A FOURTH TURNING PROPHECY

Check out this passage from The Fourth Turning and tell me these guys aren’t brilliant.

Recall that a Crisis catalyst involves scenarios distinctly imaginable eight or ten years in advance. Based on recent Unraveling-era trends, the following circa-2005 scenarios might seem plausible:

  • An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The president and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown. The president declares emergency powers. Congress rescinds his authority. Dollar and bond prices plummet. The president threatens to stop Social Security checks. Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.

The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – Page 273 – Written in 1996

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16 Comments
King-Shat
King-Shat
July 22, 2011 8:12 pm

Get your popcorn ready. We may be in for a rough ride.

Persnickety
Persnickety
July 22, 2011 8:56 pm

But, but, but, this was UNFORESEEABLE!!!! just like the housing crisis and the difficulties of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WHOCOULDANODE????!?!?!?!!?

I DEMAND that you retract that ridiculous purported quote that can’t possibly be real. Our elected leaders told us this was unforeseeable and who are you to question their patriotism!!!

/sarc

canid6
canid6
July 22, 2011 9:38 pm
Shadows
Shadows
July 22, 2011 11:51 pm

Brilliant….and creepy as hell.

AKAnon
AKAnon
July 23, 2011 3:42 am

S & H said “circa 2005”. This is 2011. Brilliant? Missed by about 6 years! (Sarc off)

Welshman
Welshman
July 23, 2011 6:25 am

AKAnon,

S&H stated 2005 to 2025. It is a bandwith, not a prediction of the exact year. Look at the Civil War, it was not an exact year process, it was the same thing, kicking the can down the road until an event that turns history. I have read many of your comments, and I think you will agree, that in the next 14 years it is not if TSHTF, but when.

candid6,

Thank you. Enjoyed the U-Tube, it blew me away. S&H seem to be Libertarian Replubican types.
S&H have a vision that fits into a pattern of unknown consequences. If one does not like the “brilliant tag”, you can sure in hell call it insightful. I’m impressed.

Admin,

S&H are both from Northern California, see, we can do some things right.

Stan
Stan
July 23, 2011 9:19 am

” You don’t know how to tell if someone is an alcoholic? Ok, I tell you. When you see a man trying to put his shoe on over his head, thats an alcoholic”

Fred G. Sanford.

You know how to tell when a country is finished? When it is totally destroyed? I will tell you. When the people of that country elect someone like Obama who has no qualifications or credintials whatso ever to run a hot dog stand, much less a country. When that countries media lines up behind him because he is slim and can read a teleprompter.

When a country stops scraping the bottom of the barrel for leaders, and picks up the fucking barrel and diggs down under it and finds Barack Hussein Obama, THATS when its over.

4th turning not with standing.

Welshman
Welshman
July 23, 2011 9:31 am

Listening to Strauss and Howe,

The Silient Generation nevery had a president from their generation 1925 to 1942. I grabbed my president book and sure enough Jimmy Carter was born in Oct. 1924 and few of that generation served in WWII.

When you break these years into groups in the context of history, it does make more sense of how things evolved. Only being 3 days in the S&H Silient Generation, I relate to Boomers, but the lessons and issues of WWII and the Great Depression affect me much more than later Boomers.

I think Ron Paul is in the Silient Generation, so I am hinting it is our turn. Ron Paul POTHUS 2012.

HoosierGuy
HoosierGuy
July 23, 2011 11:34 am

This coming Monday — July 25th — could be a very interesing day.

Muck About
Muck About
July 23, 2011 12:09 pm

I’d think that given the time that has passed since TFT has been out that the absolutely scary foresight contained therein should have gotten these guys a Nobel or something really cool.

They obviously had a unique idea, researched the proof and wrote a very readable entertaining book that has an amazing amount of insight to teach us.

MA

flash
flash
July 23, 2011 3:24 pm

Oh , we’ll muddle along OK……just need to tweak a few laws.

Food for Thought — Thanksgiving 2022

Winston, come into the dining room, it’s time to eat,” Julia yelled to her husband.

“In a minute, honey, it’s a tie score,” he answered.

Actually Winston wasn’t very interested in the traditional holiday game between Detroit and Washington . Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its “unseemly violence” and the “bad example it sets for the rest of the world”, Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn’t nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn’t the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey . Even though it was the best type of Veggie Meat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it wasn’t anything like real turkey.

And ever since the government officially changed the name of “Thanksgiving Day” to “A National Day of Atonement” in 2020, to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims’ historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats – which were monitored and controlled by the electric company – be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family.

Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program.
And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. “The RHC’s resources are limited,” explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. “Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Ed couldn’t make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines – for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn’t want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

Thankfully, Winston’s brother, John, and his wife were flying in.

Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added “inconvenience” was an “absolute necessity” in order to stay “one step ahead of the terrorists.”

Winston’s own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for “unequal scrutiny,” even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. “A living Constitution is extremely flexible”, said the Court’s eldest member, Elena Kagan. ” Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example,” she added.

Winston’s thoughts turned to his own children. He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were “just around the corner”, but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn’t help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13.

The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to “spur economic growth.”
This time, they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement.

At least, he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before government promises to make life “fair for everyone” realized their full potential. Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn’t happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them. He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2011, when all the real nonsense began. “Maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we’d just said ‘enough is enough’ when we had the chance,” he thought. Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

AKAnon
AKAnon
July 23, 2011 8:58 pm

Welshman-I am w/ you on this-I was being sarcastic about the date discrepancy. In the big scheme of things, S&H’s predictions border on phenomenal. But I doubt the status quo can be sustained up to 14 more years. I expect TSHTF within 5 years, tops.

Buckhed
Buckhed
July 23, 2011 9:30 pm

This made me LMMFAO

“No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids.”

Thinker
Thinker
July 25, 2011 11:35 am

Jim, good on you for remembering that point. The other bullets in the Prophecy section were just as relevant… even though they couched all those with, “these scenarios are unlikely to happen…”

I shared them with friends and family this weekend. They were shocked those were written in 1996.

hollow man
hollow man
July 29, 2011 7:44 pm

I Love this site!!!!!