The Daily Signal - Why You’re Wrong to Think Civil War Can’t Happen Here

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Demographer, historian, and author Neil Howe hasn't just coined the term “Millennial,” he's also predicted the future to an eerie degree—and he thinks America's in for very rough seas ahead. He says a civil war in the U.S. is far more plausible than most people think, and he dismisses the reasons Americans often discount that possibility. Howe sits down with The Daily Signal's managing editor, Tyler O'Neil, to talk about his generational theory, his books, and why he thinks a civil war in the U.S. is indeed possible, if not likely. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 3rd. I'm Virginia Allen, and we hope you all had a fantastic Labor Day weekend. It's great to be back here with you on the Daily Signal podcast. Today, the Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neill is sitting down with Neil Howe. He is a demographer, historian, and author of many books on generations, including The Fourth Turning is Here. And he's famous for coining the term millennial. Well, Howe has a theory. about generational change, and according to his theory, America is due for an existential crisis. He actually says that a civil war is far more plausible than many Americans think. This is a dynamic conversation between Tyler and Howell, so stay tuned for their conversation after this.

For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country. We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by Neil Howe, who is historian, demographer, and author of multiple books.

Most recently, The Fourth Turning is here. Neil, it's so great to have you. Wonderful to be here, Tyler. Thank you for having me. I want to just jump right in, and you've been summarizing this argument for a while, so I'm sure you're used to it. But from what I understand,

your basic understanding is that the way generations work, because we are all born into a specific time, in society and that influences our upbringing, that influences the cultural trends that we grow up with, and those people also influence those cultural trends in turn, that we come up with this generational cycle where you essentially have four phases that roughly correspond to the phases of the seasons where you have order in the inner world and chaos in the outer world and all these back and forths. So would you briefly go through how you see history turning and then what we should be expecting in the next decade? Yeah, that's a, that's a good summary. The premise is that his

generations, namely people, born at a certain time, coming along in a certain time, are shaped by history in their youth and coming of age as an adult. And then later on, as in midlife and as senior leaders, as parents and as senior leaders, they shape history, right? So there's a feedback cycle that completes a loop, so to speak. And that this gives a certain periodicity to some of these long-term trends we see in history. And in fact, we try to explain, I think we do successfully explain some of the long-term patterns that people have already discovered, right? For instance, the long cycle in economics, you know, the K-wave, you know, sort of the long cycle that sort of is, is, is, runs in synchrony with the generational cycle.

as does the realigning cycle in elections, you know, realigning elections, or as we certainly point out, and I'd like to emphasize the great turning points in our history. Namely, there is the distance of time that separates the great civic re-foundings of our nation are separated by about a long human life or about the sequence of four generations, right? that goes back to certainly the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and here we are, you know, again, and certainly even earlier in Anglo-American history going back. This does seem to be a pattern, by the way, in a more general sense, with all modern societies, societies that assume that they assume progress over time. and we see it actually not just in America today. We see it in most of the world.

We see it in all of Europe. We see it in southern Asia, eastern Asia, much of Latin America. We see it all around the world today. The key moments here are these great civic refoundings. These are typically periods of organized conflict. But you can also see them in the eras that we experience roughly halfway in between these civic refoundings, which are the great awakenings of American history, right? And very fortunately, in American history, we actually number them.

We actually talk about the first great awakening, the second great awakening. So we number them, and they come roughly halfway in between these great civic moments. And the most recently, the most recent one we experienced was the late 60s and 1970s, the time of the counterculture, the trips to the inner world, and everything that we experienced at that time. These awakenings are always accompanied by, as I think you suggested early on, by a rejection of the community of outer world institutions and it turned back toward individualism.

And generally, it coincide with an individuating of society and certainly set the tone for the rest of the saculum after that, which is a much more individualistic tone, going into the fall season of the unraveling third turning, and then that ultimately leads to a fourth turning, which is a new period of emergency in which one way and the other, willingly and unwillingly, and I said this is usually typically unwillingly. Community is recreated of necessity, right?

So the order in the public world becomes a growing priority for the rising generation. And I actually think that's true today. So that's, yeah, that's one way to sort of, you know, outline it. Yeah, I think that corresponds with a lot of the public mood today. We have since the 60s and really since the 80s, we've been atomizing more and more. We've been really good at finding our own answers to things, at solving the inner problems, and it seems like the outer world is just crumbling away.

And I think a lot of us have this sense that push is going to come to shove, that we're going to have something bad happen in a little while, either a civil war, a world war, an external crisis. And of course, when I talk about these things, some people are like, oh, no, Tyler, you're talking about a world war at the end of the world, right? Like global nuclear war. I'm like, no, I think it's going to be, more limited than that. It's probably going to be existential to some degree, but I don't think we're

going to see nuclear arm again. I just think we're going to see a very tough battle over existential issues where ultimately one side is going to have to prevail to some degree over the other, and hopefully the consensus will be better for society overall. But, you know, how do you see it likely coming? And I think it was fascinating in your original generations book, you mention a global pandemic as a sort of potential catalyst for a fourth turning. And you talk about governments, state governments and local governments going against the national government. And it was funny because I was reading that during COVID and I was like, huh, this sounds familiar. Of course, I don't think that the COVID crisis was the

big crisis that were kind of waiting for. No, in that book, which came out in 1997 that Bill Strauss and I wrote, we talked about five types of events, which would accompany, which could accompany, hypothetically, our journey into the next fourth turning, right? What would happen as we moved into the fourth turning? And, you know, four of those have already happened. No, it's true. We actually, one of our events was a crisis over the debt, which would issue forth in a new Tea Party movement. And believe that, it was just completely random that we happened to use that phrase. That was a tea party movement over a debt limitation that would lead to a, you know, a crisis over the budget.

The other one was a WMD attack on New York City. The other one was the pandemic. That's right. And the fourth one was Russia invading a former Soviet Republic. What was the fifth one? That's the down card that hasn't been turned up yet, and that was a nullification crisis where one or more of the states would actually nullify federal regulation, which would lead to a new secession movement.

So, you know, that's a down card. But it's down there. And interestingly, even one decade ago, no one surveyed American opinion about civil war. That was considered so off the table. But today it's roughly half of Americans, believe one is likely in the near future. It shows you how rapidly are sensibilities of change.

And indeed, you know, our politics have taken on this kind of manichaean style where the red zone and blue zone, are so mutually exclusive in their sense of themselves, their redenda for the nation's future, that it hardly even matters who's leading the party. It's totally driven by the sense of disaster and fear of the other side taking power, right?

And that's what is leading to such high voter participation rates, the highest voter participation rates we've seen a century, it's the, it's fear. It's also why third party candidates aren't, you know, are dropping out. We've just seen another example last week, but I've made this point consistently. It said, no one's going to vote for a third party candidate when you really start thinking about the consequences, right, that your worst nemesis would come to power. That's where we are. And as Jane Becker, this is actually an intellectual historian I much admire. He wrote a book called The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Enlightenment. He passed away during World War II.

But one of his last essays was written in 1940 called The Dilemmas of Democracy. And he was reflecting back on the 1930s and all these democracies that were succumbing to, you know, fascism or communism. And it was a dark time for democracy in the 1930s, I think we can say. hasn't been a very good decade right now either, right, for democracies around the world. But one thing he observed is it was a dark reflection. He said one problem that democracy has, and this is the way he said is democracy works best when there's really not much to talk about. And his point was, is that when most of what you're talking about is the width of sidewalks and the diameter of sewer pipes, just coordination issues,

democracy works really well. You're talking about issues that virtually define who you are. It doesn't work. He said no one is going to exceed to a vote count that goes 51% against you, which requires you to abandon everything you believe in. No, you're not going to go along, right? Well, so I think culturally we get this idea that a civil war is possible. But like...

But what I'm getting out of something. different, and that is, is that we just think that democracy is always the answer. You know what I mean? But in some cases, it can't work, you're right? You are not going to give up everything you believe in just because you came three votes short. You know what I mean? This is the problem that we, now, you would be perfectly willing to give up if it were, again, a coordination issue. If we were simply an issue, well, should we all drive on the right side of the road to the left side, of the road. Well, I don't know. I always was used to doing it the other way, but maybe I could get used to, you know, that kind of thing. This is very different to what we're facing today.

And it is typical of what happens in fourth turnings. So we're just back here again, right? Like we were in the 1930s, or like we were in the 1850s, or indeed as we were in the early 1770s. Well, so in each of those cases, like, I think the 70 and 70s is almost more of a better comparison, even though the polarization levels are, you know, they're similar to the 1850s. The problem with the 1850s, obviously comparison is that today, a lot of the polarization, besides the blue zone, red zone, which you've touched on, but I think we see a lot of blue cities in red states, We see a lot of states that are kind of on the edge. It's not as easily geographically bifurcated as it was in the Civil War.

And, you know, in the Revolutionary War, it was every other house. That's more of what it seems it might be today. We don't talk much about the polarization in the 30s because we've kind of, you know, we like to overlook it. We like to almost assume that FDR just, yeah. We overlook it, but we only have. overlook it because of the history that transpired. We're very good at reinterpreting history after the fact, right? But if you would ask most Americans in 1939 when you were still a profoundly isolationist

country, there's going to be a big crisis the next few years, what do you think it's going to be about? They would have said, well, over FDR's new deal. You know, I guess we're going to see, like, in Europe, we're going to see black shirts and red shirts, you know, whirring in the street. I mean, that's probably what people would have said. They never would have said, we're going to go on this global crusade against fascism, right? Which in fact, we did, right? But that realization only came.

We know exactly when that was, because we actually tracked opinion polls at the time. That came immediately after the fall of France. I mean, that was an enormous shock to America. It was, by the way, it was, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. People often think that everything changed at Pearl Harbor. The real change was in June, July, and August of 1940. And the beginning of the Battle of Britain, that's when opinions really begin to shift in America. And FDR and the Democratic Congress

began to get enormous rearman bills through Congress with virtually no nay vote, right? Huge, huge bills, including the two O-DICs. Navy Act, which virtually doubled the size of the Navy, laid the keels of the Iowa-class battleships, the Essex-class aircraft carriers, which if we had not started then, World War II would have lasted much longer in the Pacific. So it's really interesting to look at that. That's when things changed. And by the way, it was in that year, 1940, that America lifted out of the Great Depression. The own employment began to came way down. We're running an and suddenly all these shipyards were building again, right?

And we, for the first time, we had a conscription in peacetime. For the first time in our history, we actually started a conscription with some resistance, but then, you know, and then Wendell Wilkie came in and ran on the GOP ticket, actually in favor of rearming. And that began to bring this country closer together. But it's very interesting to see in retrospect how that happened. One misconception people have is that civil wars require geographically separated places. This is not true.

And take a look at the Spanish Civil War. That was a brutal, horrible war, and there was very little geographical contiguity about it. It is true that some of the more affluent places, Galicia and sort of, you know, the northeast were tended to be pro-Republic. but it was all over the place. You know what I mean? It was like honeycombed. The civil war in China was the same way. You know, he had warlords taking either side,

and the communists were sort of everywhere, and they were migrating. You had the long march. You were immigrating to new places. We have this feeling in America that civil wars require separate geographical units. That actually, unfortunately is not true. And even during the Civil War, we had states where there were virtually

civil wars within the States. And I'm thinking of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, right? Yeah. I don't know. But actually, your point about Blue Zone Cities within Red Zone states or vice versa is a, is a, is a classic reason why civil wars get touched off. and why they are never resolved amicably, right? So one thing that you always have when Civil War looms is you have the secessionist movement and then I think, okay, well, why don't we just let them go? And by the way, many people told Lincoln, including the abolitionists.

The abolitionists came to Lincoln and said, let them go. Just let them go, you know? And Lincoln said, no. You know, no, I'm not going to let him go. But the, you know, he was elected, you know, just to save the union, obviously, necessarily about slavery, as he famously said. If I could save the union without doing anything about slavery, I would do it. You know, he went through that long syllogism.

But I do think the problems swiftly emerge, right? what do you do about all the national assets in the seceded territory? I've had Marine officers come up to me and say, well, what if California declares itself to be a sanctuary state? You know, we got a big base in Coronado. You know, we got all these assets. You know, what happens in the case like that, right? And you get in these, well, we know what happened at Fort Sumter.

And by the way, many of these federal installations throughout the South were handed over by federal officials. Many of them just said, okay, I guess the South runs this place now. Yeah, we'll just hand everything over. But there was this general at Fort Sumter who said, damn, to fall do that. You know, I took an oath and all that, and that started the conflict. But I think one classic reason for these wars to start as well is that you're always going to say, well, okay, that's fine. But what about all these people who are our allies who are stuck inside the other side, right?

Remember why Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia, the Sudan land. These were our Germans. I mean, it's always like, why is Russia moving into Ukraine? Those are our Ukrainians. if he moves into Estonia or Latvia, why is he going to move it? Because these are our Russians living in there, right? You understand what I mean. This is an old pattern, right?

Yubo has got our people who are in there, right? Well, I think the other big concern is that, and you may have already hinted at the answer to this, that the U.S. military is an absurdly powerful force on the global stage today. Not only do we have, you know, nuclear weapons across the U.S. United States, but we also have nuclear submarines that can go anywhere in the world, and we don't know where they all are because some of them, you know, that's a classified secret. So, like, you know, to some degree, some of the military people can split off with the secessionists, but, you know, I still think the U.S. military is too big to bifurcate.

Now, maybe that's wrong. Maybe that's naive. I almost think, you know, it'd be, you know, because whoever, if the U.S. military remains itself as one thing, which of course it didn't in 1860, in 1861, it split in half. But there are assets we have now that I find it increasingly implausible to think that any state will try to create a separate government when you have quite a. strong a federal military with, you know, these carriers and with the nukes and everything that we have to. Yeah, but it won't happen like that. Tyler, I think it'll happen a little bit.

It'll start with nullification, right? Since they were there, no, we're not succeeding. We're just not going to pay these taxes. We're not going to buy those regulations. You want to do something about it? Try me. We're not going to let parents who disagree with it. their kids' trans identities keep their kids in our state. We're going to separate them. Well, we're going to do whatever we do, right? We're going to do things our way. We just don't think you have any right being in here, whatever it is, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't involve with it's trans, doesn't matter whether it's immigration, doesn't matter whether it's certain kind of new taxes or whatever, right? And so it's going to be kind of a standoff,

right? And then, of course, other states will join. You know, they realize, well, if they can do it, we want to do it, right? So you get kind of a, you know, you get, you get the, the mass, right? And then, of course, it becomes a real, it becomes an unstable situation because then the federal government will realize, my God, if we're going to do something, we lose all legitimacy. No one's going to follow any federal, you know. And by the way, Lincoln brought up exactly that point. He said, let them go. Yeah, fine. But then any state will want to go. Any state will then you see it's a slippery slope in a situation like that. And so what's going to eventually happen is, well, then finally after a time, the federal

government will start to take action. The state will refuse. It will come to force. But only at that time will the military begin to be in the military by then is going to be like probably backing up, you know. Paralyzed by fear and confusion. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not sure where we're going to go with this.

It becomes a very fraught issue, and it's very likely that much of the military will sort of extrude itself. There are two ways in which we enter this fourth turning very differently from earlier fourth turnings, which are worrying, you might say. One is, is that government is so huge going into. this fourth turning. You know, normally, yeah, when you go into a fourth turning, you have to you basically mobilize the public and spend huge amounts of public resources for new collective aims, you know, including survival, right? I mean, that's what you're doing, but government is usually very small going into it, right? Well, government is now very large going into it. In fact,

we have no way of even figuring out how we're going to pay the debt right now, you know, we're over 6% of GDP running deficits, even at the peak of the business cycle. I mean, we're so out of kilter right now, along with the size, we're also out of kilter with expenditures versus income, that that's already in question. And now what?

You're asking us suddenly to raise all this, you know, suddenly spend all these new resources. You're gonna have to brutally cut back on what we have. This is the first difference, right? So you're gonna have this enormous, restructuring in the current spending of government. That's number one. Number two is, and I think you put your finger right on it,

the size and global power of our military. Earlier for a turnings, we were kind of a marginal player in the world, even in the last one, right? We were not really that powerful. We didn't play that bigger role in the world. I mean, the ocean still protected the new world to some extent. This new one is very different. And this new one, if it requires our forces around the world

simply to stand down for six months, the entire world will remake itself, right? Because the entire world is dependent upon U.S. presence. To be what, think of what China would do with no more U.S. presence. Think of what they would do in six months in the Western Pacific. Yeah, it would look completely different, right? Think of what Russia would do. I mean, just go around the world.

Think about what everyone would do. So this is another worrisome thing. The entire world, for better for worse, depends upon our presence to be what it is. And that might be an unfortunate thing. You know, it may be that it's too bad that Europe never became more self-sufficient. You know, even with goading from Donald Trump, you know, that never quite happened, right, that they were able to stand on their own feet. But my point is, is that these two things worries me.

And typically what happens in any internal conflict is one side, typically the losing side, asked for external help. This is a rule throughout all civil wars. Hispanic Civil War, China Civil War, every Civil War that we've had, our own Civil War, the South asked Britain and France. I think there were one battlefield victory away from getting their help.

I think if Lee had won at Antietam, you know, he had these string of victories and, you know, luckily the Europeans were only focused on the East where, you know, the Confederacy did best on the battlefield. And every time Lee had a string of victories, it was like, it's just about to get there. You know, maybe Palmerston would come in. Maybe the French had come in. And ah, but then he would lose. So he lost at Antietam. I think that was close.

During the American Revolution, we were clearly getting routinely beaten. But we did have one victory which saved us as Saratoga, and France came in on our side. And that really did completely change, not just because of French help, but because Britain was suddenly worried about everything else in the world. They had to take a lot of their fleet, a lot of their troops, you know, away. But you look around, this is always a pattern. So here's another thing to throw in, right? Think about it in the context. Who would ask for help from abroad? That's another interesting to think about. At the same time that the rest of the world may be emerged in conflict in the absence of U.S. presence. That might also be a really interesting

wild card in terms of even the internal U.S. situation. We're obviously just speculating here, you know, going off on tangents. But I'm just looking at history. That's all I do. You know, I just look at what have we seen routinely before in these situations. Well, so I want to play a little bit of the naysayer devil's advocate here, partially because I talk about your theories all the time, and my wife says, well, you could say anything. You could cherry pick. You could try to come up with theories. She, and one of the things, you know, you walked through those scenarios that we already had happened. You know, we had the attack on September 11th in New York City, and we did come together, but we didn't have the fourth turning experience.

We saw COVID happen, and we didn't fully have the fourth turning happen. What are we waiting for? Why did these, you know, many starter crises not catch fire? The survival of the country has to be at stake. I mean, I'll put it just very simply. You know, we're talking about, you know, existential, you know what I mean? and tangibly, visibly, you know, existential, right, in terms of the choice.

Those are the cases and all the other for attorneys, right? I mean, you know, with regard to World War II, I think FDR made the case, it was very persuasive for the country. We did not want to be the only democracy left on earth. I mean, we could see what that would do to America, right? And in fact, there were a lot of scenarios, areas about how the Germans would land in South America, you know, start going into the Caribbean. And I mean, this was, and then, of course, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, that kind of pushed

us over the edge, right? Because not only, then we were directly attacked at the same time, we just saw our intimidating global situation of our adversaries, right? So it did seem like a a pipe to the finish for us, right? So we have to go through the 1930s or through the 1850s. Like we see a little bit as that goes here, but... I'm sorry, this is the way incentives work. You know, people don't... You know, this is the way incentives.

You've got to feel everything's on the line to push you to do something. I mean, when you're talking about, you know, restructuring the budget, when you're talking about beginning to actually take in more resources than we spent. When you're talking about investment rather than consumption, you think we're going to do all those things

just because we wake up on a sunny day and think that'd be a great idea. No, that's not how it happens. And what's really interesting, and I point this out in the book, the huge changes you see socially during a fourth turning is, first of all, community becomes paramount. because without community, you know you're dead, right? Equality. That's the only way you get people to sacrifice.

You've got to promise them something, right? You've got to promise them a better deal after it's over. We had the GI Bill, you know, during World War II, which basically promised a whole new emerging middle class of veterans that we would pay for their college, you'd pay for the vocational schooling, pay for their homes, pay for their roads, pay for, you know what I mean? We would just pay for everything.

for them, right? So community, equality, and the next is authority, right? And believe it or not, during fourth turning, you start following, doing what leaders say, because the only other option is destruction. And the other is convention in the culture. The culture turns conventional. And finally, a huge.

a huge shift toward the future. You suddenly start consuming and rewarding the past. You start suddenly pushing all your resources, not only into the community, survival of the community, but into investing into the future of the community. And one thing that's really interesting that it's remarkable about fourth turnings in our history is that it's at just the moments

when the near-term future of our country is maximally in doubt. that we make the most enormous investments in the future. Think about that. During the 1780s, which is economically the most devastating decade in American history, even worse in the 1930s, and I think the colonies would have completely curined off their separate ways. I mean, we were just a loose federation. We weren't even a federation of colonies, right?

And we suddenly gathered around and actually created this much more centralized constitution, right? And we ratified it. You know, you got nine of the, nine of the new states to ratify it. We suddenly put it into place. What an incredibly long-term investment in our future at a time of complete and utter breakdown. I mean, we really had, ports weren't working. The whiskey rebellion. States were fighting against each other.

We had actually people moving back into the countryside that the cities were depopulating. We did it. At the height of the Civil War, when Congress, we did it. Congress was in fear of Jubal Early and various Confederate attacks and maybe Maryland going to the Confederacy and isolating D.C. You had the, you know, a national currency, nationalized banking system, intercontinental railroads, the morale state university act, you know, which actually allowed all the states to create their own universities. We had, you know, universal time zones for the country. We went on a binge of sort of long-term investment infrastructure of the future of this country and think about the Great Depression in World War II.

In 1935, when the future of the economy looked utterly helpless, particularly in 1934 when this legislation was being framed, we passed the Social Security Act, which is the cornerstone of the entire welfare establishment in this country. We completely reconfigured the long-term future. It wasn't just Social Security. It was SSI and AFTC, and it was all the state federal programs for disabled and all these others.

In other words, we created this new relationship between federal government and states at the worst, darkest point in our history. Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is is that we do these amazing long-term things at the most beset crisis written times of our history. And I said, I think I said something very interesting about how history

works. You know, I saw, I talked earlier about getting up on a warm, sunny day and just deciding this would be a great idea. If you talk to policy experts about when the best time would be to balance the budget, you know, or do something like that, really smart and irrational, they would always say, okay, there's no recession. It looks like we're in peace with the world. you know, you just, that's never when we do it. We never do it that. We never do that, right? When you're fat and happy, you do the stupidest dumb things, right?

You never do anything smart. It is when your future is an immediate doubt. That, you know, as Ben Franklin said, you know, if we don't all hang together, we will assuredly hang separately, which allegedly he said up. after signing the Declaration of Independence, that's suddenly when you muster the will to do incredibly disciplined things. It isn't in a way irrational, you know,

but it's the way society works. This is why, actually, I think, that the forth turning is a time of crisis, yes, but it's also a time of great opportunity. And it's a time typically that we reverse some of the most depressing and seemingly incorrigible trans. right that we see today.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to get, and I think we're running very short on time, but I wanted to get a little bit from you, you know, Gene Twangy, and we talked about this on the phone earlier, has suggested that your generational cycle thesis has kind of been overturned by technology, by the new changes. And I thought you had a very, you know, your books address these concerns actually really well, talking about how we saw technology in the 1950s and the 1960s. Everybody was saying, oh, this is going to connect people more than ever before. And now we think technology is just going to separate people more than ever before. And I think you, how do you see technology factoring into these trends? Gene Twenge has no alternative cycle theory.

She just has a theory about what happened in the last 15 years on mobile phones, right? So it's not like she's disagreeing with anything I'm saying. She just sort of hasn't an ad hoc hypothesis about what has happened recently. But when it comes to the relationship between technology and history, I do agree that it is in a very important. relationship, my only suggestion is that we reverse the arrow of causation. Instead of talking about how technology shapes us, which is this very passive way of thinking, you know, someone invents a cell phone, we all get pushed this way, and someone invents, you know, the television

and young people all get pushed this way. So we should think about it differently. Think about the era of causation in reverse. Instead of thinking about that, Think about how, instead of how technology shapes us, how technology shapes a new generation. Let's start thinking about how a new generation shapes technology. A much more interesting and fruitful line of inquiry. And I think you can see that no matter what technology comes along, it's the emerging generational configuration which decisively shapes how it is used and how it is implemented. A computer is a great example because when computers came along, it was the GI. generation, you know, after World War, together with the silent generation, or the children of the war,

you know, we were, you know, still young adults in the 50s and 60s. They were designing these big mainframe computers. And the reigning paradigm was totaling conformity with the American High, which is we had a very strong institutions, A-frame, you know, organizational pyramids, all the information would be sent to the top. There'd be one information processor at the top. And then all the marching orders that get filtered down. Tell everyone what to do. And by the way, back then, we actually did talk about marching orders. That was an old GI holdover. You know what I mean? If you went through World War II, you talked about marching orders. Everyone gets their marching orders. Anyway, Rand Corporation did an analysis in 1967, and they asked the question, how many computers

would the world need? And they came up with the answer, seven. And they went through it. They said, Westinghouse will need one. The Pentagon will need, you know what I mean? That's kind of how they went through it. And, you know, because that's how they looked at it, right? Yeah. Now, what happened in the 1970s and early 1980s? A new generation came along boomers. And I'm thinking here of, you know, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, among many others, right? And they had a different paradigm for thinking about information processing. What was that? Tyler, it was the personal computer. Each individual gets their own computer, their own technology device, right? Empower individuals, not the organ, you see how this works. And so by 1984, you had Apple running that famous 1984 won't be like 1984 with the athlete, you know, hurling the hammer right into the tell screen with all the Stalin-era parents, you know, shattering the tell screen. That was a new way of looking. And then you had subsequently all of our presidents, Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, arguing that the computer, the microchip, would topple authorities and dictatorships all around the world, right? All these

authoritarianes all around the world would be shattered into irrelevance by the growth of the individualized computer technology. That was a reigning paradigm, starting in the middle of the awakening, through the following unraveling, and then by the GFC, a new generation is coming of age, millennials, and the whole world is beginning to change more toward the fourth turning mode. And guess what? All those dictators fell in love with the microchip. Because guess what they discovered? You can just turn those microchips around, surveil your own population, create all these social media mob, you know, mob actions in your behalf. You can turn off, as Narendra Modi now does.

You know, when Punjab is causing the trouble, he just turns the lights off on the Punjab. He just turns, he turns all the social, he just turns the internet up. The ability now of people to use this technology for top-down control is exactly what you'd expect in a fourth-turning era. I guess what I'm suggesting is, is that we're too much in the weeds here. You know, we look at the individual technologies coming along, but we don't look more broadly at this balance between community and individual

and how much now today we see all the gravity beginning to shift toward community. And this is the fourth turning world. This is where people realize that's where the vacuum is, and that's why people are voting for these, for these ethnocentric populist authoritarian leaders in so many areas of the world, particularly in East Asia and South Asia, and in much of the world, right? We're in a new generational era, as I would argue, and we're going to see technology mobilized to reinforce ways to help a centralized authority bring order.

And I believe that today, just as boomers were fundamentally a generation which wanted to undermine order and to open up more room for the individual. I think millennials, the red generation is fundamentally impulses the opposite, is to bring in order, right? This is an order-seeking generation, and in fact, the fourth turning is an order-seeking era. And this is why these things we talked about earlier come to the front, community, equality, authority. Remember, we went through that litany before.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Neil. I'm going to have to head out. That's pretty right. It's been a great pleasure. And I think everybody should go find your books. There's a slew of them. There's generations. There's the fourth turning. There's the fourth turning is here. Where else can they follow you? They can also follow me. We have a substack publication called Demography Unplugged. And we do a weekly podcast. We do a monthly overview of recession indicators that, you know, we're economically interested. You know, that's my day job. I'm an investment advisor. So I'm often looking at financial markets.

But this might be of interest to some people. And we also obviously cover demography there. So as well as other thoughts I have about where we're going. So thank you, Tyler, for having me on. With that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast. We'll be back with you around 5 p.m. for Top News. These are the headlines that you need to know to stay informed on what is happening in our world.

Be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on either our morning interview edition or our afternoon, top news. Have a great Tuesday. We'll see you back here at 5. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph Von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.