 Neil Howe is a historian and consultant, a California native, graduate of Berkeley and Yale, and the author of over a dozen books. Perhaps most importantly though, he is a baby boomer. With the late William Strauss, Howe wondered why boomers were so different from their GI elders. In the late 1980s, they developed an intricate yet broad theory of generational change. Their model has been very influential, inspiring figures from Al Gore to Glenn Beck and Steve Bannon. Neil Howe joins us on Liberty Chronicles to talk cycles, generations, and the myth-making business of history. This is Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. To start us off, are there any important personal biographical details that have gone into informing your work? Religious affiliations, political affiliations, some kind of cultural identity? The answer is no. I would say one challenge that I faced is basically kind of shedding the affiliations that people project upon me, which has often happened. When generations first came out, and I would say in the early years when people associated Bill and me with the millennial brand, I think we had a lot of people who assumed that we must be Democrats, sort of on the left. We were talking about this brand new, optimistic, community-oriented generation that would probably vote more for the Democratic Party, kind of the ethos of the Democratic Party, which indeed was a pretty good read. I mean, that was a good read because that's ultimately how they did vote, right? By the time they started voting after the year 2000. That was something originally, and then obviously more recently with the advent of the Trump administration and the book The Fourth Turning and Steve Bannon. People have applied sort of the opposite, some raving right-wing populist, and I'm the mastermind behind all of that. A lot of it has been, and I would say our books are a little bit of a kind of a Rorschach test for the people who read them. They sometimes assume, oh my gosh, he's speaking to me. He must sympathize with what I'm thinking. I mean, that tends to be one of the problems that libertarians or Austrians have with trying to model historical events, that you end up projecting onto it whatever you like to see or whatever story that you feel like telling. It's interesting that people then read your book, which is an attempt to model historical change, and then end up doing the exact same thing with themselves. Partly, too. This is something we probably, in all of our books, we discuss most in The Fourth Turning, but there is a penchant among particularly Western thinkers and particularly in more recent centuries for linear interpretations of social change. All history is tending toward X, whether it's Francis Fukuyama. It's kind of liberal democracy in the fading of nation-states around the world is popular in the 1990s, or whether it's Marxism or whether it's some sort of social utopianism or whatever it is. This is something that we got from the great monotheism, that history is linear. It starts in a particular place, and it ends at a particular place. Then that ending is where we're all headed, and we really ultimately have no choice about it. That generates tremendous amount of argument and dispute because, my gosh, that's where we're going to all end up. I hope it's a place I like. The gloss or the layer that we put on it is something a bit more cyclical, and that ends up often disappointing people, so it's not going to end up at one place for all time. I do feel uncomfortable with the idea that we'll be going backward at some point. Back down the cyclical curve. But then I thought to myself, well, a cycle is not a circle. The starting point is not the same as the end point. If history is circular, then that's a very big problem. We're never going to improve in the end. We're right back to where we start. But a cycle doesn't have the same destination. Exactly. If we lived in the ancient world, the observation that all life is circular, history is circular, literally, was at it all the time. That seemed to be a truism in the ancient world. This is why history did not interest Plato. History just was meaningless repetition. You studied the forms. History wasn't going to change anything. What happened down here was just these idiots running from democracy to oligarchy to tyranny. There was no interest in it. You weren't going to find out anything more about human destiny. I think that that's when I talk about modernity. Again, with the rise of not only monotheisms, but I think an extra afterburner was given with the rise of Protestantism, which gave a whole new urgency to the end times. Then, obviously, with science, interestingly, science rose after that. Science also makes us think of evolution happening in a certain direction. This becomes a very popular paradigm thinking in the West. I often tell people, look, if you want to think about it that way, there are obviously things that change. Secularly, our technology gets better. We tend to live longer. You can point out a number of things where life gets ever better over time or possibly, depending on your point of view, gets ever worse over time. You can point out linear trends. If you want to think about it as a cycle, you can, you know, a spiral maybe, a corkscrew shape trend. We're not exclusive. We don't mean to think that you can't find a lot of ways of interpreting history in historical trends in a large sense. We just have one dynamic that we think especially important and intriguing that we have focused on. Okay. Now, let's flesh that out because you specifically apply your concept of cyclical history. That's hard to say. Cyclical history to Anglo-American history in the early modern and the modern period. Could you break down that model for us and tell us exactly what does produce change in your mind? Let me just preface that maybe by saying that Bill and I, when we started writing about this, I think it is important. You asked me about kind of biographical considerations and so on. I think it is important to understand we did not set out to write about cycles in history. That was never our object when we started. We were really interested in generational change. We're particularly interested in what kind of endowments different generations leave behind for future generations and why different generations. We've seen this in our own life particularly with our own membership as part of the boomer generation and being so different from the GI generation that one world were to and so forth. Everything about our generational experience was so different. They were founding families and building battleships and boomers were keeping their lives on hold and going to Woodstock and just had a totally different way of looking at the world. Something that later we forgot a little bit, but there was an enormous generation gap as we like to say back in the late 60s and early 70s. I think everyone alive at the time was very aware that different generations thought very differently about the world. Our initial agenda was to figure out how this happens. How has it happened earlier in American history to go back and look historically at that phenomenon of different generations seeing the world differently because they're shaped differently in time? One of the things we found as we look back in history is yes, there has always been a very strong generational consciousness. It goes all the way back to the founding of this country. We think it actually is true as well in many other modern societies around the world. It was only at the last further investigation that we see that there's actually a certain cyclical element to these changes. No, there's not only a generation's all different. They seem to be different in a way that in a recognizable pattern. Certain kinds of generations always follow other kinds of generations and only lastly did we connect that to history itself. Obviously, since generations shape history, young generations as they grow older as adults and leaders themselves shape history. It's a circle. That was the last realization or phase we went through. Indeed, our first book which came out in 1991 was called Generations, A History of America's Future. It had a little bit of implicit pattern making in it, but it was primarily a history of America told as a sequence of generational biographies. The overwhelming point was not cyclical. The overwhelming point was just to talk about these different kinds of experiences. Later on in the book we did in 1997, The Fourth Turning, the cycle became much more in the foreground and looking at the history of cycle theories and then looking at generations as a driver for that. So then you would say that your ideas are applicable outside of Anglo-American history. It's not something peculiar to the culture started here in North America. No, and ironically this is sort of a little bit the paradox, but it's actually societies which are most intent upon the applying linear history are actually most susceptible to these kinds of cycles. That's what makes it sort of fascinating to us. Why do you think that might be? Well, I think it's because modernity gives generations the hubris or the power and the confidence to actually change institutions in their own image. So if you're in a pre-modern society, everything is prescribed. So whatever happens, you're not going to have the presumption of actually changing the institutions just because, well, you saw life differently. No, no, you're always very observant of what has been handed down. You will follow that. On the other hand, if you're more of a modern mindset, your particular point of view having been shaped uniquely by some big event like French Revolution or Industrialization or something that you went through, you think, no, no, we need to change these institutions, right? Well, the fact that you change them then shapes the experience for the next generation differently and you get much more of this push and pull through time. Anyway, this is why, and I think, even in the ancient world, I think generational phenomena are observable. Ancient Greece between the 5th and 3rd century would be a wonderful time to examine generational change from the Battle of Marathon through Socrates through Alexander the Great. It was a wonderful panoramic generational change. The mid to late republic and on into the early empire and the Roman history is a wonderful place to examine generational change. It does occur when events in history actually change rapidly and you do have a sense of political civic events changing everyone in the same way. But it is not the norm in the pre-modern environment. I presume that also you would want to adjust some parts of the model, right? If you were going to, let's say, write your next book on ancient Rome, would you have different archetypes or do you think that the archetypes you see in American history would translate pretty well to other cultures that are experiencing this cyclical path? I think the archetypes would be the same. Absolutely. In fact, the archetypes which come from everyone's familiar with Myers-Briggs and all the other, these tend to be powers of two, two for 816 and so forth. These originally come from Hippocrates and Galen. These are ancient. The four humors and the four temperaments, these all go back to the ancient world. There is nothing new about fundamental archetypes. The only difference is that instead of talking about people at any given time as belonging to different archetypes, we talk about generations across time belonging to different archetypes, which is a new twist on the concept. I'm wondering how much of the cyclical nature of history is dependent on biology. Is it based mainly on the average lifespan? If that were to change, would that substantially change the shape that history takes over time? It would certainly change the periodicity. There's no question about that. I think what's interesting about what drives the cyclical nature of social trends as we see it is that people are shaped young in childhood and their youth and coming-of-age experiences. Then, of course, as they're older, then they shape history as leaders and parents. What's interesting about that is that there is a specific time period. In most societies, there's a given amount of time, both socially and biologically, before you were deemed an adult and able to live a separate life recognized as someone able to make your own independent decisions and make your own choices as a man or a woman, and then later on, about the same period later, about 20 years or so, to be deemed to be fit for a leadership phase of life. What's interesting about that is that so many cycle theories are so many people who have talked very convincingly about cycles of drug use in America, cycles of changing trends in family function or dysfunction, cycles of political realignment or the long wave in the economy or cycles of immigration and all of these cycles. It's often very difficult to understand, okay, it's very interesting and it looks like there's a clear argument or it looks observable in some respects, but how can we understand the periodicity? Why is it 40 or 80 years? Why isn't it all happened in two years? Why doesn't it take 500 years? You know what I mean? It's what governs the cycle. Well, this is sort of what's interesting about looking at generations is that generations is a natural governor of the timing. And I think one of the things you see in the Fourth Turning where we talk about all these cycles is that we think that these things are sort of, you know, these are all good and many of them valid. We think that kind of the master governor is generational experience and he has a timing. That is to say, one generation's style becomes dominant, it becomes so dominant, it becomes dysfunctional. Other generations have to rediscover what we might call the missing archetype where, right, what is suppressed and bring that to life and that takes a certain amount of time, which can be biologically defined. So the answer to the question is, yes, if we all live like mice, right? And it was all over, you know, from grandchild to grandparent in 10 years, we would have definitely a different kind of cycle. Could you give us an example of a set of turnings and a set of archetypes and the kind of narrative that you ascribe to it in your books? Kind of a basic schematic we lay out in the Fourth Turning is that we see a long cycle of sort of overall social and political, civic life, cultural life, lasting about the length of a long human life, right? Which is about 80 years or so, maybe 80 to 85 years, something like that in American history, and that this is broken down into four periods or what we call turnings, about the length of a generation, about 20 years, 22 years, something like that. And indeed, in American history, there's actually a whole field in anthropology which talks about revitalization movements. Actually, Anthony Wallace is the great source here, but talking about awakenings as something happens in every culture, right? But we've had them in America and we call them, you know, the first great awakening, and many historians call it the late 60s and 70s, America's fourth or fifth great awakening, depending on when you want to start your count with, you know, John Winthrop in the 17th century or with Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the 18th century. But in any case, that's also interesting, right, that we have certain sequence there, and that formed the kind of the structure for the sorts of turnings we look at, and secondly, a first turning would be a post-crisis era, which is usually characterized by a high degree of institutional trust, strong institutions, a relatively constrained domain for individualism, both sort of culturally and socially, and a lot of stress laid upon being an individual as a heavy influence on conformity, a little bit of a band of wagons, you know, around these things that we've just defended, and that's what we call a first turning, and a good example of that would have been the American high after World War II, sort of that you think of the presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower and John Kennedy as being sort of that era, right? And by the way, each of these eras has a certain generational location, right? That's the era in which boomers were children, the silent generation was coming of age into adulthood, and the GI generation, the greatest generation, was entering leadership positions, you know, in governorships and state houses and, you know, along with Kennedy and on into the presidency ultimately toward the end of it. That's the first turning. The second turning is what we call an awakening, as just mentioned, and this is a period when people suddenly reject all the social conformity, the social control, the kind of political inhibition, civic inhibition of the previous first turning and rebel against it, trying to find a new sense of authenticity, individualism, room for the individual, seed time for libertarianism, I might say. And this is when boomers were coming of age, and I, you know, I would just add here that I think boomers today are among the most, you think about today's elder generation, you know, sort of the gray champions of libertarianism today are heavy among boomers, and they came of age during this period. But this is characteristic, and it started mainly in the culture on college campuses during the mid-60s, and ended up in economics in the late 70s, early 80s with tax revolts, and ultimately the election of Ronald Reagan. But whether it's in the culture, which was mainly at that time on the left, or in the economy, which is mainly at that time on the right, it was always in the direction of liberation from all of this social control. And this is a very constant, a theme of awakenings. By the way, the most recent awakenings are largely secular, although it did have its born-again offshoots, certainly, to say nothing of its hurry, creation movement and everything else. But it was mainly secular. However, historically, this has been mainly in religion, and it's always been driven by the young, and it's always been predicated on salvation by faith, not works. Who believed in salvation by works? Their fathers, right, who won all those wars. Who believes in faith? They knew younger generations at the point after the last great war. So this is always a great conversation. You know, back after the American Revolution, it was the anti-Masons versus the Mates. The Masons were my fathers, right? The anti-Masons were the young generation. This is the Loco-Foco movement. These were the peers of, well, maybe slightly younger than Emerson. Maybe more, you know, Thoreau, right, and his crowd. Ultimately, that was an incredible generation of feminist poets, religion founders, commune founders, all over much of the Midwest and New England. Incredible is probably one of the most tumultuous awakenings in American history, unfolded in the late 1820s, 1830s, early 1840s. But, okay, that's the second turning. The third turning is what you call an unraveling. An unraveling is sort of much the opposite of a first turning. So you think of a first turning as institutions are trusted and respected, individualism is suppressed, distrusted. The unraveling is much the opposite. Individualism is strong, institutions are weak, and discredited. So, you know, we think of the late 1980s, 1990s, certainly, early OOs. We think of that as being an unraveling period. And of course, the generation coming of age during that period most recently was Generation X. And typically, in archetypal terms, this is what we often call a nomad archetype. You know, these were the throwaway children during the last awakening who were basically left alone and developed great strengths of resilience. Kind of a hard-scrabble quality of being able to do alone without anyone helping them. After all, they grew up not only not depending on institutions, but not being on their families or not really trusting anyone. So these are great generations of individualists. And just as a first turning kind of accepts the wisdom of the recent crisis, the lessons of the recent crisis was we've all got to band together and keep safe, right? The third turning is the lessons of the recent awakening. We all have to atomize, right? And enjoy things each on our own terms, not join. Joining was disaster. We learned that in the awakening. And ultimately, the great unravelings of history ultimately lead to the fourth turning. And that's the next crisis. This is an hour-of-world crisis. This is when we tear down institutions and rebuild them from scratch, often overnight, often suddenly. This is when public history begins to move very rapidly again. And I think that when you think of the kind of the two antipodes of this cycle, you know, awakenings are times when we rebuild our inner world of culture, values, religion, literature, and so on. The fourth turning are eras when we rebuild our outer world of politics, economy, empire. I mean, those kinds of institutions, more the secular material side. And very different generations coming of age. We call the generations coming of age during the awakenings to be the prophet archetype, like boomers, or like the transcendental generation during the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. The archetype that comes of age during the crisis is the hero archetype, much more oriented around secular goals, much more oriented around community and the need for community and reshaping everything they meet, technology or otherwise, around the need for community, rather than as with case with boomers around the need for individualism. And this is one sort of interesting segue, you know, possibly to talking about millennials and their need for community. And what that means about what they want in politics, right? Which is kind of where many people go with that, you know, looking at the future. Now, speaking of the future, the fourth turning is sort of explicitly, at least half prophecy, or at least that's how it's billed. I wonder how strongly do you mean that? Do you see yourself and your work as history or prophecy? And if prophecy, what do you mean by that? Why make that word choice? The word choice was a bit provocative, almost intentionally so. I think history should be prophetic to some extent. You know, I talk to academic historians all the time. I was one sort of, I mean, I spent enough time in graduate school, which I can think I call myself at least having contact with the academic community. One thing I notice is that historians in academia will resolutely protest. You know, history says nothing about the future. It has no predictive element at all. And if anyone ever claims that they're a complete charlatan, in which case, you know, I would argue, then why not be just like Plato and ask, why would you ever study it? Why does it mean anything, right? If there is nothing, you can extract from it, right? And anything useful can extract. It has to be something that can form us about the future. Now, when I talk about turnings, I talk about social moods. I talk about likelihoods of things happening. I'm not forecasting events. This isn't Nostradamus. Nor am I a historical determinist. I don't think everything has to come out in any particular way. I'm talking about tendencies, moods. I think it's very interesting when you talk to people about, you know, what the world is going to be like in the years, say, 2035 or 2040. People instantly think that there's like a science fiction, you know, scenario. It could be anything, you know. And I say, that's crazy. We can know a lot about the year 2040. It's going to be all of us just older. You know? And we already know a lot about all of us. And all I claim, and in fact, I spent a lot of, you know, my own writing trying to discuss this, is trying to see is there anything you can tell about people in their 30s when you really look at them, how they've been shaped, their attitudes and behaviors and so on. You can actually deduce something about how at age 30, you can already find out how they'll be at age 50. If you can, we already know a lot about the world in 2035 or 2040. And not only do we know how many they are, I mean, the science of demography is pretty advanced. But I go beyond that. So we already know something about their personality. We know something about where they're going to go. If you ask people, you know, will the next decade be more like the 60s or more like the 80s or more like the 90s? To say that you have no idea, I just think you're tone deaf to history. You've got to be kidding you have no idea. I mean, there's a lot we know about the 60s that was set up generationally, right? It was not just an accident that could have happened in any decade. And I think that is what I'm trying to bring back to looking at history to understand that it is a it's a it can't be deduced to necessarily analytically. It is a little bit of a tone poem, but it absolutely has causation. It has a certain direction. It has it has it is a train of events or a train of of of of mood shifts, which is broadly causal and which which which does allow you to make certain conclusions about where we're going. And you know, I've been writing about this long enough to actually have a track record at this. So, you know, I think I can speak with that for the little bit of authority. I mean, we came out with our first book in 1991. You know, when we after Xers, you have to remember back then even Generation X had not been yet been named. We just called them 13th generation, called them 13ers. The next generation that label did stick. We named Millennials. We thought their first their first cohort would would be the high school class of 2000. So we thought that was a great name to give them. But we made some predictions about Millennials. And what we did predict was it totally unlike the Xers that we were getting to know around 1991 and 1992, who I think have pressed everyone by being, you know, risk takers, sort of edgy in the culture. Certainly, certainly violent. We had almost the peaking of the crime rate. We had crime rate peaked right around 1994. So this is certainly among risk taking with sort of propensity for, you know, personal confrontation and risk taking in that sense. Alienated from family life, generally collectively pessimistic about their future, all of these things we knew about, you know, this is back when people in the early 20s were all wearing black, you know, and grunge rock and gangster rap were still big. People still listening to Kurt Cobain and so on. Anyway, you just have to imagine what things were like. And what we predicted, we said this next generation, we could see how differently they were being raised, right? All the baby on board signs, all the protective clothing and all the bicycle helmets and all the Lamaze books and everything about them was different. And we said, we have seen this drama before. We had seen this play out before. Every time we had that dark to light change and nurture, we think we knew what happened. So we predicted that by the late 90s, early OOs, we would see a decline in personal risk taking. We'd see a decline in the crime rate. We would see parents much closer, kids much closer to their parents. We would see a lot more collective optimism about the future. And we would see this desire for a new sense of community, which we didn't see at all among Xers. And I would say, arguably, statistically, you can see all of that having happened now among millennials. So that's why I said, you know, you can't tell things, right? You can't look ahead. Just even seeing a new generation emerge, you can make educated guesses about how they're going to come out. And I think if one looks back at our book, I think our guesses were pretty good. In terms of events, I think a better place to look in terms of looking forward was probably our book The Fourth Turning, where we talked about, you know, how the Fourth Turning would unfold. For libertarians, the individual is the fundamental unit of social analysis. You can't describe collectives as acting entities because they're simply composed of individuals who generate their own actions. It's always one person who applies means to fulfill whatever ends they have in mind, right? Groups don't actually do anything. Only individuals do. What do you think about that? Do you think that's true? I think it all depends on your perspective. I think if you're a scientist or a social scientist, you apply whatever tools of generalization work. You know, people often say, doesn't generations take away free choice? You know, I get that all the time. And I said, that's ridiculous. I said, you know, I know what you'll be doing four weeks from now at about 3 a.m. I bet you'll be in bed, you know? You'll be sleeping, you know? High probability, you know? And it's like, so I take away your free choice. I've just made a prediction. Do you feel diminished by that? No, I think you probably don't. I think you think, yeah, like lots of other people, that's how we operate. And I could go down a huge list of those things. I could say that if you're a ski, you'll probably be skiing maybe in December, January. You won't be skiing in July. Anyway, marketers do that all the time. People who sell, anyone in companies, they know a lot about how you behave. They're not taking away from your free will. They're just observing. They're just looking at large numbers of people doing things together. I think when we look at what I find interesting is not that it's, you know, people, it's not that they're blown away that people think, well, you know, you can be categorized as a member of a group. If you're rich or poor, depending on your race or nationality, your region, you can probably say things probabilistically about you, right? How you speak, how you relate to other people. Do you send your parent to a nursing home or not? You know, that's strongly dependent on your ethnicity, which area of Europe you came from. Anyway, we know a lot about this. What's interesting to me is that generations are singled out for that, right? In other words, people who talk a lot about blacks versus Hispanics versus whites or talk about French versus Germans, talk about rich versus poor or, you know, educated, noneducated, make generalization all the time. Then they come to me and say, how can you generalize, you know, about people born in a certain time? And I'm just saying, I'm just using what works just like you do, right? So I find that I am unfairly singled out, right, for using a cohort period, which arguably is actually a stronger determinant of many ways and, you know, many social trends than necessarily a racial group or an income group or a regional group depending on what you're looking at. So I look at what works. I'll tell you one thing that's really interesting about generations that other categories don't have. And this has always fascinated me. Generations are mortal. They're born and they eventually die. They have a sense of finitude and a sense of urgency. A generation knows that there are certain things that they're ever going to do. They have to do it before it's over, right? That's something that no other category has. And it's also, generations, I think, are so interesting to look at history precisely because of that timing. They are shaped in history and on a very predictable time scale. They will be the leaders. They will make certain decisions in public life, which, for instance, a lot of other people, perhaps even in war, perhaps even, you know, huge events. And that will happen on a certain schedule. That gives it that interesting forecasting dimension. You know, if I know a lot about Hispanics or Californians or rich people, I don't know what that tells me in terms of looking forward time-wise. You know what I mean? There's nothing in that information that does anything in time. Generations are different. They do have a schedule. And just as a demographer, and I'm familiar as a demographer, you know, people tell you all the time, and I do standard demography all the time, and I often tell people. It's one of the few things we really do know about the year 2060 that absent, you know, a global war or a Martian invasion, we know pretty accurately how many people are going to be around. The fertility rate doesn't change very much. And, you know, a lot of these people have already been born. And, you know, the migration rate, it doesn't change fast. We can tell a lot about the shape of the population quantitatively in the year 2060. I just add that we also know through looking at generational change and how cohorts are shaped, we also know a little bit something about the attitudes and behaviors of those who will be around in the year, you know, 2040 or 2060. And that's what fascinates me. It's the fact that generations have a timetable. That's what I find fascinating about it. Whatever you might think of Howe's brand of history or his model's validity, he has challenged us to think generationally. Each new generation has the ability to dramatically improve upon their world. The tragedy is that so few actually have. In my view, history is like purgatory. We learn its sad stories to burn away the sin and emerge better people. It's its uses, yes, but it is definitely not the final destination. When we have learned enough history, perhaps we will finally stop being so cruel to one another. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible to learn more about Liberty Chronicles visit Libertarianism.org.