A Book We Must Read: The Fourth Turning Part I

Winter Comes Again

Chapter 1

America feels like it’s unraveling.

Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.

Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our spirit. The Cold War and New Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes. The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one many of us remember from youth, a society presided over by those of supposedly lesser consciousness. Wherever we look, from L.A. to D.C., from Oklahoma City to Sun City, we see paths to a foreboding future. We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election brings a new jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment.

Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less. Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer that two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.

Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we really that millions of self-actualized persons don’t add up to an actualized society. Popular trust in virtually every American institution - from businesses and governments to churches and newspapers - keeps falling to new lows. Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepen, and cultural arguments worsen by the year. We now have highest incarceration rate and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate on any major democracy. Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastics aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we’re not reassured.

Optimism still attaches to self, but no longer to family or community. Most Americans express more hope for their own prospects than for their children’s - or nation’s. Parents widely fear that the America Dream, which was there (solidly) for their parents and still there (barely) for them, will not be there for their kids.

Wherever we’re headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don’t like or understand. Individually focused yes collectively adrift, we wonder if we are heading toward a waterfall.