Each Winter Has Been Worse Than the Last
Three crises, three resolutions, each at a higher price than the one before. That is not a cycle. A cycle returns you to where you started.
Strauss and Howe's cycle is the sort of theory I want to dismiss and cannot, and the reason I cannot is narrower than the theory itself.
Their claim, made in 1997, is that Anglo-American history runs in eighty-year cycles, roughly one long human life, divided into four turnings like seasons. A High, when institutions are strong and trust is high. An Awakening, when a generation raised in that security attacks its conformity and demands meaning. An Unravelling, when individualism peaks, institutional trust collapses, and the mood is not urgent but ironic and detached. Then a Crisis, when everything deferred during the first three arrives at once and the society is forced to decide what it actually is.
Cyclical theories of history are cheap. They are unfalsifiable in the way horoscopes are unfalsifiable, elastic enough that any decade can be made to fit, and the literature is full of them.
What makes this one awkward is that it was written down in advance, with dates, and the dates came in.