The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe, and Trump Derangement Syndrome

I’ve been writing about The Fourth Turning since at least 2012 which I mentioned in The Theory of the Fourth Turning | How It Impacts the Body of Christ. Things made much more sense to me on the very big picture scale once I understood this concept. I’ve written about the how the fourth turning impacts the church. I’ve written about how the fourth turning impacts education. I’ve written about how you can see the first turning coming if you know what to look for. I even briefly had a Substack called Tracking the Turnings. 

All that to say that I am familiar with the concept. So I was very interested when Neil Howe’s new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End, was released. Imagine my disappointment when I picked up a copy at Barnes and Noble to consider buying and realized within a very short period of time that I knew the book wasn’t coming home with me. 

How did I know? 

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy – What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with DestinyThe Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

I don’t have the exact wording here because I did not buy the book. But his description of the so-called insurrection of January 6 in the first part of the book told me everything I needed to know. If he wasn’t honest enough to research and understand what really happened that day, I knew I wasn’t interested in reading his other thoughts. How could I trust anything else he had to say if he couldn’t be honest about that one critical fact due to his apparent Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)? You can read the one star reviews on Amazon if you want more details. There are many good ones. Like others, I suspect the death of his co-author made this book veer into places it should have never gone. It apparently lost all of the balance of the first book.

So I didn’t buy the book and moved on. 

Then the following video popped up in my CensorTube feed. Since it was free and I am familiar with the host, I decided to give it a try to see what he had to say. 

Sigh.

I barely made it through part of the video before I turned it off. Howe’s TDS is so apparent it is painful. But I thought maybe it was just me being hyper-sensitive so I looked at the comment section.

No, it wasn’t just me. The 1,400+ comments are full of observations like these.

Howe’s lack of objectivity and rejection of obvious populist trends mutes his message. Trump is clearly the “Gray Champion” of the Fourth Turning and Howe’s biases render him unable to admit that fact.

I thought this interview would be better than what it turned out to be. I’ve read the recent book of his but this was just a scree about how bad President Trump is.

I think Neal missed the boat on his own theory It seems that 4th turnings were also about throwing off the shackles of the past social contract and forming a new one. One does not need to like Trump to see that is what is happening worldwide. The social contracts are being scrapped, and the new one is not yet drafted

In previous interviews, Neil stated that the persons who will lead us out of the 4th Turning will not be the well-known current players. Unfortunately, he seems to not be able to step back and view things in an unbiased way. His theories are solid, but he is human, with TDS-clouded brain.

I have lost all respect for Neil Howell at this point. This man had a good idea which he parlayed into a decent living. Now rubber has met the road and he just becomes a whingeing handwringing liberal Democrat.

Howe’s reaction gives me less and less confidence about his 4th turning theories.

I’m reading The Fourth Turning and I’ve listened to several interviews with him, and his cognitive dissonance is on stark display. He clearly understands the what of the historic data and how it forms societal trends. However, he cannot seem to reconcile how his personal political beliefs directly lead to the outcomes he warns against. That is quite common among the younger crowd because their scope of experience is so limited, but he is old enough to have witnessed more than one generation/turning. Plus, he has made a career of studying the data, so there is no real excuse.

Up until now, I enjoyed and respected what Howe had to say. But in this interview, he showed an internal liberal bias that was really ludicrous. The questioning, however, was excellent and your easy going, non-confrontational, but probing style was perfectly suited to allowing Howe to bury himself in illogical, self-contradicatory statements. We may well be in a fourth turning, but not for the reasons stated by Howe.

A few years ago I was fascinated with the 4th Turning thesis. Today I suspect that the analysis was not original thinking on the part of Strauss & Howe. The “4th Turning” seems like the historical playbook of Rothschild inc. et. al., that was handed down to the authors. My fear is that Howe is less of a dispassionate observer and more of a proponent of the 4th Turning template, and now it’s showtime. Doubtful? Have a look at his firm … Hedge Eye …