Imagine you’re reading this in 1974. You’ve just watched Nixon resign. Vietnam is winding down. The economy is rocky, but manageable. You’ve grown up in the shadow of WWII and lived through the civil rights movement, the space race, and the Summer of Love. You think the worst is behind us, and maybe it is. But maybe it isn’t.
Let me tell you what happened next. From your perspective, it’s the future. From mine, it’s history.
The post-war boom was real. So was the sense of shared prosperity. Workers were valued, corporations paid taxes, the rich were constrained by regulation and marginal tax rates above 70%. But some people, especially the very wealthy, didn’t like those constraints. They didn’t like that they couldn’t accumulate endlessly, that they had to answer to regulators or unions or the broader public good. So they started to push back.
Enter the ideological shift: Milton Friedman told us the only responsibility of business was to its shareholders. It sounds academic, but it was revolutionary. It gave corporations permission to stop caring about workers, communities, or the environment. Regulations became the enemy. Taxes became theft. Government became the problem.
And that’s where the unraveling began.
We call it the Third Turning—the “Unraveling”—a time when institutions weaken and individualism rises. Cultural battles replaced civic unity. Empathy began to erode. Not all at once. Slowly. Reagan told Americans that government was the enemy, and millions believed him. But what they heard—whether he meant it or not—was that their neighbors were the enemy too. The poor. The immigrant. The bureaucrat. The teacher. The activist. Anyone asking for a piece of the pie.
We outsourced our manufacturing. Towns hollowed out. Workers were discarded. And it wasn’t just the jobs that left—it was the pride, the identity, the purpose. Automation followed, cutting even deeper. And all the while, the corporations—now legally people—grew richer and less accountable.
We didn’t just outsource labor. We outsourced pollution. Moved the factories overseas and pretended that carbon didn’t count if it was emitted in China. Out of sight, out of mind. We bought cheap goods and ignored the rising seas.
Empathy? That became a liability. Caring was weakness. We built entire media ecosystems around outrage and contempt. We called it news. We said we were being “realistic.” But mostly, we were just being mean. We began to admire those who felt nothing, calling their coldness strength. History had seen this before—in the Gilded Age, industrialists crushed competitors without remorse, hailed as ‘fittest’ by a society that forgot to care. Now, in our unraveling, sociopaths rose again: corporate leaders who buried climate truths, politicians who mocked decency. Their success didn’t start the storm, but it fanned the flames, driving us deeper into crisis.
Christian nationalism crept in through the cracks left by the attacks on public education. It offered certainty in a time of confusion, identity in a time of dislocation. It declared war on secularism, on pluralism, on any truth that came from science or diversity. It fused with politics. It sharpened its sword.
The press was bought up, piece by piece, until it stopped telling us the truth we needed to hear and started selling us the stories we wanted. The watchdog became an entertainer. The signal was buried in the noise.
Then came the Fourth Turning—the “Crisis.” The financial collapse of 2008 should’ve been a reckoning. For a moment, it was. We elected a president who talked about hope and change. But the machine didn’t like him. The machine stalled him. And then the backlash came.
Donald Trump didn’t cause this crisis. He was the crisis. He was what happened when decades of erosion finally collapsed the foundation. He exploited the loss of trust, the loss of empathy, the festering anger in the towns left behind. He mocked decency. He broke norms. And people cheered, not because they were evil, but because they were numb. Because someone finally said the quiet part out loud.
He lost in 2020, but the damage was done. He came back in 2024, helped by a press more interested in horse races than fascism, and by a public too cynical to believe in anything anymore. Many voters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a minority woman. Misogyny and racism weren’t new—but now they were overt.
Trump’s second term gutted the civil service. Experts were fired. Agencies were crippled. The government became less functional, less trusted, more dangerous. Unemployment rose—not from trade, not from immigration, but from the hollowing out of our public institutions. And still, he promised that he alone could fix it.
Meanwhile, climate change accelerated. The oceans absorbed the heat for a while. Then came the glacier melt, the rising seas, the floods and fires and storms. Exxon had known. So had others. But they buried the data. The market demanded growth, not responsibility. Shareholders mattered. Nothing else did.
The attacks on government backfired. People stopped trusting all of it—left, right, center. Conspiracy theories filled the vacuum. The educated were mocked. The experts dismissed. And those who tried to fix things were painted as tyrants.
And through it all, empathy continued to wither. We stopped seeing each other. We stopped listening. We stopped believing that we had anything in common. Every man for himself. Every tribe against the other.
So why am I telling you this? Why send this message to the past?
Not because I have a solution. I don’t. I wish I did. I’ve marched. I’ve organized. I’ve voted. I’ve shouted into the void. And I’m not done fighting. But I’m tired. I’m telling you because this didn’t have to happen—because maybe if more people in your time had seen the storm coming, they could have steered the ship differently. I wonder, though, if we can’t stop history’s cycles, these waves of unity and division rising and falling like a sine wave, could we at least soften their extremes? It’s just an idea—what if we’d built stronger institutions, ones that held through the unraveling, keeping trust alive? What if we’d taught empathy as strength, ensuring it never fell so low? What if we’d held leaders accountable, curbing their excesses before the crisis broke us? Then, perhaps, as the cycle turns back to a new First Turning, we’d find ourselves in a time of rebuilding, where unity and trust could rise again.
And maybe, just maybe, if someone reads this and sees the pattern, they’ll choose a different path. Because history isn’t fate. Not yet.
Nicely done Gary. I see that you also are a fan of “The Fourth Turning”. The book does seem to indicate that these four generation historical cycles are pretty much inevitable, although there is also hope that the depth of the crisis and conflagration that ends each cycle can be mitigated. As you described, previous 4th turnings have led to a new phase of recovery and growth. So far, the strongest 4th-turning recoveries occurred in the US following the wars with external entities, The American Revolution and WWII, and the weakest was after the civil war. So if the crisis phase Grand Finale is WWIII, and if it doesn’t destroy the world, it could result in a better outcome for the US over a civil war that likely would take a very long time to recover from; we haven’t even fully recovered from the last one. Of course the end of the cycle could be something less drastic than a major war, but it does seem likely that it will be dramatic in some way.
The death of empathy is the most frightening element of this cultural change. When empathy equals weakness, we have departed from basic democracy. We can no longer see that the denial of basic human rights to one group or one person means that everyone’s rights are denied. When we have lost the connection between what happens to someone else and what happens to ourselves, we have accepted fascism.
I haven’t actually read it, but I know the gist of it. It’s on my Kindle TBR list.
Why does *this* time have to be the interesting times?