Americans’ chronic failure to grasp the seasonality of history explains why the consensus forecasts about the national direction so often turn out so wrong.

Back in the late 1950s, forecasters widely predicted that America’s future would be like Disney’s Tomorrowland.  The experts foresaw well-mannered youth, a wholesome culture, an end of ideology, an orderly conquest of racism and poverty, steady economic progress, plenty of social discipline, and uncontroversial Korea-like police actions abroad.  All these predictions, of course, were wildly mistaken.  It’s not just that the experts missed the particular events that lay just ahead—the Têt Offensive and Apollo 11, Watts and Kent State, Summer of Love and Watergate, Earth Day and Chappaquiddick.  It’s that they missed the entire mood of the coming era.

Why were their predictions so wrong?  When the forecasters assumed the future would extrapolate the recent past, they expected that the next set of people in each phase of life would behave just like the current occupants.  Had they known where and how to look, the experts could have seen history-bending changes about to occur in America’s generational lineup: Each generation would age through time as surely as water runs to the sea.  Over the ensuing two decades, the current elder leaders were due to disappear, a new batch of kids to arrive, and the generations in between to transform the new phases of life they were entering.

This dynamic has recurred throughout American history.  Roughly every two decades (the span of one phase of life), there has arisen a new constellation of generations—a new layering of generational personas up and down the age ladder.  As this constellation has shifted, so has the national mood.

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Consider what happened,
from the late 1950s to the late 1970s

...from The Fourth Turning (Chapter 1)