Examining Generational Theory: The Fourth Turning

It's no secret that my view of the so-called mainstream media is one of loathing and healthy skepticism when it comes to what, and how, it communicates information in the form of "news". Journalism over my lifetime has morphed from the more traditional "who, what, when, where, how and why", to a blurring of the facts mixed with obvious bias and commentary interspersed in almost every article today.

A friend of mine shared another blog's post which commented on a generational theory by two authors, Strauss and Howe, and their book titled, The Fourth Turning". This theory was an introduction for me to a concept which seemed interesting, plausible, but had some potential flaws, or short-comings, as any theory of science does. What made it interesting to me as I was compelled to research further into this theory is that some journalists in the media have written a few articles (February and May) about how this concept influenced Steve Bannon of Brietbart and his being a close advisor of Pres. Trump during the first several months of his early administration.

As I read through the February article by Linette Lopez for Business Insider, it portrayed Bannon as something akin to Rasputin controlling the Czar of Russia. 

Bannon has never been secretive about his desire to use Trump to bring about his vision of America. He told Vanity Fair last summer that Trump was a "blunt instrument for us ... I don’t know whether he really gets it or not."

In the May article on this same topic, by Tim Fernholz - a writer for Quartz - reveals his willingness to "toe the line" for the elites who want the public to buy the story that they want us to believe by saying:

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Strauss and Howe quickly bumped up the start date of their Fourth Turning to this far more catastrophic and widely shared experience. This is also the date that Bannon uses in his film. And yet this crisis, too, didn’t quite live up to expectations: Policymakers acted far more wisely than they did during the Great Depression. Catastrophe was avoided, and though the resulting recession hurt millennials’ financial hopes in ways we are still understanding, it did not have the same impact as the crisis of the 1930s.

Perhaps the defining experience of the millennial generation is relative economic stagnation and inequality. But even that oft-heard word, inequality, is a reminder of how heterogenous millennials are: The experience of a college-educated 25-year-old is very different from one with a high-school education. Not surprisingly, this most racially diverse of American cohorts is likely to have the most diversity of experiences.

What is even more revealing is the section revealing this author's biography as a journalist when it says, "Tim began covering politics and policy in Washington, D.C. at the American Prospect in the uneventful year of 2008, before joining National Journal in 2011 to write about fiscal policy." Excuse me? 2008 was hardly an "uneventful" year!

Having studied multiple sources on the background causes which lead to the 2008 economic crisis, I wonder what Fernholz means by "...didn't quite live up to expectations." and "Catastrophe was avoided,..." As someone who had worked for almost thirty years at the time of this event, my catastrophe was seeing personal investments for retirement shrink by 33%. That's hardly "uneventful"! Were our expectations supposed to be worse results than that of the Great Depression? What about the addition of 10 trillion dollars by Pres. Obama to the national debt? He does not even mention this. But, that's not surprising given that most liberals view the national debt as nothing to be concerned about. Gee... I wonder how the millennials feel about that?

Then Fernholtz goes into gear with focusing on the Obama Administration's economic stagnation and the narrative both Pres. Obama and the press love to tout; inequality! Yes, millennials are heterogenous and racially diverse with a broad range of experiences. How many times did we hear Pres. Obama lament that minorities were struggling with inequality? Yet, what did he do as far as his policies to reduce this claim? Bail out Wall Street, nationalize Chrysler, and payback with our tax dollars millions to the unions who got him elected! Yea, that sure helped reduce inequality!

Later on in Fernholtz's article, as an example of the kind of commentary revealing the author's personal bias toward Bannon and Trump, he says, "For his part, Bannon stresses that he does not seek a crisis; he is merely prepared for one. Perhaps he sees the prediction of crumbling institutions as a way to justify his efforts to tear them down."

What seems more blatantly obvious is his generalization of millennials as a particular generation. He speaks of the majority, who voted for Hillary in the election, by citing research to explain them.

Yet there is one unique factor about the millions of Americans dubbed millennials.
“[Millennials] have been the most written about generation of any generation, in terms of media and culture and their impact,” Tucker, the Ogilvy president, says. In his view, however, all this attention hasn’t resulted in the empowerment, energy or heroism predicted by the generational theorists.

Instead, he says it made them anxious—which is supposed to be Gen X’s problem. Ogilvy hired psychoanalysts and ethnographic researchers in an effort to understand young people and the perception that millennials seek an “amazing set of life experiences.” However, their researchers found that millennials’ search was “fueled by high degrees of anxiety and a bit of insecurity…because they’ve grown up with social media, they feel high degrees of pressure to compete against their peers.”

Well,when this coddled generation of "snowflakes" are so easily offended by someone else's view which differs from what they believe, (a.k.a. indoctrinated by their college/university professors) and the more radical ones who join antifa to enforce fascistic censorship of those differing view, rather than engaging in discussion to understand those views or defend their own, then it's no wonder they can't handle competition from their peers.