Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning Is Now Raging...And It's Gone Global

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**Neil Howe** (0:45)
I would say that the trend in the West, certainly, and now the rest of the world, has been we've seen a synchronization of these turnings, right?
That's where we are, but it's global. It's now global.

**Adam Taggart** (1:05)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. History tells us that civilizations and societies boom, bust, and then rise anew to repeat the pattern, a pattern that demographer Neil Howe says is surprisingly predictable in both its timing and trajectory. Howe refers to these seasons of societal change as turnings, and has famously declared that America is now well into a fourth turning, the bust part of its cycle, where the status quo falls apart, often chaotically, and is replaced by a brand new order. Well, in its first 100 days, the Trump administration has certainly made big, and some would say disruptive or even chaotic, strides in its attempt to replace the previous status quo with a new playbook, both domestically and internationally. So, is this the kind of textbook forth turning up people that Howe expected? Well, to find out, as well as what further transformation he expects ahead, will ask the man himself. Neil, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Neil Howe** (2:06)
Hey, Adam, nice to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (2:08)
Hey, Neil, it is wonderful to have you here. Thank you. I've been really looking forward to today's conversation, because I've interviewed you over the years. I and most of this audience are very familiar with your work along with your partner about The Fourth Turning. Your latest book says that we're now well in it. I think if people had any doubts about that coming into 2025, they don't anymore. We are definitely living through times of upheaval right now. I've got so many questions for you, but why don't we start in the thick of things? We've got this massive trade, this tariff war going on right now. In many ways, this really is indicative of a trend that we're seeing across the world, where we're seeing the reversal, the end of globalism, globalization, and what Trump would say, the American subsidized world order.
Here in America, Trump won, he's got MAGA, America first. We're seeing a lot of similar political parties arise elsewhere around the world. Whether it's Maloney in Italy, Malay in Argentina, the rise of Le Pen in France, or the popularity of AFD in Germany, just to name a few, even today in Romania, where they basically had run an election, a nationalist candidate essentially won, and they negated the election and then held it again, and then the next nationalist candidate won overwhelmingly. So is this kind of the transition that you were expecting in this type of forth turning, this whole shift from, hey, we're all going to work together to this globalist world order to, no, it's my country first now.

**Neil Howe** (4:00)
Yeah, I think that definitely is a drift we've been seeing, and frankly, it's been building ever since the GFC.
That was nearly 15 years ago.
Adam, we've been seeing this wave of populist, more authoritarian, ethnocentric heads of state around the world. This is not in any one country. We see it in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe. We see it in South Asia, notably with India and Narendra Modi. We see it obviously in East Asia, seeing it increasingly in Latin America. So this is a global trend. This is a global generational trend, I should say. And it's what we should expect. It's what we should be anticipating.
The decline of globalization really started at the end of the GFC, and it's now accelerating. And now we have the US president, sort of the head of the Western Alliance, right? The cornerstone of globalization, so to speak, historically, certainly after World War II, is changing course rather dramatically. And you're right, he says this whole globalization thing is something that, you know, it's a bad deal for the United States. Obviously, the United States has gotten a lot out of having a prosperous democratic world order. If, you know, if that is one of the things that's got to go along with globalization and certainly work to our favor, and certainly having the dollar as a world reserve currency has been an enormous, you know, to quote, jusqu'à dest'en, you know, an exorbitant privilege the United States has enjoyed for all these years. But we have a regime now in place which thinks it's a bad idea, and we're going to turn away from it. And I do believe that a lot of people were thinking that globalization went too far. For example, in de-industrializing a lot of America very suddenly with the rise of China, and perhaps China should not have been admitted to the global order, you know, when and the manner it was. Right. So he has a lot of support. He has a lot of support for a lot of his agenda. I think on the bringing back, you know, blue collar jobs to America, rolling back the non-legal immigration wave that we've seen over the past 15 years, especially over the past three years, during the Biden administration with the, you know, rise of the huge asylum backlog, which is basically how many of these people are made legal, right? So to speak, nominally legal. But so there's a, there's a popularity to a lot of what he's doing. There's also what you might consider a more conventional conservative side to this, cutting the size of government, cutting the size of government programs. And then there's some aspects of it, really not sure what box to put them in. We don't know what they are. We don't know what he wants to do with defense. I mean, presumably, like, like, like many good Republicans, and certainly the heads of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate, he wants to expand defense. How much? We don't know. But there are a lot of contradictions, and there's a lot of chaos surrounding it. One of the chaos, more chaotic elements is, of course, Adam, that is a lot of this stuff transcends the rule of law, right? Practically every element of it is going to confront the federal courts, right? So it's either in a district court or appeals court, or it's going to the Supreme Court right now, and you can go down the whole string of things. The law by which he's actually putting these tariffs into place, the law by which he's, you know, rounding up, ICE is rounding up and, you know, getting rid of these immigrants who are in the United States. How he's kind of short-circuiting the Administrative Procedures Act when it comes to, you know, regulations and so forth. The impoundment of funds, he thinks he can, he has the power to just simply stop funding for a program or just scrap an entire program all together. As many people have tried to remind Donald Trump, if you look at the Constitution, roughly two-thirds of it is Article 1 It's all about Congress.