The author argues that the United States’ old republic is dissolving while a new one is emerging. The 2008 financial crisis, rising populism, and the pandemic exposed decades of institutional decay. Polls register broad dismay: Many Americans think that the country is coming apart, that democracy is at risk, and that the nation is in crisis. Public health has deteriorated, with life expectancy falling since 2014. Trust erodes as shared narratives fragment.

Institutions are tasked with what they cannot do while restrained from what they must do. Howe cites examples including the federal government’s inability to maintain a firearms registry, Medicaid’s constraints on routine care, and federal student-loan policies that inflate tuition while shifting wealth to already-wealthy universities. Incompetence fuels distrust, which lowers compliance, which increases dysfunction—a vicious cycle.

Emergency interventions during the 2008 economic crash and the COVID-19 pandemic averted collapse but deepened long-term debt and inequality. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented an epidemic of “deaths of despair.” Upward mobility has weakened: Barely half of Millennials and Gen Xers out-earn their parents.

A stark generational divide has opened. Older Americans defend a static “vetocracy”—a political order in which comprehensive change is always stymied by gridlock and resistance. Younger Americans are losing confidence in liberal democracy—those in their thirties are far less likely than those over 60 to deem democracy essential, and a growing minority favor alternatives, including military rule.

Since 2008, the nation has turned inward as globalization slows. Trade barriers multiply, and electoral democracies decline. An anti-Western axis of autocracies tightens coordination. At home, Americans self-sort by class and identity. Media ecosystems tell audiences what they want to hear, hardening tribal identities.

Politics features two mega-parties expressing mutually exclusive moral universes. National governance is gridlocked, while states become sites of one-party control. Every election is framed as existential. Many voters prioritize their side’s victory over the preservation of democracy itself.

These trends are widespread. Research shows young adults leading in dissatisfaction across affluent nations. A conviction has spread that only a strong civic order imposed by “our side” can restore stability. Political engagement has risen while public speech has grown blunter, binding leaders more tightly to their factions.

The government has tested emergency powers during the pandemic. The author suggests that a trigger event could shift demolition of the old order into construction of a new one. A substantial number of Americans believe that civil war is possible.

Howe recalls how The Fourth Turning forecast the end of the “Unraveling” around 2008, followed by a Crisis. He outlines the theory: Modern history moves through a recurring cycle of four “turnings” across an 80- to 100-year “saeculum.” The First Turning (“High”) features strong institutions and weak individualism; the Second Turning (“Awakening”) brings spiritual upheaval; the Third Turning (“Unraveling”) yields strong individualism and weak institutions; and the Fourth Turning (“Crisis”) replaces a failing civic order. In the current saeculum, the “American High” followed World War II; the “Consciousness Revolution” spanned the mid-1960s to early 1980s; the “Culture Wars” ran from 1984 to 2008; and the “Millennial Crisis” began in 2008. Four recurring generational archetypes propel the cycle: Prophet , Nomad, Hero, and Artist.

The 2010s resembled the 1930s, with the 2008 financial crash leading to record inequality, surging populism, untested national policies, rising partisanship, falling birth rates, and a culture prizing safety and community. Globally, authoritarian nationalism gained ground.

The author concludes that the Fourth Turning began in 2008 and likely has another decade to run. He anticipates a culminating national trial, probably involving war, that will demand sacrifice yet open opportunity to forge a new civic order. If resolved well, a First Turning in the early-to-mid-2030s could usher in stronger institutions and trust.

The chapter closes by situating the work within three paradigms of time. In “chaotic time,” history is random. No event bears any relation to any other. While Howe argues that this view of time may be found in very young children and bears a resemblance to Buddhist notions of enlightenment, he does not argue that any society has ever viewed time in this way. Cyclical time, dominant in the ancient world, tames chaos through repetition and ritual; modern society resists it because it seems to deny progress. Linear time, born in Western monotheism and secularized in the Enlightenment, frames history as purposeful progress; the US embodies its extreme. Yet modernity’s effort to flatten nature’s rhythms has not ended cycles—it has created new ones. The most consequential modern cycles, the author argues, are long-term shifts in public mood driven by generational turnover. Paradoxically, the society least inclined to believe in cycles may be most in their grip.