If your email provider truncates this post, please find the full version at https://thereactionarycanary.substack.com/
Dear Reader,
The Reactionary Canary recently finished reading The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe (published in July 2023), and wanted to take this opportunity to share some reactions. Before going into those however, it may be helpful to share some background and a summary of the book itself. Then, he will get into the meat of this post, which will take Neil Howe’s framework and historical starting points, but provide the canary’s own analysis of the current era of American political history. (Spoiler: he agrees 100% with the point made by Neil Howe that the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008/subsequent Great Recession was the “catalyst” or ‘triggering event’ for this Crisis era, but from there, he goes in a wildly different direction than Howe does in The Fourth Turning is Here)
In effect, the canary will argue that much of the drama we’ve witnessed over the last 15 or 16 years—including the most dramatic parts of the past 4 to 8 years—can be traced back to the actions and events that crystalized into the era of the Great Recession, and the socio-political currents unleashed by the actions and events leading up to and surrounding the time of the subprime mortgage collapse. He will argue where things went from there to get us to our present predicament as a country. Finally he will step outside the Strauss-Howe framework altogether for his final thoughts on these things.
The canary realizes that this is his longest post to date, and he recommends taking it in small doses, with appropriate quantities of alcohol…
Part I — Background
Strauss-Howe Generational Theory
In the 1980s, Neil Howe and William Strauss were drawn to the characteristics of generational cohorts (both were card-carrying Baby Boomers) and the influence of generational “archetypes” on historical events, especially in the United States. By 1991, they published their first book together, Generations, laying out their unique terminology, and describing the cycles of American history per their theory. If generational cohort-based characteristics are the main drivers of Strauss-Howe theory, then its centerpiece is a mental model of the rhythm of American history (repeating cycles of 80 to 100 years, which Strauss and Howe dubbed a saeculum, itself comprised of 20-25 year period “Turnings”). Drawing from Howe’s words in The Fourth Turning is Here, the model is described:
Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s periodic rhythm, in which the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter correspond to eras of rebirth, growth, entropy, and (finally) creative destruction:
· The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and an old values regime decays.
· The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
· The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and a new values regime implants
· The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one
But it was their next book, The Fourth Turning, published in 1997, that really caught attention, and which included this passage:
History is seasonal, and winter is coming. Like nature’s winter, the saecular winter can come early or late. A Fourth Turning can be long and difficult, brief but severe, or (perhaps) mild. But, like winter, it cannot be averted. It must come in its turn. . .
The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. . .The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort — in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.
These words in 1997.
Strauss and Howe continued to publish books right up to Mr. Strauss’ passing in 2007, and Howe has continued on solo since then. Reflecting in his most recent book, in Howe’s own words:
Back in 1997, in The Fourth Turning, Bill Strauss and I wrote that America was then traversing an “Unraveling” era of exuberant individualism amid collective apathy and political drift. That era, we predicted, had another ten years to run. Beyond that? We wrote that Americans in the late Clinton years suspected they were “heading towards a waterfall” – an assessment we agreed with.
Roughly on schedule, in the fall of 2008, with the arrival of global economic mayhem, the “Unraveling” era came to an end. And the generation-long era of the waterfall commenced. Only now that Americans are in it, they realize it feels more like a series of punctuated cataracts. They had better get ready. History, like any good movie director, saves the most vertiginous plunges for last.
So, according to Howe, our current “Fourth Turning” or “Crisis era” began around September 2008, with the subprime mortgage meltdown, and the start of the Great Recession. According to him, we’re about a decade and a half in, with roughly a decade to go before some kind of transition is likely, into a new “First Turning” or “High” period.
For a more in-depth explication of Strauss-Howe theory itself, especially of its unique terminology, and core components, this article by Brett and Kate McKay does a fantastic job.
The Fourth Turning Is Here
Zooming into the book itself (again, published less than a year ago), the main thrusts are:
That the USA entered its most recent ‘Fourth Turning’ in September 2008 (at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial meltdown and Great Recession) and Howe expects that it will ‘play out’ by the early to mid-2030s
Generational cohorts, and differences between them, have played a huge role in bringing the country this point, the drama over the 16 years since the start of this Fourth Turning, and in the coming years as this “Millennial Crisis” resolves
Specifically, the Baby Boomers’ self-centeredness—from the personal and familial level, all the way up to the national and global levels—will lead to the demolition of the post-WWII civic order. The selflessness and public service-orientation of the Millennial generation (those born—in Howe’s version (other commentators differ on the dating)—between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s) will provide the foot soldiers for the creation of the replacement civic order
As far as all of this goes, fair enough. And as far as pop history books and frameworks go, you could certainly do worse than to read The Fourth Turning is Here. However, there are a few things missing from the tome, including a thorough explanation of what “The Millennial Crisis” (as Howe dubs the current Fourth Turning) is really about, and what is driving it (beyond the archetypal differences between generations, and especially between Boomers and Millennials).
So, to make up for what’s missing from Neil Howe’s latest work, here is a coalmine canary’s analysis of the crisis of our time —
Part II — A Bird’s-eye View of a Crisis
Analyzing Fourth Turnings Past
Although it is beyond the scope of this post to go into tremendous depth about the previous Crisis eras in American history (if that’s what you are looking for, Howe devotes an entire section of The Fourth Turning is Here just to this endeavor, or you could read his and Bill Strauss’ eponymous 1997 tome), a cursory glance is in order, so as to anchor the terms of the framework in concrete details and examples. Regarding those terms, recall Strauss’ and Howe’s definition quoted above from their 1997 work: “The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.”
There is much to be mined there, and remember that Strauss and Howe were primarily focused on popular culture rather than civics and political science. No doubt one could illustrate the ‘replacement of the old civic order with a new one, as propelled by a new popular set of values’ through any number of prisms in each of the previous three such eras since the American founding—
The American Revolution, circa 1765 to 1790, with the climax coming in the form of the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783
The Slavery/Secession/Reconstruction Crisis, circa 1854 to 1877, climaxing in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865
The New Dealers’ Struggle, circa 1929 to 1953, with the climax coming in World War II from 1939 to 1945
—but what exactly was the ‘replacement civic order’ that came out of each of these eras? One way to view this might be as a series of successful factions of societal elites defeating rival factions of societal elites to take primacy of power in the American system. Viewed this way, the three previous civic order replacements since the American founding could be viewed as:
The British regime displaced by the Continental Congress and then Constitutional regime — producing a new group of sovereign rulers
The Southern agrarian and New England merchant capitalists trumped by the Midwestern industrial capitalists
The (somewhat) Constitutionally-limited regime of the United States replaced by the (almost completely) Constitutionally-unbound administrative state (and its controllers)
Of course, each of these factions of oligarchs (both the winners and the losers of the previous Fourth Turnings) wrapped itself in propagandistic themes of virtuousness so as to appeal to millions of Americans to support it and to serve as cannon fodder (recall that each of the previous Fourth Turnings climaxed with extreme bloodshed) in the intra-oligarchical struggles. To be fair, for millions of people who answered the call, these struggles were about those themes. This post is not to take anything away from their steadfastness and their belief in what they understood the struggles to be about. And there is much to glean from this angle of history (Strauss’ and Howe’s books make for good analyses of this angle).
However, when the propaganda is stripped away, what remains is the cold-blooded quest for power and domination by the characters at the top of the oligarchical heaps of history. Whatever their excuses in the moment, whatever their followers’ beliefs and valor, and whatever the subsequent myth-making of the regime-approved “historians,” Fourth Turnings have tended to be driven primarily by almost-insatiable lust for power and control by small groups of people, and effected largely by the propagandistically-induced emotions of millions of foot-soldiers.
Again, this bears much more exploration than this already-long post permits. There is much to be mined in just who the rival oligarchs of previous eras in American history were, who their foot-soldiers were, and what themes motivated those foot-soldiers. It is simply beyond the scope of this post to mine these things more deeply here. But suffice to say for now, there may well have been gaps between:
The ‘Spirit of ‘76’ that drove the soldiers at Valley Forge and Yorktown, and their “Founding Fathers” who engaged in many of the same behaviors they had accused the British Crown regime of
The spirit of ‘resistance to tyranny’ held by the foot soldiers of the Confederacy, and their “leaders” who enslaved millions of human beings…just as there may well have been a gap between the spirit of a ‘New Birth of Freedom’ that motivated many of their counterparts in the ranks of the Union Army, and their own “leaders” who used the victories of the Union Army for ulterior ends
The spirit of ‘fighting fascism’ and ‘rescuing democracy’ that motivated the soldiers and Marines who stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, and their “Great President” who happily allied—and carved up the world—with Stalin and Mao.
In the Fourth Turning of our time—Howe’s “Millennial Crisis”—there are certain similar (to the previous Fourth Turnings) elements, including emotionally-charged foot-soldiers of change, an oligarchical elite drunk on—and at the same time thirsting for—power, and enough propaganda to make Edward Bernays smile, but there are also unique factors about this crisis. Whereas each of the previous Fourth Turnings largely featured intra-oligarchical struggles for power, carried by the sacrifices of the plebian masses for those oligarchs, this Fourth Turning has been primarily about all of the oligarchical elites together, against the plebian masses.
The Crisis of Our Era
As alluded to above, Neil Howe focuses on generational (with special focus on Baby Boomers’ and Millennials’) characteristics and differences in analyzing the crisis. But if you are willing to entertain a different prism through which to view the drama, an alternative theory is that the fundamental divide of the Millennial Crisis is between the regime that gave birth to the The Great Recession (and other outrages of the 20th and early 21st centuries), and the people who sought, especially in the wake of September 15, 2008, to see it reformed, and its resident criminals held accountable.
Early on, the movement of the latter seemed to have the wind at its back. However, through a succession of regime-run counterattacks (many, if not most, bearing the traits of “psychological operations” or “5th Generation Warfare”), that wind has dissipated over the past decade-plus. This succession of counterattacks has indeed been something of a “series of punctuated cataracts” as Neil Howe describes the feeling of this era’s events in the quote in Part I above (even if Howe himself does not connect the dots in his latest book on what is causing these cataracts).
However, before going further, it might be asked, what is “the regime” referenced so frequently in this post? To a certain extent, this is a mystery (not by accident). However, in at least beginning to pierce the fog, N.S. Lyons’ seminal essay The China Convergence is a fantastic resource, as it delineates and analyzes the structure of the apparatus (which Lyons refers to in that piece as “the technocratic managerial regime”) by which our rulers wield power in modern civil society. One thing in particular to note, is that in the case of the United States, the official US government, while a part of the regime, is far from its whole, and indeed functions to a large extent as a smokescreen for the greater regime.
For a more truncated definition (or at least description) of “the regime”, perhaps it may suffice to say that it is the sum of the bureaucratic, technologic, military, financial, legal, “philanthropic”, industrial and commercial, propagandistic, academic, and other oligarchical entities and individuals that control the exercise of power in our time. As mentioned above, the official government of the United States constitutes part of this, but is far from its whole.
This is vital for understanding the past decade and half, and for navigating this Fourth Turning going forward. Only when this becomes clear, do the campaigns and psychological operations of the regime over the past 15-plus years become properly contextualized. Although there may be a face-value aspect to these campaigns, each of them has been primarily a counterattack by the regime, designed to divide, distract, and disorient the general public away from any substantive reform of, and from any serious accountability for, the corrupt actors within the regime.
Why?
Because if there is a time in the past several decades when the movements for serious, substantive civic reform and justice were gathering momentum, it was immediately following the start of the Great Recession.
Over time, more and more power in society has been accrued into fewer and fewer oligarchical hands, while an ever more opaque (and large) apparatus has been constructed to effect said oligarchs’ exercise of that power. Throughout much of the 20th century, this apparatus—however sinister—delivered; while it harmed plenty of people through globalism, outsourcing, financial fraud, and military and “intelligence” misadventures, it seemed to deliver relative peace and prosperity to the vast majority of Americans over the 20th century.
Then came the Great Recession.
Demonstrations in the Streets
Although the financial hardship of the Great Recession had a tremendous impact on hundreds of millions of Americans, the full political (as opposed to just the financial) mechanics involved drove the Fourth Turning of our time. So brazen, so cynical was the almost-open corruption of the ruling class, that for the first time in three quarters of a century (if not longer) the movement for substantive reform of the American system took on a widespread popularity with the general public. Whereas in the decades prior, the system worked just fine for the supermajority of Americans, and systemic reform was the province of tin-foil-hat kooks, bitter Rust Belt malcontents, and Marxist fringe-dwellers, the severity of the Great Recession, coupled with the blatantness of the systemic corruption, gave rise to a popular drive for ‘unrigging’ the system, and ending the mass violation of the American people by their rulers.
Several things in particular may have been driving this popular movement.
First, the inherent (and—post-September 15, 2008—open and visible) corruption of a system whereby the wealthy and connected can, through lobbying and manipulation, arrange the transfer of wealth from the middle class and working poor to themselves (and other outrages). For a more in-depth exploration of an example of this corruption, David Rogers Webb’s The Great Taking, while not perfect (especially about Webb’s thoughts for the future), presents fascinating insights into the recent past (especially the events leading up to and culminating in the Great Recession, including just how brazen the corruption of the elites has been).
The second was the way in which the partisan system was arranged to guarantee the same policy outcomes regardless of which party and which individuals held elective office. Both of these things became apparent to a huge segment of the population in late 2008 and across 2009 —
After years of psychological operations (especially obsessive focus on the real and imagined differences between the Republican and Democrat parties) it may be difficult to remember this, but think back to late 2008 and early 2009. Think back to the way that George W. Bush-headed Republicans and Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid-headed Democrats put aside their alleged animosity to bail out some of their mutual friends. And think back to how brazen and absurd this was.
Writing several years afterwards about Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs and the way in which government regulators ‘handled’ them, James Corbett recorded:
For those who don’t remember the subprime mortgage meltdown and Goldman’s role in it (along with the other big banks), they intentionally blew up the housing bubble by creating Structured Investment Vehicles to keep mortgage backed securities and other risky investments off their main books. This allowed them to raise money on the commercial paper market at low interest rates and earn high interest rates by buying toxic subprime mortgage securities. Then they paid off the ratings agencies to AAA certify their toxic mortgage CDO garbage.
Then (and here’s the psychopathic genius of it) knowing that it was all going to melt down sooner or later, they pawned the subprime-backed derivative garbage on their customers at the same time as they secretly bet against it. Internal emails released in subsequent investigations show they referred to their own CDOs as “sh***y deals” and called their customers “muppets” for buying them.
The end result? Goldman had its most profitable year to date in 2007 as the market started to turn with a staggering $17.6 billion profit. By 2009, in the depths of the crisis that they helped bring about and as the rest of the world faced total financial armageddon, they did even better, netting just shy of $20 billion profit.
So, just to recap: Goldman makes tens of billions by selling the very toxic assets they were secretly betting against and in the end they pay a $5 billion penalty.
…Oh, and (needless to say) the Injustice Department practically fell over themselves to announce at the earliest possible opportunity that no one would even be prosecuted for this fraud (let alone go to jail).
While Corbett’s summary is helpful for context, it does not begin to fully capture the outrageousness of corruption that was on full display in the days following September 15, 2008. Whereas Goldman Sachs and other major banks did end up paying slap-on-the-wrist settlements as institutions, a core component of the government-arranged, citizen-funded bailouts included many in the CEO class not only not going to jail, but getting US citizen-funded bonuses for the years of the Great Recession, including the collapse year of 2008.
In the wake of the stock market collapse, mass unemployment, and reconsolidation of wealth into the hands of the regime and its masters, America’s top elected officials somehow managed to put aside their partisan differences, not to hold the criminals accountable, but rather to bail out the criminals from the consequences of their unethical behavior, and in some cases to reward them in the form of taxpayer-footed bonuses…
The overall situation in the country, as chronicled in 2010 by the Institute for Policy Studies, surely did not endear the regime and its cronies to the suffering people:
Corporate executives, in reality, are not suffering at all. Their pay, to be sure, dipped on average in 2009 from 2008 levels, just as their pay in 2008, the first Great Recession year, dipped somewhat from 2007. But executive pay overall remains far above inflation adjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.
American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate in the 17th annual Executive Excess, CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers. CEOs are clearly not hurting.
But they are, as we detail in these pages, causing others to needlessly hurt — by cutting jobs to feather their own already comfortable executive nests. In 2009, the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies. Most careful analysts of the high-finance meltdown that ushered in the Great Recession have concluded that excessive executive compensation played a prime causal role. Outrageously high rewards gave executives an incentive to behave outrageously, to take the sorts of reckless risks that would eventually endanger our entire economy.
And, specifically, regarding the notion of taxpayer-footed bonuses for the criminals of Wall Street:
The report from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office focused on 2008 bonuses paid to the initial nine banks that received loans under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall. Cuomo has joined other government officials in criticizing the banks for paying out big bonuses while accepting taxpayer money.
Citigroup, which is now one-third owned by the government as a result of the bailout, gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year, Cuomo's office said.
The New York-based bank received $45 billion in government money and guarantees to protect it against hundreds of billions of dollars on potential losses from risky investments.
"There is no clear rhyme or reason to the way banks compensate and reward their employees," Cuomo said in the report, noting banks have not in recent years actually tied pay to performance as they claim when describing their compensation programs. Cuomo added that when banks' performance deteriorated significantly, "they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well."
Bank of America, which also received $45 billion in TARP money, paid $3.3 billion in bonuses, with 172 employees receiving at least $1 million. Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired during the credit crisis, paid out $3.6 billion.
Bank of America earned $2.56 billion in 2008, while Merrill lost $30.48 billion. Cuomo's office said Merrill Lynch doled out 696 bonuses of at least $1 million for 2008.
Notwithstanding the impotent theater of Andrew Cuomo in decrying what the crony-kleptocrat regime was doing, no action was taken to discipline either the banks, or the government.
Nor did the change of presidential administration in January 2009 affect the scandal of the regime’s behavior. Although the incoming President of the United States had campaigned on a ‘hope and change’ platform, and spoken of ‘fundamentally transforming’ the country, his initial days in office showed that the regime’s policies were to be largely unchanged, vis-à-vis the criminals of the financial (and, for that matter, other) rackets. Not only did the banking cartels continue to receive rewards from the new Obama administration for sticking the general public with an unemployment and inflation-filled recession triggered through blatantly unethical financial practices, but one of candidate Obama’s signature campaign issues (overturning the Republican administration’s military and "intelligence” practices) was soon to be revealed as just another empty promise.
From this (as candidate Obama):
To this (as President Obama):
Regarding the matter of military and “intelligence” misadventures, although these may not have had quite the same motivating status on what was developing in the late 2000s and early 2010s as the banking, tax, and other straightforwardly financial matters, there can be no doubt but that the regime’s scandalous and incestuous arrangement with war profiteering, war crimes, false flag ops, and the shameless advancement of the “security” surveillance state played a part in galvanizing large numbers of the general public in the direction of seeking accountability and reform of the regime.
Although USMC General Smedley Butler had written about this particular kind of corruption as far back as the 1930s, the events of September 11, 2001, including the patently preposterous official narrative of the regime, and the unconscionable corruption of the regime’s members towards US service men and women, and foreign civilians (and finally towards American civilians) doubtless played a huge role in waking up millions of Americans. Writing on the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Global War on Terror—but chronicling things that by 2011 were already driving changes in public opinion vis-à-vis the regime—Rebecca Barrigos noted:
In March 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility calculated that the war on terror has, directly or indirectly, murdered around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan – a total death count of 1.3 million. That is a conservative estimate; the researchers concluded that the real casualty rate is probably much closer to 2 million.
Obama’s election in 2008 was promoted as bringing an end to US wars in the Middle East. Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize winning president has overseen a troop influx into Afghanistan and authorised further military operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Libya, extending the theatre of war and escalating the use of drone warfare.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, since 2002, drone strikes have killed more than 7,000 people.This doesn’t take into account drone strikes in Iraq and Syria – which are on the rise as the US seeks to maintain its military presence in the region without the further deployment of troops on the ground.
Despite this expansion, the US has not been able to accomplish its objectives. In fact, after 15 years of war, the US global position is weakened.
She continued:
Justifying these crimes against humanity required the creation of a hysterical climate of fear. The stoking of Islamophobia and demonising and criminalising of Muslims have become the key means by which the US and its Western allies excuse both imperialist interventions and a mass offensive against civil liberties.
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where the US has detained and tortured accused terror suspects, is the embodiment of this. Within its walls, almost 800 people have been incarcerated. Of these, 674 have never been charged. These people are victims of the war on terror, their lives destroyed by US imperialism.
The Bush administration introduced draconian anti-terror laws such as the Patriot Act – passed in 2001 in part to intimidate domestic opposition to war. Governments around the world followed suit, seizing on an opportunity to increase state powers and further spy on and repress their own citizens under the guise of “fighting terrorism”. The Obama administration has expanded the domestic US security state, and rabidly pursues whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, who have heroically exposed the depravity of US imperialism.
In the 20th century, sentiments such as these would have been dismissed as fringe. Even as late as the mid-2000s, a sizable portion of the public would have defended the regime’s activities. But change was brewing.
Amid all this evidence that the system was indeed ‘rigged’ (and especially that the ‘partisan differences’ between Republicans and Democrats was largely theater to distract away from the fact that both parties were owned by more or less the same interests), a spirit of outrage, not seen in decades prior, fomented into open and passionate opposition towards the regime itself, and not necessarily just towards the R face or just towards the D face of its uniparty). On the left, this spirit manifested most clearly in the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the right, in the TEA Party. While these two movements’ ideologies differed overall (in some cases, wildly) the popular sentiment made visible in both was born out of the rage that vast segments of the general public felt towards the regime itself.
Both the TEA Party and Occupy had a certain degree of astroturf direction. Indeed, in the case of Occupy, Michael Snyder has documented this in detail. At the top strategic level, it was an attempt to corral primarily socialist and other left-wing activists into the power, and under the influence, of the very powers they thought they were opposing. Similarly, there was almost certainly an attempt by actors within the regime to use the TEA Party activism to corral right-wing populists into a safe and impotent space at the service of the very regime most grassroots-level TEA partiers were protesting. However, as Snyder himself admitted in his documentation about Occupy, and as was blisteringly obvious to anyone at the time of the TEA Party, the vast majority of the demonstrators and protesters themselves were driven by organic and grassroots sentiments of outrage at the regime…as was the growing segment of the general public they represented.
Moreover, the attempts by the regime to use the Occupy and TEA Party movements to corral the masses into controlled narratives (and opposition to each other) not only failed, but was actually backfiring by the end of 2011. While partisan politicians mostly stayed on script (deriding the opposite side’s movement) independent voices such as Ron Paul’s broke through the psyops, and by the end of the year, the natural alliances and common cause of the populist “left” and populist “right” were beginning to become visible. This was clearly apparent in real time, as by October 22, 2011, NPR was reporting on the obvious:
Members of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party may disagree on many issues, but there's one thing that unites both groups: distrust in concentrated power.
"One can't help but feel that there's a huge system out there between politicians, between corporate interests, that really prevents the average Joe from being able to air out his concerns," says Charles Zhu, an Occupy Wall Street supporter who was in Washington, D.C., this week to join protests in McPherson Square.
At both Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protests, you might hear similar opinions on the 2008 bank bailout, the federal deficit and government spending, and the influence of corporations and money on Congress. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig says there's good reason to this visceral sense by both the left and the right that there is too much power in too few hands — whether it's the government or corporations.
NPR went on to say:
Toby Marie Walker, head of the Tea Party in Waco, Texas, says there is too much money in politics and worries about its influence on regulation and laws.
"I'd like to see some finance laws that say only so much money can come from outside your district [or state] so that the local people have more control over who gets elected." Walker says.
That sentiment has been echoed in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but Walker says the groups don't exactly see eye to eye — yet.
For all the efforts of the regime to divide people along ideological and partisan lines, fewer and fewer people were having it.
A key example of this is the way in which—by late 2011—Ron Paul rEVOLutionists (who were supposed to remain siloed in the ‘conservative’ camp) were becoming a fixture of Occupy events. In November 2011, Brent Budowsky had written in an article in The Hill titled “Ron Paul and Occupy Wall Street can change the world together”:
The truth is, as most Ron Paul supporters and most Occupy Wall Street supporters would agree, far too often the fix is in against us.
The most powerful answer to crony capitalism is customer capitalism. The most powerful weapon for change is a unity between conservative populists and liberal populists.
While we will never agree on the role of government, the most powerful revolution waiting to be tapped is to join forces in support of those in the private sector who stand with the 99 percent, giving individuals real choices in the private market in support of companies that believe that the customer is always right.
But the notion of these supporters joining forces was more than just the fever dreams of writers in The Hill. As documented by Michael Tracey in The American Conservative, it was actually happening…
On the very first night of the Zuccotti Park occupation in September 2011, when participants had scant conception of what Occupy would soon become, Ron Paul people showed up and argued with Marxists about whether they were entitled to stay. They stayed. One might say Ron Paul people played a more integral role to the inception of Occupy than conventional Democrats or liberals, many of whom scorned the inscrutable demonstration in its first weeks. The journalist Arun Gupta, who co-founded the Occupied Wall Street Journal in New York City and later embarked on a tour of Occupy sites across America, told me he’d see clusters of Ron Paul supporters and various libertarians virtually everywhere he went. Such folks “tended to be better represented and integrated in red states,” Gupta said–Cheyenne, Boise, Tulsa, Little Rock, Louisville, Charleston, etc.–while in “blue states” they typically formed enclaves that were “tolerated” by the wider group.
A fair number of Occupy people in those days either had no opinion of or actively disliked Ron Paul, but the undercurrents of support were nonetheless noticeable, ranging from individuals who would wield official campaign paraphernalia to others who would concede private support only for narrow aspects of Ron Paul’s platform upon intense questioning. One would more reliably come across vocal Ron Paul supporters at Occupy events than vocal Obama supporters. It was not lost on the Zuccotti Park crowd, for instance, that Ron Paul personally expressed a measure of support for the movement earlier than most any other national U.S. politician–aside from Sen. Bernie Sanders or Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
This is not to say that a Ron Paul/Bernie Sanders presidential ticket would have been viable and swept into the White House by 2012 or 2016 (much less that either or both such characters could have effected much change via the presidency, given the way that the regime is structured to mitigate the effects of the voters going off-script), but it did signal that the control mechanisms were failing by late 2011 and early 2012. Whether their ire was primarily focused on the US government itself (by extension, the Federal Reserve and crony capitalists) and its taxation policies, as was the case in the TEA Party and much of conservative populist movement…or at the puppeteers and cronies (especially in commercial banking and the military-industrial complex), as was the case on the left-wing side of the movement, masses of people were joining the movement for systemic reform—and accountability for the crimes—of the regime. And the momentum was all on their side.
So what did the regime do? It changed the subject.
The Empire Strikes Back
With the modern abilities to scrape and synthesize large amounts of data, we can take a bird’s-eye view of what shape and flavor the public discourse took at the time that the Millennial Crisis was heating up. As presented by Zack Goldberg in a 2020 essay, at the exact moment that Americans were coming together across group identities (i.e. “the 99%”) to demand accountability and reform, the controlled organs of media (and other components of the regime) flooded the public discourse with themes and narratives designed to distract the public away from the actual crimes of the regime, and to divide the public against each other. One chart in particular shared by Goldberg illustrates this counterattack by the regime:
While the concepts and verbiage associated with “Critical Race Theory” have existed since at least the 1960s (and the underlying Marxist dialectic of strife among social groups as pretext to totalitarian revolution since at least the mid-1800s), there is a reason why CRT and concepts such as “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “institutional white supremacy” and the like languished in relative obscurity until right around late 2011/early 2012 — the regime didn’t need them before 2011.
This is related to the reason why since 2012, these concepts and themes have become ubiquitous in American society, and dominate the public discourse, regardless of whether a given person or entity espouses the ‘liberal’/“woke” or the ‘conservative’/“based” position on them —
At that point, faced with a general public enraged and seeking justice, it was easy to resort to a ready-made (if half-century old) set of canards that would divide, distract, and disorient the masses away from the path the zeitgeist was on. Moreover, by flooding the public consciousness (which the graph above helps to visually illustrate, but does not even come close to fully capturing) with race-baited terms and narratives, and reframing the parameters of the civic conversation, the regime shifted the popular conversation away from:
‘should the corruption of the regime be curbed and its criminals brought to account?’
to:
‘should the rule of law and the foundations of civilization be dismantled, and the regime vested with totalitarian power (so as to be able to provide
vengeancejustice for the historically ‘oppressed’)………or should the status quo be preserved?’
In this way, the ‘sides’ of the public discourse have become set in such a way that no matter what, the regime does just fine; either the radical so-called “woke” win, and the regime gets even more power (necessary, of course, so as to implement racial and/or some other kind of “justice”), or the conservatives—the self-described “anti-woke”—win and the regime continues on as it always has. Either way, it escapes accountability and reform.
Whereas a little over a decade ago, there was actual momentum building for things like ending (or at least auditing) the Federal Reserve, to bringing the war criminals, profiteers, and spook perpetrators of the ‘Global War on Terror’ to criminal trials, there is no serious movement for these types of things as of 2024 (there is an unserious movement, hinging on a man who has proven singularly unserious, but more on that later).
A special mention should be made here of the performance of ‘conservative’ media. While there has been yeoman’s work done over the last several years in debunking and combatting the worst lies of the race hustle by organs such as The Daily Wire, and influencers and personalities like Matt Walsh, and while this is not to state that any or all of these organs and people are necessarily controlled opposition in the strictest sense, an important point remains. Namely, by focusing the attention of people under their influence on select projects and puppets of the regime, rather than on the worst aspects of the regime itself (and especially by focusing attention on those projects most tailored to the overall divide-and-conquer strategy of the regime in recent years), conservative media has been one of the most potent weapons of our rulers in taking the wind out of the sails of a unifying populist reform movement over the past decade-plus. This is also why, for all the sky-is-falling theater by conservative voices about ‘censorship’ (and for all the genuine desire for such by left-wing stalwarts) their voices remain as loud as (if not louder than) ever.
It has been posited that perhaps the reason that there was such a flood of psyops around skin color and group identity starting around 2011 or 2012 was because of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. To be sure, Obama benefitted from, and was no doubt delighted by, the ops. And the regime, especially its professional propaganda corps, preferred Obama to Mitt Romney. However, there are two problems with this as a total explanation for the efforts. First, however much the regime preferred Obama to Romney, they were both completely acceptable to the regime; it wasn’t worth the while to so weaponize every institution in society just to get one company man elected President rather than a different company man. Second, if Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign had been the sole intended beneficiary, the operation would have trailed off shortly after the election. As Zach Goldberg’s chart above illustrates, far from trailing off after 2012, the opposite happened.
What we are left with is that the regime struck at the heart of what gave the populist movement of the early 2010s its threatening character: its transcendent appeal across demographic and identity groups. All had been violated by the ruling class, and all had the potential for common cause. By shifting the focus from those who actually had oppressed millions (those in the regime) to a fictional power and oppressor group (those with a certain skin pigmentation), the regime disoriented and divided the types of people who otherwise might have carried the populist movement to some form of success —
From this:
To something like this:
Needless to say, this treatment of the race hustle psyop(s) does not even begin to scratch the surface of the issue, but for purposes of this post—examining recent history in broad strokes, the bottom line is: there is and has been tremendous corruption in the American regime, especially—but by no means limited to—within the financial and military complexes (not that there is much distinction between the two). One might almost say that there is…‘systemic corruption.’ At the exact moment (starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 and continuing through the bail-outs and “bankruptcies” of the next several years) that this real systemic corruption was most visible, and reform was in the air, the public consciousness was diverted to a fictional (or at least—to whatever extent it may have been real—weaponized) systemic problem.
It was not the last such operation unleashed against the general public.
The Orange Man Cometh
From the moment he descended the escalator of Trump Tower in June of 2015, Donald Trump personified what the regime has been doing during the Millennial Crisis: a divisive TV actor who parroted just enough of certain parts of the populist aesthete to draw supporters from it, while alienating numerous others, and ultimately delivering on precisely none of the original populist/reform policy agenda.
Despite talking up vague ideas of “draining the swamp”, as President, Donald Trump stacked his administration with swamp creatures. There was no reform of the banking system to end and penalize the usurius and fraudulent (and kleptocratic) practices. Despite many claims that Trump ‘kept the US out of wars’ he kept the spigot of money flowing into (probably corrupt) Ukrainian hands, he ordered multiple bombing campaigns in Syria and Iran, and he kept American troops— or at the very least, resources—engaged in ongoing warfare from the Levant, to Yemen, to Afghanistan.
And this does not even get into Operation Warp Speed, the influence of characters like Jared Kushner, or other such things that disprove the notion that Trump was “anti-establishment” in any effective way.
This is not to completely beat up Donald Trump. Some good things may have come out of his tenure (or at least, less bad than if Hillary had been president). Furthermore, the jury is still out on whether Trump was a witting participant in the operation to divide and distract members of the populist movement, or if he actually had good intentions and was simply ineffective at delivering on them.
However, one thing is clear by now. Donald Trump did less than nothing to “drain the swamp” or defeat the deep state. However good his intentions may have been, however noble his supporters, there was no “storm”, and just about the only people who got ‘locked up’ under Trump were those foolish enough to come to Washington DC for him in January 2021, and unfortunate enough to be successfully baited inside a certain government building before being hunted down, in many cases while their man was still in the White House.
In contrast to Trump’s supporters, who were hunted down like terrorists and hauled off to the gulag for stepping inside a public building, it’s worth noting that the Clintons, Obamas, Bushes, and other members of the ruling class, especially in the banking and military-industrial-spook sectors…never even faced prosecution under President Trump. Even the alleged examples of Trump’s efforts—such as James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper—faced nothing more than the lightest of taps on the wrist (and were simply replaced by Trump with other swamp characters, like Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel).
Whatever your thoughts on Trump personally, he was utterly lacking in the willingness—or at least the ability—to effectively fight the regime and its worst members.
If Trump was effective at anything, it was at dividing the public into more balkanized, and thus more easily subdued and controlled, groups. Consider that of the people who appeared to be finding common cause against the status quo of the regime, circa 2009-2011, half have completely abdicated the dreams of the Occupy movement for obsessive focus on Trump; defeating him, destroying him. They no longer oppose the financial racketeers and war-profiteering criminals; if anything, they see them as heroes for opposing Trump. On the other hand, the other half has at least retained some measure of notional defiance of the regime, but many of them have pinned their hopes for the realization of their dream on a man who has manifestly demonstrated incompetence, if not mal-intent.
To this it might be objected that Trump has done some good (granted, and as mentioned above, he almost certainly led to less bad things than a President Hillary Clinton would have — also granted). Many of his appointments were less bad than Biden’s have, or Hillary’s would have, been. His policies—leaving aside the context: a blatantly rigged, fraudulent, nebulous, and illusory thing called “The Economy”—may have led to slightly greater illusions of prosperity than Biden’s have. Perhaps, to an extremely limited extent, they have even led to greater actual material prosperity. And the U.S. government did not persecute pro-life heroes under Donald Trump.
If this is satisfactory, fair enough. But let us be honest about being satisfied with something this milquetoast, instead of pretending that Trump is something that he is not. He is not, and never has been, in any meaningful or substantive way, anti-establishment. That does not mean vote Democrat, or don’t vote, it means be honest about who and what Trump was and is.
At this point, it is pretty obvious that regardless of whether he makes it back into the White House or not, Trump not only is not a threat to the regime (notwithstanding all the kabuki-theater bluster to the contrary—from both sides), but actually an asset to it…
The Pandemic
No account of our times would be complete without addressing the pandemic. Much has already been said better by others. Like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, there are a million perspectives and some people may study the subject for a lifetime without fully comprehending it. However, it is interesting that in Neil Howe’s framework, Fourth Turnings always include a “mass mobilization” event, of which the Civil War and WWII are examples. In The Fourth Turning is Here, Howe predicts that just such an event will occur in the near future (before the mid-2030s), either in a conventional kinetic war, or as part of solving some civic problem (Howe offers “climate change” as a possibility). Regardless, he believes that it is inherent to the structure of generational cycles for the crisis to be addressed through inducing masses of young people to ‘enlist’ (or be conscripted) into defeating a common enemy. From defeating Tories, to defeating Rebels, to defeating the Axis Powers, to someday perhaps defeating Vladimir Putin or “global climate change”, this mass mobilization is essential to the cycles of history (particularly Fourth Turnings), in Howe’s opinion.
Perhaps Howe is correct, or perhaps while previous Fourth Turnings had mass mobilization events, the Millennial Crisis had a mass immobilization event — the pandemic. From ‘lockdowns’ and ‘shutdowns’ to encouraging people to stay in their basements, stare at their screens, and lean on Door Dash, the first couple of years of the 2020s did see a level of regime-directed activity (or inactivity) on par with the previous Fourth Turnings.
Another aspect of the regime’s activities from 2020 to 2022 was malice. It was almost as if it felt, and took personally, what tens of millions of its people had had the temerity to consider in the years preceding 2020: the idea that it should be subject to reform, and that its members be held to account for their actions. And if the people would be this uppity, then the regime would let loose its animus towards them — locking them down (a prison term), separating them, muzzling them, contact-tracing them, forcing them to roll up their sleeves for a toxic injection.
And as with the systemic racism and Trump operations, the pandemic was a win-win for the regime — if the lockdowns, shutdowns, jabbing campaigns were defeated, said defeat would suck up the energy and attention of the people, leaving them exhausted and distracted away from changing the regime status quo. If the lockdowns, shutdowns, and mass jabbing succeeded, even better for the regime. Notions of systemically reforming government and the financial, military, and other weaponized and corrupt industries, already largely forgotten by the early 2020s, have subsequently been completely relegated to the dust bin of history, as of 2024. In their place were distractions about the safety and efficacy of injections, the quality of masking and social distancing guidelines, and the fairness of the 2020 election.
(the latter in particular must bring the regime a special level of amusement; what could be more delightful to it than seeing the time, attention, and relationships of tens of millions of people sucked into investigating and arguing the validity—or lack thereof—of an election between two (effective, if not literal) patsies of the regime)
All this being said, there were a couple of silver linings to the pandemic operation.
The first was the heroism and courage of everyday Americans who stood up and defied the regime. From refusing to wear masks, to assembling in large groups (even just for parties and meals), and finally to refusing the jab, tens of millions of Americans heroically fought back. And if they were successfully diverted from the more threatening (to the regime) tide of a decade earlier, it takes nothing away from their courage and glory.
The second was the way in which the late 20th and early 21st century democratization of information flows empowered the people to resist and defy the regime during the pandemic. Whereas in decades prior, when the regime’s organs of propaganda and consent-manufacturing drove a narrative, supermajorities of Americans followed them. In the early 2020s, email, podcasting, blogging, and Substack helped to empower counternarratives of resistance.
At least to date (mid-2024), the pandemic seems to be the closest thing witnessed in the United States in the Millennial Crisis, to what the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII were to their Crisis eras: a centrally-directed mass movement of the American citizenry towards (whether the citizen masses/foot-soldiers realized it or not) a new civic order (as Neil Howe might say). In the case of the pandemic, perhaps this also represented a move away from the purely defensive posture of the regime coming out of the height of Occupy and the TEA Party (that is, the preservation of the system), towards a civic order in which their power actually grew beyond what it had been.
This does seem to have been a component of the pandemic operations of the regime from late 2019 to 2022 and beyond: the evisceration of a civic order in which the citizens held certain rights (here understood as granted from Above the level of government, and impervious—in justice—to the desires of the regime to infringe them) such as bodily autonomy, freedom of assembly, freedom to practice religion, etc. and its replacement with a civic order in which the citizens are limited to “rights” (here understood as granted by the government itself, and fully able to be rescinded by said government) to…whatever the government felt like giving rights to on a particular day or hour. This new civic order, sometimes referred to—especially in the context of perpetual medical martial law—as “the emergency state” may yet become a full reality.
Viewed through a Strauss-Howe prism, the old civic order (which implanted in American society around the time of the Great Depression and WWII) was not particularly Constitutionally-bound itself and it allowed for emergency suspensions of the pretense (the actual rule of law having died decades, if not centuries, earlier) of the rule of law (see everything from gold confiscation to Japanese-American internment to “extraordinary rendition”). But these emergencies and their suspension of the pretense of rule of law for certain limited periods of time were the exceptions between 1929 and September 11, 2001. Since 9/11, and especially since 2020, the implementation of the emergency state is characterized by the absence of even the pretense of the rule of law at any time, and perpetual state of emergency. This perpetual state of emergency points to the final destruction of the concept of divinely-granted rights impervious to the will of the regime.
Thankfully, this appears (as of mid-2024) to have been less than a completely-successful operation by the the regime, at least to date, at least in the United States. A signal moment in this may have been the Supreme Court’s ruling in January 2022 against “OSHA” and the subsequent backpedaling of the Biden Administration on vaccine and mask mandates. But vigilance will be required going forward, the perpetrators are still in power, and the foundations remain for the full implementation of the emergency state, which perhaps by that time may simply be the total state. More to the point, the foundation for guarding against the total (indeed, the totalitarian) state has long been dismantled.
Some may challenge the conflation of the Covid-19 pandemic with the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII. For example, they might point out that each of those conflicts was characterized by massive bloodshed, and by enormous sacrifice by thousands, if not millions, of people. To be fair, the comparison between the pandemic and these wars is far from exact. However, a couple of points stand to be made—
First, there has been a cataclysmic amount of figurative, if not literal, bloodshed since October of 2019, when the virus left its Wuhan home. From mal-socialization of school children, to heightened rates of depression and numerous suicides, to broken families as a result of pandemic-era restrictions and other policies, and finally, to health problems caused by masking and other pseudo-scientific anti-health fads, and finally, the crown jewel of pandemic operations…the “vaccine” — this has been an extremely bloody Crisis. Moreover, if even the lightest, most conservative plausible estimates of the harm caused by the Covid “vaccines” is accurate, then it is entirely possible that more Americans will have been killed and maimed (even proportionately to overall population sizes) by the events of 2019-2022, than were killed and maimed in the United States in the Revolutionary, Civil, and Second World Wars…
Second, while it is true that many, if not most, people in the United States made minimal sacrifices during the pandemic compared to…the soldiers at Valley Forge, the prisoners at Andersonville, and the marchers at Bataan, the same could be said of the vast majority of Americans at the time of…Valley Forge, Andersonville, and Bataan. Throughout American history, a disproportionate amount of the valor has been displayed by a relatively small number of people. Admittedly, the sacrifices and valor of those who, during the pandemic, refused to mask, refused the jab, and defied and contradicted the propaganda of the regime, may not have equaled the sacrifices and valor of say…Audie Murphy at the Battle of the Colmar Pocket. However, the fact remains that tremendous valor was shown, tremendous sacrifices were made, and there was tremendous heroism displayed by many Americans during the pandemic. And if their resistance and defiance helped to deter the regime from further implementation of the emergency or total state, and especially from further coercing even more receptions of a harmful injection, then it is entirely possible that their glory ranks alongside that of earlier generations or Americans, including those at the time of Independence, Abolition, and the defeat of the Axis Powers.
The War on “Disinformation”
Another major campaign in recent years by the regime to stave off any reform or accountability of itself is the so-called War on Disinformation (better described as: the War on Any Lack of Control by the Regime of the Flow of Communication, for Its Own Purposes, even if that rolls off the tongue less palatably…)
To date, one of the most comprehensive and well done, if imperfect, analyses of the “War on Disinformation” is Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” This is well worth the read, notwithstanding its flaws.
Beyond what is covered in Siegal’s analysis, two additional points bear consideration—
First, the war for control of communication being waged by the regime is not an end in itself, but rather is a means to an end: the preservation (and, where possible, expansion) of its power. And as with race, the Donald Trump phenomenon, the pandemic, and numerous other psyops over the past decade and a half, a key component of the regime’s preservation of power is the division and distractedness of its enemies (i.e. 90% - 99% of the population).
Second, while literal control of the means of communication is nice, the regime will probably settle to some extent for effective control, through the method of “flooding the zone” — in this way, even uncontrolled communication and information-sharing can redound to the regime’s overall benefit. Put differently, in the words of Yuval Noah Harari of the World Economic Forum:
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.
Still, notwithstanding the control grip the regime holds on communication and information-sharing, both literal and effective, it may be dissatisfied with the current landscape. Although attempts to bring the regime to justice have been utterly derailed, at the same time, the regime’s attempts to propagandize on a grand scale seem to perhaps have been less successful than in decades past. From the official regime narrative on Covid and its “vaccines” to the official regime narrative on the events of early January 2021, and numerous other examples, a smaller percentage of the general public appears to be accepting it than did in the early 20th century to around the time of 9/11 —
For this reason, there may well be serious attempts in the coming years—including, but not limited to, the types of attempts outlined by Jacob Siegel—to capture greater control of the public discourse for the regime, and to mitigate the power and impact of uncontrolled sources of information that disseminate counter-propagandistic knowledge. Whether it comes in the form of a cyber ‘event’ as recently predicted by the World Economic Forum, or in conjunction with a ‘black swan’ election-year event, as recently predicted by Catherine Herridge, the regime is almost certainly going to do more in the coming months or years to further disable the ability of its critics to rally against it.
Besides these dramatic ‘events’ already predicted, the regime is also hard at work (and has been, probably for years, if not decades) on siloing dissent within algorithmically-driven, ideological compartmentalization. On all of the regime’s platforms (which definitely includes Google, YouTube, and much of the internet, potentially even including platforms that pose as being independent) algorithms can be used to drive people into ideological echo chambers where the illusion exists of free and open speech (given all of the content in open defiance of the regime and its narratives), but which is illusory, as only those who are already in a given camp (as surveilled by the AI algorithms, and indicated by their surveilled habits of life), are driven and exposed to this type of content and knowledge.
There are a number of potential antidotes to this, from open-source (as opposed to closed/regime-controlled) AI, to independent building of servers and other means of communication, to fostering greater non-virtual (i.e. in-person) trust and relationships. But for now, the key thing to note is that if this Fourth Turning plays out over the next several years, the regime will almost certainly try to blunt the impact of dissent from its propaganda, if perhaps not totally eradicate it, and that the mere existence of said dissent may actually be illusory as to the status of resistance to the regime.
Assessment
In reflecting on all of this, it seems that there is a fundamental difference between the core of the Millennial Crisis and the core conflicts of each of the previous Fourth Turnings since the American founding. Whereas the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII were led by rival factions of oligarchs against each other (Continental Congressmen against the Crown, northern industrial capitalists against southern agrarian capitalists, and Allied leaders against Axis leaders), the heart of this Fourth Turning has been all of the oligarchs together…against the plebs they rule.
In short, to the extent that the spirit of defiance that motivated the populist and resistance movements of the Millennial Crisis constituted a rebellion, it had all the characteristics of a slave rebellion (albeit debt and political slaves rather than chattel slaves). If one looks at the history of slave rebellions throughout world history, from before the time of Spartacus, through modern times, one will find that slave rebellions are frequently defeated by the slaver-holders. It’s not without reason that the story of Spartacus ends with him crucified on the Apian Way as a warning to others not to pursue a similarly uppity course against their masters, and this Fourth Turning may well end with the J6ers still behind bars in the DC gulag.
As things stand in June 2024, there is almost certainly not going to be any substantive regime change in the United States, or any serious accountability for the perpetrators and enablers of the crimes of the regime, at least in this life. The deck chairs may be re-arranged, there may be some slaps on the wrist, and even Donald Trump himself may be restored to the office of figurehead-in-chief. But barring something extraordinary, there will be no tribunals for the criminals of the Great Taking, the Global War on Terror, or the pandemic. And as things stand now, most people may not even notice.
Part III — Navigating into the Future
What’s to be done?
If The Reactionary Canary knew the answer to that, he’d deserve a raise. However, he can offer a few thoughts:
First, looking past the propaganda, and overcoming the regime’s use of (literal or effective) controlled opposition to distract, divide, and disorient those who resist it.
Second, finding the positive and the things worth fighting for.
As alluded to above, it looks unlikely that the Fourth Turning of our time, The Millennial Crisis, is going to end with the triumph of the policies that the Occupiers and the TEA Party marched for over a decade ago, much less in the regime brought to its knees, and its members brought before Nuremberg-style tribunals. These things simply aren’t on the policy agenda of either arm of the uniparty, and almost everyone—regardless off which arm of the uniparty they favor—seems to be ok with that, at least passively.
As a Millennial himself, a member of a generation that Neil Howe and Bill Strauss predicted would play a role in history analogous to the Greatest Generation, The Reactionary Canary finds this a bittersweet pill to swallow. This is especially the case given that just over a decade ago, at the time he was discovering the Ron Paul rEVOlution, and hundreds of thousands of Americans were taking to the streets to demand reform and accountability, there was an exhilaration; that predicted historical destiny seemed so close to fulfillment.
Still he says bittersweet, rather than bitter, because notwithstanding the way American history has gone, there is still so much to rejoice about, to be grateful for, and to fight for going forward. Regarding that second point above, about finding the positive and the things worth fighting for, perhaps the things about American history to be most grateful for, and that are most worth fighting for, are those that have not (at least yet, at least completely) been eviscerated from society: faith, family, and freedom.
No matter what happens with our regime, with our public figures, with politics, it is still in our power as individuals to keep the Faith, to fight for freedom, and to try to build and support strong families. And if we simply do this, it may lead to an even greater victory in our times, than if the regime were brought to its knees and its members brought before tribunals.
Looking Ahead
The Reactionary Canary doesn’t have a crystal ball, and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. The best that he can do is react to what’s in the atmosphere, hopefully to some benefit to others. Moreover, Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is just one of any number of mental models one could use to analyze history (in The Fourth Turning is Here, Howe admits as much, and even dedicates an entire chapter to analyzing other such models), and it isn’t necessarily any better or any worse than any others.
However, in this context, The Reactionary Canary will share that he was struck by the frequency with which Howe uses a particular word to describe his (and the late Bill Strauss’) framework for understanding history and anticipating what may happen in the future. In The Fourth Turning is Here, again and again, the word is “constellation.” This was striking for two reasons:
One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against Neil Howe and Bill Strauss is that their predictive model of history based on what has happened in the past is (in addition to being arbitrary and inconsistent) so vague (and almost cheesy) as to be like astrology.
If astrology is a perversion of the study of the stars, then the non-perverse form would be astronomy. In astronomy, constellations play a huge part in helping human beings to learn about the stars and leveraging use from this knowledge, including in navigation. But here is the thing: constellations are human-delineated things; there isn’t actually a giant fish, or a giant bull, or a giant hunter in the sky — human beings found these shapes to be helpful for purposes of navigation and other such things, and arbitrarily designated the constellations.
Perhaps Strauss-Howe theory is similar; while there is a tremendous degree of arbitrariness to it, it may help in forming a coherent analysis of where the United States has been, where it may be going, and what may be prudently done to try to prepare. In this sense, perhaps it is like a constellation for navigating history.
TRC already shared his own thoughts above about how Faith, family, and freedom are the things most worth fighting for, and the things that—if prioritized—may lead to a positive outcome to the Millennial Crisis, at least in the lives of individuals and groups living through it. The only thing he would mention further regards the—unfortunate—probability that, at least judging on the criteria of the success or failure of the original populist movement (accountability and reform), our regime is, or at least will be, the “winner” of the conflict of our times. The caveat to that is: consider that in each of the previous Fourth Turnings since the American founding, the winning side still fell short of its ultimate goals and the losing side was able to win something:
Although the Continental Congress and its supporters succeeded in wresting authority and control over 13 of the British colonies in North America, they failed in their attempts to make Quebec the 14th state — the Loyalists and the Crown succeeded in preserving something of British North America in union with the British Empire
Although the Midwestern Republicans succeeded in preserving the union that they would dominate by 1865, they failed (at least in the 19th century) to fully destroy Southern culture — by 1877 and the end of Reconstruction, carpetbagger colonization attempts had been defeated (not that that was necessarily a good thing, given the torrent of massacres and oppression that followed)
Although the regime succeeded in using the New Deal as a smoke screen for eviscerating what was left of a Constitutionally-bound republic, and carried the Soviet Union and Maoist China to victory in eastern Europe and much of Asia, it failed to implement full-scale fascist Communism in the United States (at least to date) — starting with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the line of White House succession, and continuing through the rooting out and prosecution of Communist infiltrators, the counter-totalitarians salvaged something of American freedom from the wreckage of the regime’s Great Depression and WWII projects
Each of these examples bears much further exploration than it is within the scope of this post to delve into. Let it suffice for them to be examples that even if there is no dismantling of our corrupt regime (and thus, it is the “winner” of this Fourth Turning), history shows that—even within the model of Strauss-Howe theory—a great deal of good may still be won in the coming years and decades, if people remain vigilant and faithful, even in the face of overwhelming odds, and even in the face of seeming defeat.
For Faith, family, and freedom, carry on the fight.
Amazing. Made it through part 1 on the first read, will continue later to hear the bird's eye view. So well thought out and we'll researched!