuck middle class is doing so-so, and a Scum at the bottom where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.
The beauty of the current system is that the ruling class Snobs get to tell the Scum how much they care, and then blame the Schmuck cops and other notorious white supremacists for the travails of the Scum.
No doubt at some point this false ruling-class narrative will fall apart. And then the only question will be the size of the butcher's bill.
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