One of the reasons Nobody landed the way it did is that it felt less like an action movie and more like a mood.

On the surface, the story is simple. A middle-aged suburban man, living a quiet, almost invisible life, discovers that he used to be something very different. Violence returns. Competence returns. A part of himself he had buried turns out not to be gone at all.

The plot is exaggerated, but the feeling underneath it is familiar.

Many people my age recognized the character immediately.

Not because we were secret assassins, but because the film captured something about the generation that grew up late in the Unraveling —a generation that learned early not to trust institutions, not to expect stability, and not to assume the system would reward loyalty the way it once had.

Strauss and Howe called this kind of cohort a Nomad generation.

Nomads come of age during periods of institutional decay. They learn self-reliance because the structures around them feel unreliable. They tend to be practical, skeptical, and less idealistic than the generations before and after them. They are not usually the ones who design the new order, but they are often the ones who keep things functioning while the old one breaks down.

In calmer periods, those traits can look unnecessary, even threatening.

In crisis periods, they start to look different.

The Seismograph

One of the strange things about late-cycle societies is that the culture often senses this shift before it understands it.

No one announces that the system is unstable.
No one declares that a turning has begun.

But the ground starts to feel less solid, and people begin listening for different signals.

It is less like a plan and more like watching a seismograph.

When the earth is quiet, no one looks at the needle.
When the ground starts to tremble, even slightly, everyone starts glancing at the instrument to see what it is doing.

Years ago, writing about what he called “apocalyptic times,” Walker Percy described the strange feeling that can appear late in an age—the sense that the institutions still stand, the routines still function, but something underneath them has shifted. The language people use to explain the world no longer quite fits the world they experience.

What interests novelists in these peculiar times… is what he perceives as fault lines in the terrain, small clues that something strange is going on…
a sign that things have gotten very queer without anyone seeming to notice it… sane people seem a little crazy, and crazy people sometimes look knowledgeable… like the movie The Body Snatchers, where everybody looks normal, except that they are not—but no one notices, except the poor novelist, who has nothing better to do than notice.

People may not know what is ending.

They only know that the old explanations no longer feel secure.

When that happens, societies start paying attention to different kinds of voices.

Not because anyone has decided to change direction, but because the ground no longer feels permanent.

The Uneasy Man

You can see hints of this shift in the way men—especially Gen X and younger men—are talked about in public life.

Sometimes they are described as lost.
Sometimes as angry.
Sometimes as dangerous.
Sometimes as necessary.

Often as all four at once.

I’ve written before about this tension—in essays about the strange mood around Gen X, about the shift from late-Unraveling optimism to something darker, about the sense that the culture no longer knows whether to reassure younger men, restrain them, or prepare to rely on them.

The tone changes from year to year. The pattern does not.

Late-cycle societies grow uncomfortable with the kinds of traits they may later need.

When institutions feel secure, aggression looks like a problem. When institutions feel fragile, competence under pressure starts to look valuable again—even if no one wants to say so directly.

This does not require a conspiracy. It only requires a society that senses strain.

Voices talking about discipline, responsibility, limits, or male frustration appear, disappear, and reappear again. Some are mocked, some are elevated, some are ignored—but the conversation itself keeps returning, as if the culture cannot quite decide whether these traits belong to the past or the future.

That is what makes Nobody feel less like escapism and more like a late-cycle story.

The hero is not young.
He is not idealistic.
He is not trying to fix the system.

He is a man who learned to live inside a world he does not fully trust—and discovers, almost by accident, that the world may not be strong enough to keep certain forces safely contained.

The Generation in Between

This pattern is not new.

Periods of stability tend to domesticate the generation that grows up inside them. The culture teaches them to be safe, polite, productive, and manageable.

But if the cycle turns, the same generation may find itself living in a world that requires something different:

Resilience instead of comfort.
Endurance instead of optimism.
Competence instead of confidence.

History often calls on the generation that least expected it.

In the last cycle, the Lost Generation came of age during institutional decay and lived through the chaos that followed. They were not the ones who built the mid-century order, but they were the ones who survived the transition that made it possible.

Strauss and Howe’s model suggests that Nomad generations often play a similar role.

Not the architects.
Not the prophets.

The ones who hold things together when the structure starts to shake.

The ones who keep the lights on.

The Shape of the Story

Movies, myths, and stories tend to notice these shifts before politics does.

The hero who appears late in a cycle is rarely the clean, idealistic figure of a stable age.

He is more likely to be older, tired, skeptical, and dangerous if pushed too far.

He does not trust the system completely—but he has learned how to operate inside it.

He is not looking for a revolution.

But he is not surprised when order breaks down.

Nobody is one version of that figure.

In the next essay, I want to look at a pattern that appears again and again in crisis eras:

The appearance of the double. The alter ego. The second self that emerges when the ordinary rules stop feeling real.

• “Outis”

• Nobody

• Tyler Durden.

• Achilles and Patroclus.

• The shadow in the mirror.

When the cycle turns, the hero is rarely just one man.

And the stories start to reflect it.

Periods of civilizational renewal rarely begin with expansion.
They begin with loss.

Institutions shrink. Influence fades. Confidence weakens. What once seemed permanent begins to look fragile. In such moments, the natural instinct is to call the situation decline, failure, or collapse.

But older traditions often use a different word:

pruning.

The idea appears in Scripture, in monastic life, in political history, and even in modern generational theory. Growth that cannot be sustained is cut back so that life itself can continue.

If the present moment resembles earlier crisis eras, then the question may not be how to restore what we had, but how to endure the pruning that comes before renewal.

I. Benedict XVI and the Smaller Church

Long before he became pope, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the future of Christianity in the modern West in terms that sounded pessimistic at the time but now seem almost descriptive.

In a 1969 radio address, Joseph Ratzinger predicted that the Church would lose cultural dominance, lose social prestige, and become smaller and poorer. It would no longer be supported automatically by the surrounding society. It would have to live with less influence, fewer institutions, and fewer nominal believers.

But he did not describe this as destruction.

He described it as purification.

The Church, he suggested, might have to begin again from smaller, more faithful communities. Only after this narrowing could something stronger grow.

The image often used to summarize his thought is the image of a vineyard:

Branches are cut back not because the vine is dying, but because it must live.

II. Robert Hugh Benson and the Remnant

Decades earlier, the English priest Robert Hugh Benson imagined a similar future in his 1907 novel Lord of the World.

Benson wrote at the end of the Victorian age, when European civilization still appeared confident and secure. Yet his story described a world of technological progress, global unity, and humanitarian ideals in which Christianity survives only as a small and increasingly isolated remnant.

The danger in the novel is not barbarism.

It is a world that believes it no longer needs transcendence.

The Church in Lord of the World is not destroyed in one dramatic moment.
It becomes marginal, then misunderstood, then opposed, and finally reduced to something that looks insignificant by worldly standards.

And yet it survives.

Not through power.
Through fidelity.

Benson belonged to the generation just before the catastrophes of the twentieth century, but his imagination anticipated what the Lost Generation would experience: the collapse of old certainties, the fall of empires, and the need to rebuild without the illusions of the previous age.

III. The Fourth Turning as Pruning

The generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe describes history as moving through cycles of growth, confidence, complacency, and crisis.

In their model, the crisis era — the Fourth Turning — comes when institutions built in an earlier cycle no longer fit the present. Debt accumulates, trust erodes, elites divide, and the system becomes too rigid to adapt gradually.

Eventually something gives.

Wars, depressions, revolutions, or cultural upheavals force a reset.

Seen from inside the crisis, this looks like collapse.

Seen from a longer perspective, it often looks like pruning.

After the Civil War, the United States emerged more centralized but more stable.
After the Depression and World War II, the country emerged poorer but more cohesive.
After each crisis, the structure was smaller in some ways and stronger in others.

The Fourth Turning is not only destruction.

It is the cutting away of what can no longer be sustained.

IV. The Benedictine Pattern

When the Western Roman world weakened, the response that endured was not an attempt to preserve every institution exactly as it had been.

It was the slow work associated with St. Benedict of Nursia and the monastic tradition.

Monasteries did not save the empire.

They preserved learning, liturgy, agriculture, and community through a period when the larger political order was unstable. They were smaller than the civilization that produced them, but more durable than the structures that collapsed around them.

This pattern appears again and again in history.

When large systems weaken, survival often moves to smaller, more intentional communities.
Not because people want less, but because less can be sustained.

Pruning is not the end of life.

It is the condition for its continuation.

V. Why Pruning Feels Like Failure

Late-cycle cultures expect constant expansion.

Economic growth should continue.
Institutions should grow larger.
Influence should increase.
Comfort should accumulate.

When the trend reverses, the instinct is to assume something has gone wrong.

But long civilizations rarely grow in a straight line.

They expand, stabilize, overextend, and contract.
After contraction, they sometimes grow again — but differently.

A generation living through the contraction often feels cheated.

It inherits obligations without the rewards that earlier generations enjoyed.

Yet those generations frequently make renewal possible precisely because they accept limits that others refused.

They cut back debt.
They rebuild families.
They preserve institutions at smaller scale.
They choose durability over speed.

They do the work of pruning.

VI. The Remnant and the Future

Both Benedict XVI and Robert Hugh Benson understood that renewal rarely begins with dominance.

It begins with survival.

A smaller Church.
A smaller community.
A smaller circle of trust.
A smaller set of institutions that still function.

From the perspective of the age, this looks like defeat.

From the perspective of history, it often looks like preparation.

The Fourth Turning, if the theory is right, is not only a time when systems break.

It is a time when illusions are stripped away.

And what remains, if anything remains, becomes the seed of the next order.

VII. After the Pruning

No one living in a crisis era can know whether renewal will follow.

Pruning always feels final while it is happening.

But the pattern repeats often enough to suggest a possibility worth remembering.

Civilizations sometimes survive not because they avoid loss,

but because someone accepts it.

Branches are cut back.
Communities grow smaller.
Expectations narrow.
Structures simplify.

Not so that life can end.

So that life can continue.

Late in an Unraveling, almost everyone agrees that something is wrong.

Institutions feel bloated.
Government feels distant and ubiquitous at the same time.
Wars seem endless. And pointless.
Borders, porous.
Debt keeps growing. Trust keeps shrinking.

People begin to talk about reform, about cutting back, about restoring limits. The language shifts from expansion to restraint. Even those who once celebrated disruption start to say the system has gone too far.

But late-cycle societies rarely understand what real pruning looks like.

They imagine correction without contraction.
Reform without instability.
Limits without loss.

They want the system to become rational again without becoming smaller.

In the last decade, you could see this instinct across the political spectrum, but it appeared most clearly among voters who believed the country needed to pull back from the habits of the late twentieth century. Fewer foreign wars. More controlled borders. Less bureaucratic expansion. Policies that favored citizens over abstractions. A government that promised less and did less.

This was not, in their minds, a revolution. It was a pruning.

The expectation was that the system could be cut back to something healthier without breaking. That institutions could be steered again. That the machinery of government, once pointed in the right direction, would respond to the will of the public the way it had in earlier decades.

Instead, what followed felt less like reform and more like strain.

Conflict between branches of government that no longer trusted each other.
Agencies that could not be redirected.
Courts deciding questions politics could not settle.
Elections that half the country doubted.
Rules applied unevenly, then argued over endlessly.

The system did not behave like a machine that needed adjustment, it behaved like a structure under stress.

This is the moment late-cycle cultures find hardest to understand. When institutions are strong, pruning can be deliberate. Leaders can cut spending, close programs, reduce commitments, and the system absorbs the change. But when trust has already eroded, even small attempts at correction can produce instability.

People who thought they were voting for reform discover that the problem is deeper than policy.

They are not steering a stable structure, they are testing whether the structure still holds.

History suggests this is not unusual.

In earlier cycles, the transition from Unraveling to Crisis rarely looked like a clean reform movement. It looked confused, uneven, sometimes incompetent. Governments hesitated. Elites disagreed. Rules stopped working the way people expected. The old order did not fall all at once, but it stopped feeling solid long before anything replaced it.

The people living through those moments often believed they were trying to save the system.

In many cases, they were.

But once a cycle turns, the forces at work are larger than any election, any policy, or any leader. The habits that held the old order together have already weakened. The trust that made institutions function has already thinned. What people experience as political conflict is often the surface of something deeper — a society that no longer agrees on what authority means.

This is why pruning in a crisis era rarely feels clean. It feels like disorder. It feels like nothing works the way it used to. It feels like control has slipped, even when everyone is trying to regain it.

Only later, if renewal comes, does the pattern make sense.

Expansion stretches a system.
Unraveling weakens it.
Crisis forces limits.

Then comes pruning, whether anyone wanted it or not.

The mistake late in the cycle is not wanting change. The mistake is believing change will stay rational once the cycle has turned. And once that realization sets in, something else begins to shift.

Not just institutions.

The psyche of the generation living through it.

That is where the next part of the story begins.

History rarely moves forward without someone taking a loss.

Not every generation expands. Not every generation flourishes. Some inherit stability, others inherit chaos, and a few are asked to do something harder: absorb the cost of transition so the next generation can build again.

Late in an Unraveling, that idea feels almost impossible to accept. The assumption is that problems can be fixed, systems can be optimized, and the future will look more or less like the present, only better.

But every Fourth Turning begins the same way. Someone has to take a haircut.

In the last great American crisis cycle, the Lost Generation tightened its belt so the G.I. Generation could construct the mid-century order. They endured World War I, the Depression, and years of austerity. Many never fully recovered economically. But their children received the GI Bill, the suburbs, the universities, and the long postwar boom. They took the haircut so the next generation could grow.

In the last essay I wrote about what might be called The Last Optimists of the Unraveling — the thinkers, planners, and reformers who assumed that even large disruptions could be managed without fundamental loss. They believed the system would adapt, because it always had.

That belief is natural late in a cycle. It is also the belief that usually fails first.

If the generational cycle described by William Strauss and Neil Howe still holds, then the question for our moment is unavoidable: Is Generation X becoming the haircut generation of the Fourth Turning?

I. The Forgotten Role in the Cycle

Strauss and Howe called Gen X the Nomad generation — the cohort that comes of age during institutional decay and learns early not to trust systems.

Nomad generations tend to be:

• skeptical rather than idealistic

• self-reliant rather than protected

• pragmatic rather than visionary

• smaller, less dominant, less celebrated

They rarely build the new order. They stabilize the transition while it is rebuilt.

The Lost Generation played that role in the last cycle. Gen X may be playing it now.

And the role almost always requires something late-cycle cultures hate: accepting limits.

II. What a Haircut Looks Like Now

In the 1930s, a haircut meant poverty, rationing, and war.

Today it looks quieter. It looks like:

• smaller retirements than expected

• supporting parents and children at the same time

• leaving prestige careers mid-stream

• building schools instead of climbing institutions

• choosing stability over consumption

• accepting that the system will not reward you the way it rewarded your parents

Late societies experience contraction as injustice. Earlier societies recognized it as the price of survival.

Late civilizations call contraction failure. Older civilizations called it stewardship.

III. Buying the Republic One Business at a Time

You can see the instinct in unexpected places.

Entrepreneur Codie Sanchez has built a following urging younger buyers to purchase the small businesses Baby Boomers are retiring from — plumbing companies, laundromats, machine shops, local services.

Her advice sounds financial:

• millions of owners are aging out

• their children do not want the business

• private equity will strip what remains

• someone has to take responsibility

Buy boring businesses. Run them well. Keep the cash flow alive. But beneath the financial language is a civilizational moment.

Late-cycle cultures celebrate disruption. Early-cycle cultures reward stewardship, and
Crisis-cycle cultures require it.

Owning a machine shop is less glamorous than launching a startup.
Running a plumbing company ties you to a place.
Keeping a local business alive means carrying obligations instead of chasing options.

That is a haircut compared to the promises of late modern life.

And yet continuity is always local.

Sometimes a republic survives because someone keeps the hardware store open.

IV. Signs of the Haircut Generation

You see the pattern most clearly not in Washington, but in ordinary life.

Gen X parents founding classical schools.
Mid-career professionals leaving prestige tracks for smaller firms.
Families lowering expectations to keep households intact.
Parishes held together by middle-aged laymen who know the institution is weaker than it looks.
Entrepreneurs building durable companies instead of chasing exits.

These are not the habits of a generation expecting reward.

They are the habits of a generation preparing to hand something on.

Older societies recognized this instinct.
One generation tightens the belt so the next can stand on something solid.

I had a moment recently that made this feel less theoretical.

I was listening to Darryl Cooper’s Martyrmade podcast on the end of the First World War — revolutions in Russia and Germany, governments collapsing, currencies failing, entire systems coming apart faster than anyone expected. What struck me most was the texture: confusion, incompetence, and the strange mixture of luck and accident that decides whether a regime survives or falls.

Later that day I drove through Chevy Chase, Spring Valley, and the Palisades in Washington, D.C., on my way toward McLean across Chain Bridge — neighborhoods that feel as permanent as anything in America. Old houses. Quiet streets. Settled wealth.

The day before, I had passed people sleeping in vans in a Walmart parking lot in North Carolina.

The contrast was hard to ignore.

The people living in Berlin in 1913 probably felt the same way. Until, very quickly, they didn’t.

V. Pruning Before Renewal

Years before he became pope, Pope Benedict XVI predicted that the Church of the future would become smaller, poorer, and more faithful. It would lose cultural dominance, lose numbers, lose comfort — and only then begin to grow again.

He spoke of a Church that would have to start almost from the beginning.

Not destroyed, but cut back to what could live.

Long before him, the priest Robert Hugh Benson imagined something similar in his 1907 novel Lord of the World a world of technological unity and spiritual exhaustion in which the Church survives only as a small, faithful remnant.

Civilizations, like vineyards, sometimes live only by cutting back growth they can no longer sustain.

Pruning always looks like loss while it is happening.

Only later does it look like preparation.

VI. Mansfeld or Benedict

In times of decline, elites usually choose one of two paths.

Accommodation — remain respectable, adjust to the dominant order, survive inside the system. Or rebuilding — slower, smaller, less visible, but more durable.

When Rome weakened, Benedict of Nursia did not try to save the empire. He built communities that could outlast it.

Haircut generations tend to choose Benedict, even when the culture rewards Mansfeld. Not because they want to. Because they see the limits of everything else.

VII. Acting as Ancestors

Late-cycle cultures assume life should always get bigger. Long civilizations know that sometimes survival requires getting smaller first.

The real question for Gen X may not be:

How do we get what our parents had?

It may be:

What do we give up so our children inherit something real?

Families choosing land over leverage.
Schools built slowly instead of scaled quickly.
Businesses passed down instead of flipped.
Communities repaired instead of abandoned.

People acting not as consumers, but as ancestors.

If the Fourth Turning is real — or if the Third American Republic is nearing its limits — renewal will not begin with expansion. It will begin with pruning.

Crisis generations rarely get the boom. They get the work that makes the boom possible.

And pruning is always done by those who will not live to see the harvest.

Technology improved.
Markets expanded.
Institutions adapted.
Problems were solved by innovation, not sacrifice.

Norm MacDonald told us that luckily the good guys seemed to have won every war.

Even when things went wrong, the assumption was that the system would correct itself. The future might be messy, but it would still be better.

In retrospect, it is striking how widely this belief was shared in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It appeared in business books, policy papers, startup culture, urban theory, education reform, and political rhetoric across both parties.

Clayton Christensen called it disruption.
Thomas Friedman called it globalization.
Richard Florida called it the creative class.
Silicon Valley called it innovation.
Consultants called it optimization.

Different language, same assumption: The system does not collapse. It upgrades.

Disruption Everywhere

When Christensen published Disrupting Class, the argument felt both humane and inevitable.

Schools were rigid. Students were different. Technology would personalize learning, expand access, and make education work better for everyone.

I believed it. Not just intellectually. Practically.

In 2012, I helped found Carolina Science Online, an early digital program built on the idea that online delivery could improve outcomes for students who were not well served by traditional classrooms. The goal was not to destroy schools but to help them adapt — to make the system more flexible, more efficient, more modern.

That was the mood of the time. Disruption was not seen as destruction. It was seen as progress. If something failed, it was because it had not been disrupted enough yet.

The Overton Window of Optimism

Looking back, what is most striking is not that these ideas existed, but that they felt almost impossible to question.

Across business, academia, and policy, the Overton Window assumed that change would be:

• technological rather than political

• managerial rather than tragic

• innovative rather than sacrificial

History, in this view, did not require collapse. It required better leadership, smarter systems, and more data.

Even people who sensed that something was wrong, or had read Strauss & Howe in the 90s, often assumed the crisis and the correction would be rational.

Fewer wars.
Smarter government.
More efficient schools.
Better markets.
Less waste.

It would be a pruning, not a crisis.

The idea that the system itself might be reaching the end of a cycle felt melodramatic, even irresponsible. For most of the Unraveling*, the educated classes believed problems were bugs. Not features.

Soft Landings

Writers like Strauss and Howe argued that societies move in cycles, and that periods of institutional decay are often followed by crisis.

But that was never the dominant assumption.

Most people who ran large organizations, taught in universities, wrote policy papers, or worked in consulting believed something closer to a Whig version of history — the idea that, over time, things get better, and that even major disruptions eventually produce improvement.

Even the word disruption carried this assumption. It meant creative destruction, not collapse. It meant progress with turbulence, not tragedy. It meant the system would survive.

That belief shaped a generation of leaders. And it shaped the institutions they ran.

When Disruption Came for Politics

Then, in 2015 and 2016, disruption arrived somewhere it was not supposed to.

Donald Trump disrupted the Republican primary.

Bernie Sanders disrupted the Democratic primary.

Both campaigns ran against the assumptions that had guided the previous thirty years — global markets, managed borders, technocratic policy, endless growth, permanent stability.

For a moment, it looked like the same logic that had transformed business and technology was now transforming politics.

Disruption had come to Washington.

But the reaction was different. When startups disrupted industries, it was exciting. When voters disrupted politics, it was dangerous. The same language that had celebrated disruption for decades suddenly shifted to a new tone:

Protect institutions.
Defend norms.
Preserve stability.

The Overton Window moved almost overnight.

Disruption was good — until the system itself felt threatened.

The Limits of Optimization

Around the same time, another problem was becoming harder to ignore.

Many of the systems that were supposed to improve through innovation were not improving at all.

Education spending rose, but outcomes did not.
Healthcare costs rose, but health outcomes did not improve.
Technology expanded, but trust declined.
Institutions grew more complex, but less effective.

In education, the results were especially striking.

Billions were spent on devices, platforms, and digital programs. Test scores stagnated. In some places, they fell.

No one planned this. No one set out to hollow out the system. But the assumption that everything could be optimized turned out to be wrong.

Some systems do not need disruption. They need limits.

And once limits appear, the conversation changes.

At this point I dusted off my Strauss and Howe, because when pundits started saying, “This is unprecedented in history!” I knew their version of history started in 1941, and that the Crisis of the “Fourth Turning” had begun.

It is said that animals can sense seismic shifts, weather events, etc., and adjust their behavior accordingly. The cognoscenti panic was like elephants fleeing the tsunami — something was coming.

The Moment Before the Haircut

Late in an Unraveling*, people still believe problems can be solved without loss.

They assume reform will be rational. That correction will be gradual. That institutions will adapt without breaking.

History suggests otherwise.

When long expansions end, someone usually takes a haircut.

Expectations shrink. Institutions contract. Comfort disappears before stability returns.

The people who came of age during the optimistic phase rarely expect this.

The people who grew up during the breakdown often do.

In the next essay, I want to look at the generation that usually absorbs those losses — the cohort that learns to live without illusions, and that often ends up holding things together when the system stops working.

What I’ll call the Haircut Generation.

*Strauss and Howe describe history moving in recurring cycles of four phases, each lasting roughly 20–25 years:

High (c. 1946–1964)
A period of institutional strength and social confidence.
Order is trusted. Authority is respected. Growth feels natural.

Awakening (c. 1964–1984)
A cultural and spiritual revolt against that order.
Institutions are questioned. Personal authenticity is elevated. Authority is challenged.

Unraveling (c. 1984–2008)
Institutions weaken. Individualism rises. Shared norms fragment.
Systems still function—but belief in them erodes.

Crisis (c. 2008–present)
Institutions fail or are remade. Conflict intensifies.
Society is forced to rebuild order under pressure.

When Disrupting Class was published, the argument felt both obvious and humane. Schools were rigid. Students were different. Technology could personalize learning, widen access, and finally bring education into the modern world.

I believed it. I didn’t just believe it intellectually; I built on it. In 2012, I helped found Carolina Science Online, a digital program created with the explicit hope that online delivery could improve outcomes for students underserved by traditional models.

That is why the recent reporting on the last twenty years of edtech is so striking.

According to a recent Fortune article, the United States has spent roughly $30 billion putting laptops, tablets, and digital platforms into classrooms. Over the same period, reading and math scores have flattened or declined, and in some places dropped sharply after digital testing and one-to-one device programs became mandatory. Researchers now suggest that the generation raised with the most classroom technology may also be the first in modern history not to outperform their parents academically.

This is not a small miss. It is a reversal of one of the defining trends of modern civilization.

For most of the twentieth century, every generation learned more than the one before it. More schooling, better teaching, and stronger institutions produced steady gains. The assumption behind the edtech movement was that technology would accelerate that trend.

Instead, it may have interrupted it.

The mistake was not technological. It was philosophical.

Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption works beautifully in markets where customers can exit, failure is survivable, and value is easy to measure. It works in disk drives, retail, and software. It does not translate cleanly to education, which depends on continuity, authority, and trust across generations.

Education is not just delivery. It is formation.

You can iterate software.
You can refine tools.
You can optimize platforms.

But iteration alone cannot supply the ends toward which education is ordered. It cannot create judgment, allegiance, or character. Those come from institutions that expect obedience before they offer customization, and from adults who embody what they teach.

What began as reform slowly became something else.

Over time, the language of disruption provided a moral permission slip for extraction. Content was centralized. Teachers were deskilled. Platforms locked in districts. Contracts multiplied. Compliance replaced judgment. Money was made, but rarely by improving learning itself. Profit came from licensing, credentialing, consulting, and procurement, not from students mastering more.

Anyone who worked in education long enough saw the pattern. A district would adopt the newest device, the newest platform, the newest system. Vendors booked revenue. Administrators checked boxes. Teachers adapted as best they could. Students adjusted. Outcomes barely moved.

Then the cycle repeated.

These decisions were not made by villains. They were made by people who sincerely believed the system was broken and needed disruption. In the cultural moment of the late 1990s and early 2000s, that belief felt almost like common sense. Disruption was the dominant ideology of the time. If something was old, it must be inefficient. If it was inefficient, it must be replaced. If it could be replaced by software, it should be.

That logic worked well enough in business to become a worldview.

But education is not a startup. It is a civilizational institution. It exists to transmit knowledge, habits, and loyalties across generations. When disruption is applied to something like that, the result is rarely transformation. More often, it is erosion.

What makes the moment we are in now feel different is that the language has begun to change. For years, we were told to disrupt institutions. Now we are told to defend them. But institutions cannot be defended after they have been hollowed out. They have to be rebuilt, slowly, by people willing to think in decades instead of quarters.

If I could speak to my 2012 self, I would not tell him he was foolish to try. I would tell him he mistook a solvent for a foundation.

Disruption can expose weakness. It cannot raise children.

Education does not need more platforms. It needs authority worthy of trust, teachers worthy of imitation, and institutions willing to accept responsibility for formation, not just delivery.

That is not a technology problem.

It is a civilizational one.

I don’t know, in people’s imagination, is the United States military still the conscripted juggernaut of the World Wars: an engine of mass, a continent-sized factory that can be pointed, inevitably, at any problem? Is it the picture of limitless industrial capacity: ships sliding off assembly lines, tanks multiplying like stamped steel, ammunition and fuel appearing on demand? In that story, American power is not merely formidable. It is inexhaustible.

But the reality of how American force is actually generated and sustained in the 21st century looks almost like a different country.

The tip of the spear is not an industrial civilization. It is a comparatively small cohort of people who fight, deploy, and deploy again. The burden is carried by a narrow slice of the population, disproportionately drawn from a particular cultural and regional lineage. Jim Webb’s Born Fighting describes this Scots-Irish strain in American life: martial, clannish, stubborn, proud, historically overrepresented in military service, and often alienated from the softer moral self-conceptions of the coastal elite. You can argue with Webb’s framing, but it illuminates something real: in a nation of 330 million, the people who do the fighting come from a much smaller “nation within the nation.”

And that cohort is tired.

We spent two decades in the Global War on Terror cycling the same people through the same kinds of wars with different names. The political class called it sustainable because the rest of the country barely noticed. There were no ration books. There were no war bonds. There were no broad mobilizations of labor, industry, and public attention. There were “support the troops” bumper stickers and “thank you for your service” at airports.

That is not a national war effort. It is a professional caste absorbing coastal decisions.

When a society treats war like an outsourced service, you get a force that is tactically elite and strategically brittle. The small group can be exceptionally good at violence, logistics, and improvisation, but it cannot conjure depth. It cannot produce the hidden reserves that made America terrifying in 1943: not just the courage of soldiers, but the machinery of a whole people reorganized around a shared end.

The second mismatch between myth and reality is material.

Our mental model is still steel-and-oil mass production. But modern war at scale is a contest of precision-guided munitions, sensors, software, and the industrial base that replenishes them. And here the story is not “limitless.” It is “limited supply chain.”

Missiles are not bullets. You cannot spin up a cruise missile factory the way you can expand small-arms production. The components are specialized. The subcontractors are fragile. The lead times are long, because our ruling class outsourced manufacturing. The inventories are not infinite, and the replenishment pipelines were not designed for a world where “peer conflict” is more than a think-tank phrase.

So the posture becomes paradoxical: we appear omnipotent because we can strike anywhere, quickly, with precision. Yet that very precision can hide a deeper weakness: we are optimized for short, sharp bursts of high-end expenditure, not prolonged industrial attrition.

In other words, we have confused sharpness with depth.

The cultural consequences of this are profound. When most Americans imagine “the military,” they imagine national unity, shared sacrifice, and a mass mobilization that binds classes together. But the actual arrangement has been closer to a social partition: a warrior minority fighting on behalf of a civilian majority that retains the psychology of peacetime.

That gap breeds resentment on both sides. Civilians can become sentimental and naive about war because they do not pay its price. Fighters can become contemptuous because they did. The state becomes tempted to use force more casually precisely because it has insulated the broader public from the cost.

This is where Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning lens feels less like a clever metaphor and more like a diagnostic.

In their model, a Fourth Turning is a crisis era: institutions lose legitimacy, old arrangements break down, and the society is forced into a reckoning that it can no longer defer. The crisis is not necessarily “war” in the narrow sense. It is the collision between a decayed institutional order and reality.

The myth of an inexhaustible American war machine is part of the old order. It is a story we tell ourselves because it is comforting. It allows us to preserve the image of American power without doing the hard, unglamorous work of rebuilding the foundations that make power real: industrial capacity, civic cohesion, shared obligation, and moral clarity about what force is for.

But crisis eras have a way of stripping away the stories we tell ourselves.

A society that cannot manufacture the munitions it imagines it can expend is living on institutional credit. A society that concentrates war in one cultural subclass while the majority lives as if peace is the default is living on civic credit. A society that confuses technological sophistication with national strength is living on conceptual credit.

Eventually, the bill arrives.

The uncomfortable possibility is that the United States has been behaving like the late stage of an imperial cycle: a state with magnificent capabilities at the margins and hollowed-out capacity at the core. That hollowing does not show up on cable news because it is not cinematic. It shows up in procurement failures, workforce misalignment, brittle supply chains, and a shrinking pool of people willing to carry the burden.

What would it mean to take this seriously?

It would mean admitting that “supporting the troops” is not the same as sharing responsibility for national decisions. It would mean rebuilding the industrial base not as an economic slogan but as a strategic imperative. It would mean rethinking foreign policy commitments in light of replenishment capacity, not just deterrence theory. It would mean rebuilding a civic culture where sacrifice is not confined to a hereditary warrior class.

A Fourth Turning is not just collapse. It is also reconstitution. Crisis eras can produce renewal if they force the society to tell the truth about itself.

The truth is that America can still be extraordinarily powerful, but only if it stops living in the imagination of 1944 while operating with the social and industrial realities of 2026.

The juggernaut is not gone. But it is not automatic. And it is not free.

When Clay Christensen’s book Disrupting Class appeared, it felt humane, overdue, and obvious. American education was rigid, standardized, and ill-suited to students who didn’t fit its narrow mold. Technology, Clay Christensen and his coauthors argued, could personalize learning, widen access, lower costs, and do for education what disruption had already done for entire industries.

I believed it. Many serious people did.

In 2012, I helped found and launch an eLearning platform for science education because I genuinely thought digital delivery could improve outcomes, especially for students underserved by traditional models. This was not a thought experiment or a branding exercise. It was operational belief, backed by time, capital, and risk.

Which is why the failure matters.

More than a decade later, the results are no longer ambiguous. Digital education has produced tools, supplements, and very profitable niches, but it has not produced a single scalable model that reliably improves learning outcomes across populations. Where money is made, it is almost always made indirectly—through credentialing, compliance mandates, licensing, marketing arbitrage, or public subsidy—rather than through demonstrable gains in mastery or formation.

The hyped disruptors, VC-backed MOOCs (Coursera, edX, Udacity) have pivoted away from education toward credentialing, corporate training, government contracts, and degrees-as-a-service.

If education were going to be disrupted in the Christensen sense—cheaper, better, and eventually dominant—it would have happened by now. It hasn’t. The market never cleared.

This is not a timing problem. It is a category error.

Christensen’s theory works where customers can exit, failure is survivable, and value is immediately legible. Education has none of those properties. Education is intergenerational. Its outcomes are delayed. Its success depends on authority, trust, imitation, and continuity—things markets are famously bad at pricing. It is also a de facto government monopoly.

I no longer believe that education can be engineered through technological disruption alone. Iteration is not the problem; iteration untethered from authority is. Iteration can refine practice, improve tools, and correct error, but it cannot supply the ends toward which formation is ordered. Education depends on judgment, imitation, and trust—on adults who already embody what they are trying to pass on. When mere iteration is asked to replace those things rather than serve them, it becomes optimization without orientation. You cannot scale apprenticeship without adults who embody what they teach.

The problem was never delivery. The problem was formation.

As the years passed, something else became clear. What began as reform slowly hardened into extraction. Digital education didn’t fail because of bad intent; it failed because disruption became a moral permission slip. Content was stripped from teachers and centralized. Credentialing was unbundled from formation. Attention became the monetizable unit. Institutional trust—built over generations—was quietly arbitraged.

The rhetoric remained access and innovation. The mechanics increasingly resembled asset stripping.

Consider the now-forgotten wave of one-to-one device programs. Districts were sold tablets as equity tools, personalization engines, and cost savers. Vendors booked contracts, implementation partners collected fees, consultants certified compliance, and platforms locked in users. When outcomes failed to improve—and in many cases worsened—no one bore moral responsibility. The institution absorbed the damage; the vendors moved on.

Guilford County (NC) Schools’ failed adoption of Amplify tablets is not unique. It is illustrative. A well-intentioned system, sold a future it was structurally incapable of delivering, absorbed costs—financial, cognitive, and cultural—while the logic of disruption quietly exited the scene. No one was fired for being wrong about children. L.A. Unified adopted iPads without insurance or a repair and replace program. Disaster.

This pattern is not accidental. In the economics of education, it has been documented repeatedly. Large-scale studies show that fully online instruction underperforms in K–12 and community college settings, particularly for low-income and first-generation students. Blended learning can help in narrow, well-supported contexts, but its effects are modest and fragile. There has been no outcome curve shift. No new dominant model. No Christensen moment.

The defenders of digital education respond with familiar language: reskilling, lifelong learning, micro-credentials, AI tutors. But this is not progress; it is linguistic drift. These terms belong to a culture that cannot mourn institutional failure and therefore cannot rebuild authority. They are “Unraveling” euphemisms for exhaustion.

This is why MBA-types and LinkedIn discourse struggle to grasp what is happening. MBA training has assumed a stable background order, modular institutions, and legitimacy supplied by markets. LinkedIn rewards optimism, portability, and personal branding. Neither is equipped to speak about inheritance, duty, or formation. Neither has a grammar for institutional death.

And yet the phase has changed.

During the Unraveling, elites preached disruption. Institutions were framed as obstacles. Authority was suspect. Extraction could be called innovation. But as systems now strain under real loads—demographic, civic, moral—the language flips. Suddenly we are told to defend institutions, to trust them, to preserve them.

What is missing is confession.

You cannot credibly ask people to defend institutions after teaching them, for thirty years, that institutions deserve to be disrupted. You cannot restore authority without acknowledging how it was hollowed out. Education, in particular, cannot be rescued by platforms. It can only be rebuilt—slowly, locally, relationally—by adults willing to think in generations rather than quarters.

If I could speak to my 2012 self, I would not tell him he was wrong to try. I would tell him he mistook a solvent for a foundation. Disruption can expose rot. It cannot raise children or re-found education.

Education does not need to be disrupted. It needs authority worthy of trust, teachers worthy of imitation, and institutions willing to accept responsibility for formation, not merely delivery.

That is not a technology problem. It is a civilizational one.

Wikipedia on an Unraveling:

Unraveling

According to Strauss and Howe, the third turning is an unraveling. The mood of this era they say is in many ways the opposite of a high: Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. The authors say highs come after crises when society wants to coalesce and build and avoid the death and destruction of the previous crisis. Unravelings come after awakenings when society wants to atomize and enjoy.^[34] They say the most recent unraveling in the US began in the 1980s and includes the long boom and the culture war.^[18]

I first confronted this problem more than a decade ago, when Vladimir Putin addressed the American public and warned against repeating the devastation of world war. At the time, that warning was easy to wave away. Today, it is harder.

As I wrote then: “Putin knows devastation.” He was born into a country still hollowed out by war—a civilization where cities had been erased, families annihilated, and survival itself was a moral achievement. Russia lost a staggering share of its population in World War II. America did not. That difference is not ideological. It is experiential.

“To take this historically unique situation and economic anomaly, and to expand it to be a general assumption about national exceptionalism would seem to be a tragic mistake of epic proportions.”

The American postwar experience—suburban abundance, industrial dominance, moral confidence—was real. But it was also fleeting. A one-time civilizational windfall mistaken for a permanent birthright. The generation that grew up inside that miracle internalized prosperity without devastation, security without sacrifice, power without consequence.

That absence of memory matters. Societies that remember devastation tend to avoid it. Societies that do not begin to treat war as theater, policy, or therapy.

In the years since, the United States has drifted from ideological conflict into something more disturbing: whimsical war-making, detached from national survival and insulated from personal cost. As I argued then, the devastation was not material at first, but spiritual:

“The spiritual devastation of the Baby Boomers, their antiseptic yet materially rich upbringing in suburban alienation, has resulted in the material devastation of whomever gets in the way of their tantrums.”

This is not an argument about virtue or vice. It is an argument about memory and restraint. Russia’s leadership—whatever its moral failures—operates with a cultural memory of annihilation. America’s leadership increasingly does not.

That is why Russia is not merely another foreign policy file. It is the civilizational mirror in which American amnesia becomes visible. To escalate toward war with a society that remembers devastation, while being led by elites who do not, is historically reckless.

Carlson’s warning resonates because it cuts through abstraction. It names the danger not as ideology, but as forgetfulness. Not as malice, but as late-cycle arrogance.

As I wrote in 2013, in words that now feel uncomfortably current:

“Boomer devastation is in their psyche; the pain of their desolation screams out in cruise missiles and F-16s.”

Every eighty years or so, civilizations are forced to relearn what war actually is—not as metaphor, not as prestige signaling, but as devastation. The question before us is no longer whether that reckoning is coming, but whether it will arrive through restraint or through catastrophe.

History is not kind to societies that choose to relearn the lesson the hard way.

I am reposting it unchanged—not because every emphasis would be framed the same way today, but because its central claim remains intact: civilizations that forget what devastation looks like are uniquely prone to causing it.

What follows is a document of that forgetting.

Seeking to avoid devastation, like that of World War II, is how Vladimir Putin opens his op-ed to the U.S. and its political leaders.

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies. Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.

Devastation. The word comes from the Latin verb, devastare which means to lay waste, which is derived from the Latin adjective vastus –empty, desolate. Putin knows devastation. Putin was born in 1952, 7 years after the end of World War II, a war which saw his country and his family devastated.

In Russia almost 13% of the population perished during the war, with over 7 million civilian deaths and nearly that many military deaths. More Russian civilians died in WWII than soldiers. All told almost 14 million Russians perished. These are only Russian numbers, not the whole Soviet Union. In contrast the United States lost roughly 400,000 soldiers and 1,700 civilians, altogether less than one percent of the total population.

The rolling tanks, the aerial bombardments, and the brutal warfare along the Eastern Front left Russia devastated economically as well: a quarter of its capital resources were destroyed and agricultural output was lower than it had been in the 1920s. Add the leadership of Stalin, who killed an estimated 20 million Soviet citizens, and the economic disaster of Communism to the destruction of WWII and you have a land made empty, desolate.

Both of Putin’s older brothers had died; the oldest, a few months after he was born in the 1930s, the other of diphtheria during the Siege of Leningrad. More people died in the Siege of Leningrad than all U.K. and U.S. losses combined for the entire war. Like his Baby Boomer peers in the United States, born to the G.I. Generation after the Great Depression and WWII, we can imagine that young Vladimir was a source of hope for his parents in the devastated emptiness in which war and death had left their family.

Unlike devastated post-war Russia, the post-war America into which the Boomers were born was a cornucopia. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the United States had not been bombed into rubble. We were the exception. We had no industrial competition. Everyone in the world bought our stuff. They had no other choice. That was a unique moment in history. As the Economist writes:

These boomers have lived a charmed life, easily topping previous generations in income earned at every age. The sheer heft of the generation created a demographic dividend: a rise in labour supply, reinforced by a surge in the number of working women. Social change favoured it too. Households became smaller, populated with more earners and fewer children. And boomers enjoyed the distinction of being among the best-educated of American generations at a time when the return on education was soaring. Yet these gains were one-offs. Retirements will reverse the earlier labour-force surge, and younger generations cannot benefit from more women working… In short, boomer income growth relied on a number of one-off gains.

To take this historically unique situation and economic anomaly, and to expand it to be a general assumption about national exceptionalism would seem to be a tragic mistake of epic proportions.

Our political leaders have never seen the resulting devastation of armies traversing our borders and laying waste to our territory. They grew up as well-cared-for children in the brand new, burgeoning suburbs, at a time of unprecedented optimism and wealth. It was an exceptional time in history.

The strength and wealth of the nation were so secure that they were able to “tune in, turn on and drop out”, in that fit of Daddy-anger that was the late 1960s. But you can’t really blame them for taking everything for granted. The suburbs had no roots, the new middle class corporate jobs meant GI dad moved the family for work, a few years in one city, a few in another.

There was material wealth to be sure, but the Boomers were devastated in their own way, uprooted from their ethnic enclaves in the northern cities (if Catholic) and from their Midwestern cities, towns, and family farms (if Protestant), devastated psychically in the wasteland of Levittown and cul-de-sacs. In fact Baby Boomers now have the highest suicide rate of any generation. The Me Generation is an alienated generation. It was an exceptional mirage, material wealth masking spiritual devastation.

Tom Wolfe, himself of the Silent Generation sandwiched between the GIs and the Boomers, described the exceptional nature of Boomer self-absorption as having discarded the “age-old belief in serial immortality.”

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide a ‘better future’ for their children … the soldier who risks his life or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for ‘his people’ that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community – for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead, they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of nature. The Boomer entitles himself to exemption from this legacy. from The Me Generation

Since their transition into political power with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and the accession of Newt Gingrich as House Speaker in 1994, Boomers have proceeded to spend the principal of that exceptional material and economic endowment, so confident in themselves and the sheltered world they grew up in, and so confident in the America built and made safe by their fathers whom they revolted against, that they seek to transform all the world into clones of post war America through mass marketed "culture", porn, or force of arms: “Democracy, Whisky, and Sexy!” as they said in Najaf, Iraq.

And if not that transformative violence, the Boomer political class desires at least to invite all the dreamers here, knowing in their hearts, of course, that “Inside every Gook there is American trying to get out”, to get that online degree and work in a cubicle to pay for the Boomers’ Social Security, Medicare and the War on Terror.

Are the Boomers on an extended ballistic tantrum? A cruise-missile hissy fit? Are they just acting out? They have proceeded to lay waste to the foundations of their inheritance, graduating from waging ideological wars on the institutions that raised them, to waging whimsical wars abroad, costing billions, from Clinton through Bush and Obama. As Baby Boomer Chris Hedges writes, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." They have indebted their children and grandchildren with these wars of theirs, for some notional, Platonic ghost of Democracy, which brings with it market-opening opportunities for Whisky! and Sex! to these bedraggled traditional peoples who only know the ways of their ancestors and not our enlightened, modern ways, not for any real national threat, but spuriously, based upon lies and/or to cover up lies.

Putin knows about the wasteland left by Great Patriotic Wars, and knows about the decades of U.S. sponsored jihad on his country’s southern borders, and the unintended consequences and blowback of such sponsorship and intervention. (see: Boston Marathon Bombing) Putin’s Mother Russia was not just devastated economically, it was devastated morally and spiritually after the war, annihilating its own future with some of the highest abortion rates in the developed world through the 1990s, with alcoholism, and other social pathologies of devastating effect on their people’s ability to continue as a people Rus.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -Vernon Law, baseball player, Silent Generation

Russia in general, and Putin in particular, have experienced the test of war and devastation, learned the lessons. Recently, Russian birthrates surpassed those of the US. As Tom Wolfe noted, this is an indication of belief in a future and a sense of continuity for themselves as a people and as a civilization. This practical politician does not want devastation again. Having experienced the devastation of war across his country’s borders and in his own family, Mr. Putin finishes his op ed using the crusading, religious terminology of the American Baby Boomer political class, teleological “democracy”, while echoing the Declaration of Independence.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

America is exceptional to us because it is ours, not because of the historical, economic anomaly of the post war years, not because it stands astride the world as a Colossus. Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Mexicans, Somalis, Vietnamese, etc. are not deformed Americans waiting to be fully Americanized. They are allowed to love their countries too, to think that their country is exceptional because it is theirs, whose blessings they hope to pass on to their posterity.

The devastation of the war and the devastation of Communism led to a devastation of the soul of that great people and their civilization, Russia, a civilization that is literally being born again.

The spiritual devastation of the Baby Boomers, their antiseptic yet materially rich upbringing in suburban alienation, has resulted in the material devastation of whomever gets in the way of their tantrums –be it the civic institutions they inherited, or the indigenous cultures of small countries who rub them the wrong way.

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" -Michael Ledeen

Baby Boomers took for granted the material wealth and security in which they were raised. They attacked the very civilization and institutions that had made them the best-raised and most educated generation of children in the history of the world to that point. They exempted themselves from their legacy and borrowed against their posterity.

Tom Wolfe recognized the unintended consequences for the Boomers' rejection of civilizational norms in the 1960s:

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time. The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point, the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside--quite purposely--were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets, or as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. This process, namely the relearning--following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero--seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America. -from Hooking Up

The whimsical way in which Boomers go to war suggests a need for a great relearning of the rules of civilization. But it also suggests "war as psychotherapy" and is reminiscent of the “World War as an Afterthought” theme in the background of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, when a sick and decadent nation continually goes to war abroad while waging a domestic war on the minds of its pharmacologically pacified citizens, and on culture itself:

[Montag has just come home to find his interactive-television addicted wife overdosed on sleeping pills.] The object he had sent tumbling with his foot now glinted under the edge of his own bed. The small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny flare. As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous ripping sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black linen down the seam. Montag was cut in half. He felt his chest chopped down and split apart. The jet-bombs going over, going over, going over, one two, one two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them, one and one and one and another and another and another, did all the screaming for him. He opened his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between his bared teeth. The house shook.

The Boomer devastation, because it is wholly spiritual, is worse than the material and economic devastation that informed Putin's childhood, which probably made him all the more practical and ruthless.

Boomer devastation is in their psyche, the pain of their desolation screams out in cruise-missiles and F-16s, pissing away the material wealth that they inherited by bombing deserts.

The series Fallout is ultimately a story about a daughter’s quest for her father.

There is a moment early in the series Fallout when you realize the bomb is not the point. The bomb has already gone off, in every sense that matters. The show is not about catastrophe as event, but catastrophe as inheritance—what it feels like to grow up inside the moral wreckage of decisions made before you were old enough to vote, or even to speak.

This is not Boomer apocalypse. It is Gen X aftermath.

The genius of Fallout is that it understands, instinctively, that the end of the world did not come from nihilists, barbarians, or enemies at the gate. It came from men in offices with good intentions, thick binders, optimistic charts, and a sincere belief that systems could replace judgment, and management could replace fatherhood.

Which is to say: it came from the postwar High.

Strauss and Howe, in The Fourth Turning, describe the post–World War II era as a High: institutions strong, authority unquestioned, order presumed permanent. Fallout dresses that High in smiling atomic-age costumes and corporate cheerfulness—suburban lawns, polished appliances, wholesome families frozen in amber optimism. The future, they were told, was inevitable, and it would be clean, efficient, and professionally administered.

Vault-Tec is the logical endpoint of that faith. It does not rage or threaten. It plans. It prepares. It reassures. And then, quietly, it experiments. The Vaults are not shelters so much as controlled environments—human beings reduced to variables in a long-term study whose designers will not be present to face the consequences. It is the managerial father archetype, perfected: competent, distant, morally confident, and utterly unwilling to suffer alongside his children.

Then came the Awakening, which Boomers remember as liberation. Authority was challenged, traditions dismantled, hierarchies mocked. Fallout does not deny that something was broken—but it is merciless about what was not rebuilt. The rebellion burned down the old house and then wandered off, congratulating itself on the fire. Institutions survived, but hollowed out. Expertise remained, but detached from responsibility. Systems kept running long after belief in them had died.

And into that hollowed-out world came Generation X.

Gen X did not grow up in the High. They grew up in its maintenance phase. They learned early that the adults were lying—not always maliciously, but structurally. Corporations promised loyalty and delivered layoffs. Governments promised competence and delivered scandals. Churches promised meaning and delivered committees. Fathers went to work, followed the rules, and came home exhausted, vaguely ashamed, and unable to explain what any of it was for.

Fallout’s wasteland is not chaos. It is residue. Leftover rules, decaying infrastructure, corporate slogans still peeling from walls long after the companies themselves have vanished. Authority is everywhere in form and nowhere in substance. This is the Unraveling made flesh: a world where nothing quite works, but everything insists on still being obeyed.

The characters move through this landscape the way Gen X learned to move through life: skeptically, ironically, without illusions. They do not storm the system. They scavenge it. They do not believe in utopia. They believe in getting through the day without being consumed. Loyalty is local. Trust is provisional. Survival comes first.

Which brings us to the Crisis—not the nuclear explosion, but the revelation underneath it. The great sin of Fallout’s world is not evil intent. It is moral abdication. The people who destroyed the world did so while believing they were being responsible. They optimized. They mitigated risk. They outsourced judgment to process. And when the consequences arrived, they were already gone—retired, dead, or sealed behind layers of institutional insulation.

This is Gen X’s political theology, laid bare.

Authority, they believe, is not real unless it is willing to suffer. Systems do not deserve obedience. Safety without meaning is a lie. Management without love is predation by another name. The bomb was simply the moment when the bill came due.

Boomers dismantled crowns, and in many cases rightly so. But they did not replace them with crosses. They replaced them with flowcharts, committees, and slogans about progress. Fallout says—quietly, devastatingly—that a civilization run by people who never learned how to be fathers cannot survive its own power.

The Vaults were not too strict. They were too empty.

So Fallout is not really about the end of the world. It is about the end of confidence. It is about what it feels like to inherit a civilization that promised everything and explained nothing, that built vast systems and refused to take responsibility for their human cost.

Gen X does not ask for kings. It does not even ask for heroes. It asks, in a voice sharpened by irony and disappointment, whether anyone remains who deserves authority at all.

Until that question is answered, the wasteland remains.

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For most of its history, American sport asked the public to believe.

Believe that effort mattered. Believe that rules constrained power. Believe that victory and defeat meant something beyond money.

What gambling introduces is not merely another revenue stream, but a change in kind. When outcomes are priced, belief itself becomes a commodity. And once belief is monetized, the game no longer needs to be fixed—only managed.

That is where American sports now stands.

From Storyteller to Stakeholder

For decades, ESPN and its peers framed themselves as narrators of sport. They explained games, elevated heroes, contextualized failure. Their authority rested on distance: they were of the sport, but not inside its incentives.

That distinction no longer holds.

Odds now scroll beneath highlights. Betting lines structure pregame shows. In-game commentary routinely references spreads, totals, and live wagers. The viewer is not simply invited to watch, but to speculate—to experience the game as volatility.

This shift was sold as harmless modernization. Fans were “already gambling anyway.” Regulation would make it safer. Revenue would support public goods.

But the deeper change was subtler: sport stopped being merely played and started being priced.

Gambling Does Not Require Fixing—Only Variance

This is where the work of Brian Tuohy becomes difficult to dismiss, even for skeptics.

Tuohy is often caricatured as claiming that games are scripted. That is not his argument. His claim is narrower and more unsettling: in modern professional and collegiate sports, outcomes do not need to be fixed to be exploitable.

They only need to be nudged.

Officiating discretion.
Selective enforcement.
Timing decisions.
Ambiguity preserved rather than resolved.

In betting markets, marginal changes produce outsized financial consequences. A single call—or no-call—can swing millions without ever proving intent. The system depends not on certainty, but on plausible deniability.

This is not the boxing-ring fix of the past.
It is institutional ambiguity optimized for monetization.

The North Carolina Turn

North Carolina provides a useful local lens because the transition happened quickly—and visibly.

When mobile sports betting was legalized in North Carolina, it was framed as inevitable progress. The apps arrived almost overnight. Advertising followed immediately: phones, billboards, broadcasts, arenas. Betting was normalized not as vice, but as participation.

Early revenue announcements were celebratory. The state had “won.”

But the question almost never asked was the most basic one: who was paying?

Anyone who spent time around the rollout could see the pattern. The heaviest engagement came not from wealthy hobbyists, but from young men for whom frictionless mobile betting turned sport into a constant, ambient temptation. National research consistently shows that gambling losses concentrate among a small share of users—and that those users skew poorer, younger, and disproportionately Black.

This is not an accusation.
It is a design outcome.

The house does not need moral failure.
It needs access, velocity, and hope.

From Formation to Consumption to Extraction

Earlier phases of sports financialization extracted value from bodies and families. Gambling extracts something more fragile: trust.

When fans begin to suspect—not even know, merely suspect—that outcomes are shaped by incentives they cannot see or challenge, the civic function collapses. Victory feels pre-sold. Defeat feels managed. Loyalty becomes transactional.

This is why gambling represents a qualitative break, not just another sponsorship category.

An institution can survive greed.
It cannot survive disbelief.

The End-State Problem

Late-cycle systems always attempt the same maneuver: they convert legitimacy into liquidity. They monetize trust faster than it can be replenished. They assume the rituals will outlast belief.

Sometimes they do—for a while.

The stadiums remain full. The apps keep paying. The broadcasts continue. But beneath it all, the relationship has inverted. The public is no longer participating in a shared civic drama. It is providing volatility for someone else’s balance sheet.

That is not sport as formation.
It is sport as extraction.

And extraction, historically, is never the final chapter.

There is a peculiar feeling that accompanies the end of an era. It is not panic —at least not at first. It is disorientation. Institutions still stand. Titles still confer authority. Processes still run. And yet, almost no one believes in them anymore.

This past year did not feel like collapse. It felt like inversion.

Rules were followed meticulously, while outcomes grew more absurd. Failures were explained as successes. Moral language proliferated even as trust evaporated. The rituals continued, but belief did not. Something fundamental shifted —not suddenly, but unmistakably.

I’ve explored different facets of this inversion throughout the year —from institutional failure, to generational anger, to the extraction logic that emerges at empire’s end. What follows is an attempt to consolidate those strands into a single diagnosis.

To understand what is happening, we need a framework that treats this moment not as scandal, nor as partisan malfunction, but as a historical phase.

That framework exists. Strauss and Howe called it a Fourth Turning.

What a Fourth Turning Is — and Why It Matters

Strauss and Howe argued in their 1991 book Generations, that Anglo-American history unfolds in recurring cycles lasting roughly the length of a human lifetime —about 80 to 100 years. Each cycle contains four phases, or “turnings”: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and finally a Crisis —the Fourth Turning.

I’ve returned to this framework repeatedly this year, including in “4th Generation Warfare in the Fourth Turning” and “Martyrmade Darryl Cooper, the Fourth Turning, and the End of Postwar Conservativism,” because it explains not just political conflict, but institutional behavior.

The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II era were all Fourth Turnings.

A Fourth Turning is not defined by hardship alone. It is defined by institutional misalignment —systems built for a world that no longer exists, enforced by people who no longer believe in them, yet who still benefit from their continuation. After each Fourth Turning, new institutions emerge in response to the crises brought on by the collapse of the previous era’s institutional capabilities to solve problems.

The Thirteen Colonies before the Revolutionary War, were a new nation afterwards. The loose constitutional federation of states before the Civil War, became a strongly centralized, continent-spanning national government. That national government in turn, by the end of WWII, had entirely new, New Deal institutions established and a global military presence and responsibility.

In a Fourth Turning, trust collapses before the systems do. And once trust is gone, behavior changes.

Institutional Decay: When Best Practices Become Ritual

Institutions are not evil. They are path-dependent.

They are created to solve real problems under specific historical conditions. Over time, they accumulate procedures, credentials, compliance layers, and internal metrics. Eventually, they optimize not for outcomes, but for survival.

This dynamic was at the heart of my recent essay “Chernobyl, Everest, COVID and the Death of Best Practices,” where I argued that modern disasters increasingly occur not because best practices are unknown —but because they are overridden by institutional incentives.

Judgment gives way to process. Truth gives way to consensus. Excellence gives way to credentialing. Best practices become rituals —performed not because they work, but because deviation is punished.

History is littered with warnings:

• Everest climbers dying because schedule and presige mattered more than conditions.

• Chernobyl technicians obeying orders and ignoring physics.

• COVID-era institutions suspending long-standing risk norms in the name of emergencies and never fully restoring them.

In each case, the failure was not ignorance. It was institutional self-protection overriding reality.

And once institutions stop telling the truth, people stop believing.

Looting the Treasury: End-Game Logic, Not Moral Collapse

This is where outrage often enters the story —but outrage alone misses the point.

In “Job Searching in Apocalyptic Times” and later “Rent-Seeking, Private Equity & the Final Phase of Empire,” I argued that what we are witnessing is not merely corruption, but end-of-era rationality.

“Looting the treasury” is rarely theatrical. It is legal. Credentialed. Compliant. Explained with moral language.

In late-stage systems, rational actors behave rationally. They extract value while legitimacy still exists. They arbitrage regulation, credentialing, and proximity to decision-making. They convert authority into income, reputation, and insulation from downside risk.

This is not conspiracy. It is end-game logic.

At the end of an era, elites no longer invest in the future. They harvest the past.

The Anger Is Rational — and That’s the Danger

One of the great mistakes of this era has been to pathologize popular anger.

I explored this directly in “From EDM Utopia to Meme War” and later in “From Occupy to Mamdani,” tracing how class-based anger was repeatedly deflected, moralized, or fragmented.

The anger is not mysterious. It is empirical.

People see:

• rules enforced selectively,

• failures rewarded,

• sacrifice demanded without reciprocity,

• and narratives that no longer match lived experience.

Many men did not disappear. They were cancelled and stopped believing the institutions were neutral arbiters.

So did many women. So did many institutions’ own employees. So did two entire generations raised to trust systems that now appear openly extractive of their futures.

Unintegrated anger, however, is volatile. Fourth Turnings are dangerous precisely because legitimacy collapses faster than replacement structures emerge.

How Fourth Turnings Resolve

Fourth Turnings do not end in consensus. They end in replacement.

Old elites fall or are reconstituted. Institutions are dismantled, purified, or rebuilt. Moral language simplifies. Authority recenters. New compacts are forged —usually after suffering that could not be negotiated away.

This pattern underlies much of “The Fatherless Century and the Return of the King.”

This is not prophecy. It is pattern recognition.

The question is not whether the old order can be saved. It is whether the next order will be worthy of trust.

A Year-End Recognition

This past year felt like recognition more than collapse.

The masks slipped. The scripts failed. The gap between language and reality became too large to ignore. People did not suddenly become cynical, they became honest.

Fourth Turnings are terrible periods to live through. They are also the only times societies remember what institutions are actually for.

The reckoning has already begun.

The American sports fan still believes he is participating in something ancient and moral.
He cheers for his school. He teaches his children loyalty. He speaks of sports as character, discipline, and sacrifice.

And in a sense, he is right.

The form remains.
The meaning has changed.

Garrett Garrett once observed that “the revolution was, but it was not noticed.” Institutions, he warned, often undergo their decisive transformation quietly—retaining their symbols, rituals, and names long after their purpose has changed. Only later does the public realize that what it loved has become something else entirely.

American sports has crossed that line.

I. Sport as Formation: The British Public School Inheritance

Modern organized sport did not begin as entertainment. It began as formation.

In the nineteenth century, Britain’s elite public schools—Eton, Rugby, Harrow—used sport deliberately to mold the ruling class. Games were meant to teach discipline, hierarchy, loyalty, and endurance. Sport trained boys for command: to lead men, absorb pain, and subordinate self to order. This was not democratic, but it was coherent. Sport served a civilizational function.

"The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"

—The Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley

America inherited this model—and then democratized it.

High school and college athletics became a civic ladder: open to talent across class, rooted in place, justified as moral education rather than profit. For much of the twentieth century, sport helped knit communities together and offered real upward mobility to those with ability and discipline.

That bargain no longer holds.

II. Credentialing Without Formation

The Varsity Blues scandal briefly shocked the public not because it revealed corruption, but because it revealed how thoroughly credentialing had replaced formation. Wealthy parents used athletic admissions not to cultivate excellence or discipline, but to bypass competition entirely. Public outrage focused on bribery and fakery, yet missed the deeper truth: the system had long rewarded those who understood how to convert money into institutional access through officially sanctioned channels. Varsity Blues was not a violation of the spirit of modern collegiate sport; it was a violation of its etiquette. The scandal mattered because it exposed what sport had quietly become—not a tool of formation, but a negotiable asset in a credential economy.

III. The Quiet Revolution: From Formation to Financialization

The transformation did not begin with NIL. NIL merely made it impossible to deny.

Youth sports professionalized. College sports nationalized. Universities monetized loyalty.

The NCAA continued to speak the language of amateurism long after the economics had turned openly commercial. Conference realignment followed television contracts. Rivalries dissolved. Geography disappeared. Selection controversies exposed what had already become true: decisions now follow revenue logic more reliably than sporting logic.

The fan still says “we.” The institution no longer does.

IV. Andrew Luck: Knowledge as Insulation

Andrew Luck is often treated as an anomaly—brilliant, introspective, unusually willing to walk away.

But his story is not anomalous. It is diagnostic.

Luck was not merely talented; he was informed. His father, Oliver Luck, was a former NFL quarterback and senior athletic administrator. Andrew Luck grew up fluent in the machinery of elite sports: injury economics, incentive structures, psychological costs, and the gap between rhetoric and reality.

When the costs exceeded the returns, he exited.

This was not entitlement.
It was system literacy.

V. Arch Manning: The Guild in Plain Sight

If Andrew Luck represents informed withdrawal, Arch Manning represents informed navigation.

From early adolescence, Arch Manning’s recruitment unfolded with remarkable restraint. Exposure was limited. Access was controlled. Commitment was delayed. This was not hesitation; it was expertise. The Manning family understood how early overexposure damages quarterbacks, how NIL attention distorts development, and how to arbitrate offers without burning relationships.

Nothing about this process violated the rules.
Everything about it revealed the rules.

This is what a guild looks like once it stops pretending.

VI. The Return of the Guild

We are told that elite sport remains a meritocracy. But advancement increasingly depends on early access, institutional fluency, financial insulation, and family networks embedded in the system. Children of professional athletes, coaches, administrators, trainers, and agents are dramatically overrepresented at the highest levels—not by conspiracy, but by path dependence.

Modern sports is drifting back toward the guild.

VII. The Alma Mater as Franchise

We still cheer for the school.
But the school now functions as a licensing brand, a media asset, and a recruiting funnel. Private capital extracts revenue. Families supply emotional loyalty. Universities provide legitimacy.

This is Garrett’s revolution:
the banner remains,
the meaning does not.

Coda: Looting the Treasury Without Breaking the Temple

What we are witnessing in modern sports is not corruption in the crude sense, but something more characteristic of late cycles: extraction without demolition. The stadiums are full, the rituals intact, the language of loyalty unchanged—but the surplus once reinvested in formation has been quietly diverted. Youth sports notice it first, as families pay more for less protection. Colleges notice it later, as brands are licensed while obligations are shed. The insiders—families fluent in the system—adapt rationally, insulating their children or extracting value before the structure hardens further. This is what looting the treasury looks like when it wears school colors: not a smash-and-grab, but a careful harvesting of civic trust, intergenerational goodwill, and institutional legitimacy, right up to the moment when the public finally realizes the account is empty.

If this essay traced how sport hollowed out its formative purpose while keeping its rituals intact, the next asks what happens when belief itself becomes monetizable. In Essay II, we turn to sports gambling—ESPN, betting apps, and the pricing of outcomes—to examine what extraction looks like once trust, not just institutions, enters the market.

In a Fourth Turning, politics ceases to be ideological and becomes existential.

This essay continues a line of inquiry begun in my earlier work on managerial elites, rent-seeking, and what James Burnham once called the “managerial state.” If the previous essays asked how legitimacy was lost—through extraction, credentialism, and treasury-looting—this piece asks where that loss is now being contested. Ohio and Florida offer two live case studies of Fourth Turning politics: not left versus right, but producers versus managers, place versus brand, and authenticity versus institutional closure. The next essay will widen the lens further, asking what these intraparty insurgencies tell us about how Crisis eras finally resolve.

Voters no longer ask, What do you believe?
They ask, Are you real? Do you belong? Are you one of us—or one of them?

That is the terrain on which two seemingly separate Republican intraparty conflicts are unfolding: Casey Putsch’s insurgent challenge to Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, and James Fishback’s bid to define the post-Ron DeSantis future in Florida.

These contests are not about policy nuance. They are legitimacy trials—and they reveal how “America First” itself is fracturing as the Crisis era deepens.

I. The Fourth Turning Shift: From Ideology to Legitimacy

Strauss and Howe argued that during a Fourth Turning, institutions lose moral authority faster than they lose formal power. Parties, corporations, media, universities—even “movements”—become suspect. Endorsements no longer confer trust; they signal capture.

In this environment:

• Local authenticity outranks résumé excellence

• Producers outrank managers

• Builders outrank talkers

• Moral boundary enforcement outranks policy sophistication

Politics becomes less about persuasion and more about purification.

Ohio and Florida show two variations of this same dynamic.

II. Ohio: Shop Floor vs. Donor Circuit

The insurgent: Casey Putsch

Putsch presents himself as a producer candidate—a manufacturer, a builder, a man tied to tangible work and place. His campaign rhetoric emphasizes globalist capture, hollowed-out industry, and the moral rot of managerial elites who profit while communities decay.

In Fourth Turning terms, he is making a legitimacy claim, not a policy one:

I am real. I build. I belong here.

That matters more in a Crisis era than any white paper.

The front-runner: Vivek Ramaswamy

Ramaswamy, by contrast, represents a new and fascinating phenomenon: managerial populism. He speaks the language of insurgency while arriving wrapped in endorsements, national brand recognition, donor confidence, and early institutional closure.

Trump’s endorsement and the Ohio GOP’s unusually early consolidation are not signs of strength in a Fourth Turning—they are defensive maneuvers. Institutions attempt to foreclose legitimacy contests before they metastasize.

But Crisis-era voters increasingly interpret this as:

The court closing ranks against the country.

III. Why This Fight Is Bigger Than Ohio

The Putsch–Ramaswamy contest is not Left vs. Right or even Establishment vs. Populist. It is:

In a Fourth Turning, history tends to side with the former—or at least force the latter to imitate it.

IV. Florida: Succession Anxiety in a Scarcity State

Florida’s version of this drama is less about out-of-state celebrity and more about what comes after dominance.

DeSantis imposed order. He fought institutions. He won. Now the coalition fractures over who inherits legitimacy.

James Fishback’s insurgent lane

Fishback’s campaign centers on housing costs, labor competition, and the moral language of theft—who is taking from whom, and who is allowed to belong.

This is textbook Fourth Turning politics:

• Scarcity is no longer economic; it is civilizational

• Housing is not a market failure; it is extraction

• Labor is not neutral; it is boundary enforcement

His emphasis on being a “fourth-generation Floridian” is not branding—it is credentialing in a legitimacy economy.

V. Crisis-Era Politics Is About “Who Is Real”

Florida has already seen procedural and eligibility disputes surface around insurgent figures. In a normal era, these are footnotes. In a Fourth Turning, they become weapons.

Because the underlying question is not:

Did you file correctly?

It is:

Are you counterfeit—or are they using rules to protect themselves?

This is why Crisis eras are so volatile. Law and legitimacy drift apart.

VI. The Shared Pattern: America First Splits in Two

Across both states, we see the same fracture:

1. Managerial America First

   • National brand

   • Media fluency

   • Institutional endorsements

   • “I can run the machine better”

2. Producer America First

   • Local roots

   • Physical production

   • Moral language

   • “The machine itself is illegitimate”

This is not a temporary schism. It is the sorting mechanism of the Fourth Turning.

VII. Winning Without Winning

Even when insurgents lose elections, they often win the era.

They force: New enemies to be named, new legitimacy tests to be applied, new moral language to dominate.

Front-runners survive by absorbing insurgent rhetoric —or they don’t survive at all.

That is how Crisis eras consolidate: through coercive alignment, not consensus.

Coda: Looting the Treasury and the End of Managerial Legitimacy

In late-stage empires, managerial elites do not govern—they extract. They arbitrage rules, harvest rents, and insulate themselves with credentials and procedure while the productive base collapses.

The insurgent instinct—whether in Ohio workshops or Florida housing battles—is not primarily ideological. It is instinctual.

People sense that:

• The treasury has been looted

• The institutions are hollow

• The managers no longer deserve obedience

Fourth Turnings end when legitimacy is forcibly re-grounded—sometimes through reform, sometimes through purges, sometimes through catastrophe.

What Putsch and Fishback represent is not a campaign strategy. It is a diagnosis.

And in a Crisis era, diagnosis precedes demolition.

The Minnesota scandal surrounding Feeding Our Future is not shocking because public money was stolen. It is shocking only if one still believes American institutions are still oriented toward stewardship rather than extraction. By the time the fraud reached hundreds of millions of dollars, the system was already signaling—quietly but unmistakably—that the treasury was open.

Between 2020 and 2022, federal prosecutors allege that more than $250 million in pandemic-era child nutrition funds were siphoned through a dense web of nonprofits, shell organizations, falsified meal counts, and kickbacks. The money was meant to feed children during COVID school closures. Instead, it financed luxury purchases, international transfers, and an industrial-scale fraud operation hiding behind the most morally protected language in the modern state.

The funds flowed through the Minnesota Department of Education, which found itself trapped in a late-regime dilemma: approve claims that were plainly implausible, or risk accusations of discrimination for slowing money allegedly destined for poor children. When state officials attempted to intervene, the response was not procedural rebuttal but moral counterattack. Oversight itself was framed as suspect.

That moment matters more than the dollar amount.

Because what failed in Minnesota was not compliance. It was legitimacy.

In healthy eras, fraud is constrained by social shame and institutional confidence. In Crisis eras, both are gone. Rules remain on paper, but belief in them has evaporated. Bureaucrats learn—quickly and rationally—that denying funds carries personal and professional risk, while approving them carries none. Delay becomes cruelty. Enforcement becomes harm. The safest course is to sign and move on.

This is how looting becomes systemic without requiring conspiracy.

Feeding Our Future succeeded not because it found a clever loophole, but because it chose an untouchable moral category. “Feeding children” is among the holiest expenditures of the late-managerial state. Question it, and you are no longer a regulator—you are a villain. Late regimes always develop these sacred budgets. In medieval Europe it was the Church. In declining empires it was the military. In modern America it is children, health, equity, and emergency relief.

Once extraction is wrapped in sacred language, accountability collapses.

What makes Minnesota especially revealing is that this dynamic did not remain confined to pandemic food programs. In widely viewed on-the-ground reporting, independent journalist Nick Shirley documented Minnesota daycare centers that appeared inactive or nonexistent while still receiving public funds. His work did not establish criminal guilt; it did something more important in a Fourth Turning context. It showed that the conditions which enabled Feeding Our Future had not been corrected.

The details matter. Daycare funding, like child nutrition, occupies a moral high ground that discourages scrutiny. The beneficiaries—young children—cannot speak for themselves. The services are difficult to verify in real time. And officials who question enrollment numbers or operating status risk reputational and political damage. Shirley’s reporting did not need to prove intent. It revealed a system still structured to reward passivity over guardianship.

That continuity is the real story.

Late-stage managerial systems do not experience isolated scandals; they experience template repetition. Once a method of extraction proves safe—protected by moral language, procedural complexity, and enforcement fear—it migrates. School meals were one such channel. Daycares are another. Other care-based sectors, including home-based services, share similar structural vulnerabilities even when they are not part of the same scandal.

This is not an accusation. It is a warning.

James Burnham warned that managerial regimes do not fall because they are stormed, but because their managers stop believing in the mission and begin arbitraging the rules. Minnesota shows that phase clearly. Oversight became performative. Audits became ritual. Whistleblowers became liabilities. The system no longer rewarded stewardship; it rewarded risk avoidance.

Calling this “corruption” understates the case. Corruption implies deviation from a norm. What Minnesota reveals is normalization. The system did not break. It behaved exactly as a legitimacy-starved system behaves under stress.

COVID was the stress test.
Minnesota failed visibly.
Other states failed quietly.

By the time fraud reaches children’s meals and then daycares—by the time oversight itself is treated as moral transgression—a regime is no longer malfunctioning. It is communicating. It is communicating that moral language has replaced accountability, that procedure has replaced judgment, and that extraction has replaced stewardship.

Looting the treasury at this scale is not a side effect of decline.
It is one of the mechanisms by which decline completes itself.

Minnesota is not an outlier.
It is a mirror.

And in a Fourth Turning, mirrors do not flatter.

One such place is Piedmont Community College (PCC) in Person and Caswell counties, where a new president has stepped into the role at a moment of growth and is leading with the kind of local connection and mission-anchored clarity that feels more like institutional rebirth than crisis management.

His name is Dr. Kevin Lee, and his story — from community college student to community college president — embodies a kind of human-scale renewal that feels precisely like a post–Fourth Turning education model.

[This is Part III of III. Part 1, and Part II are linked]

From the Hometown Experience to Local Leadership

Dr. Kevin Lee became PCC’s sixth president in August 2025, following a national search and affirmation by the PCC Board of Trustees. His career spans nearly 25 years in higher education across the North Carolina Community College System, including leadership roles as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer at Brunswick Community College, where he oversaw academic programs, institutional effectiveness, workforce alignment, and community partnerships.

What makes Lee’s path remarkable is not just institutional seniority, but personal history. He started his adult life uncertain about college, a first-generation learner who recalled sitting in his car gathering the courage to enter a community college’s admissions office — the same place many of his students now sit.

That lived experience matters. It isn’t an abstraction. It means he does not lead from behind a managerial desk; he leads from the vantage point of someone who has walked the journey his institution asks others to take. It is a vision shaped by empathy and by proximity to the very communities Piedmont serves.

Anchoring Education in Local Needs

Under Lee’s leadership, PCC is doing what post–Fourth Turning education will require if it is to remain vital: it is bracing itself against local economic and civic realities, not abstract policy waves.

The college has recently experienced its highest enrollment growth in a decade — 13% in 2024 — and is adding programs in nursing, medical assisting, practical nursing, commercial driver licensing, and sonography to meet real workforce demand.

Significantly, PCC has acquired a 90,000-square-foot former manufacturing facility to serve as a south campus for advanced technology and trades programs, freeing up space on its main campus and expanding capacity for both existing and future programs.

In counties where access to educated workers can determine local economic vitality, that kind of strategic physical investment matters far beyond campus gates.

Lee himself has said that PCC is “the backbone of the community” and that the college is “in every conversation,” which reflects not a slogan, but an operational reality: education integrated into regional development conversations.

A Leadership Style Grounded in Service and Partnership

Lee’s leadership is not managerial first; it is relational and results-oriented.

Across his career he has cultivated industry partnerships, written winning grants (more than $2.5 million in recent years), and built bridges between institutional capacity and local workforce needs.

Those are not auxiliary roles. They are precisely the kinds of functions that post-Crisis education ecosystems will need if they are to be locally legitimate, economically relevant, and resilient.

Lee’s personal motto — that “education is the first step in opening doors” — is backed up by institutional action: a college expanding into healthcare, trades, IT and workforce pipelines because the community needs those skills now, not because the latest trend survey said so.

That orientation — anchored to place, skills, and real opportunity — contrasts sharply with the old model of schooling as a compliance bureaucracy or a credential factory.

What PCC Offers as a Model for Others

Two things make Piedmont Community College under Kevin Lee particularly worth spotlighting as a live example of Scenario 3 (community-anchored education):

1. Local Economic Alignment

PCC isn’t waiting for distant policy solutions to match regional labor markets. It is building the pathways itself — healthcare, trades, logistics, IT — and negotiating with industry directly, including preparation to interface with major tech or data center developments in Person County.

This is not “education for jobs.” It is education as a civic engine — a node in the local economic ecosystem that co-creates opportunity with employers, workers, and families.

2. Human-Centered Mission

Lee’s leadership style — described consistently as servant-oriented, empathetic, mission-driven — is not bureaucratic distance dressed up as strategy. It is humane purpose first, efficiency second.

When the president talks about celebrating each graduate, or knows the courage it takes to step through a college door for the first time, it signals a fundamental orientation that future education models will need: education that forms citizens, not just certifies them.

A Place Called College

In the post–Fourth Turning future, the institutions that endure will not be the biggest, but the most meaningfully embedded. They will be those that:

• are tied to real places and real people,

• orient themselves toward local need first,

• and hold a vision of education as actual opportunity rather than abstraction.

Piedmont Community College is not a national prodigy. It is a hometown college growing into its calling.

But that may be exactly the future we will look back on as the real model — the one that survived the test of legitimacy, relevance, and civic worth.

Read more

But this is not a leadership problem. It is a historical problem.

Superintendents are leaving not because the job has become harder, but because the job has become structurally incoherent. They are being asked to lead an institution whose economic purpose, moral justification, and public legitimacy no longer align. That kind of contradiction cannot be managed. It can only be exited.

To understand why this is happening now —and not ten or twenty years ago— we need to situate public education inside a longer civic rhythm.

A Short Reminder: What a Fourth Turning Is

In The Fourth Turning, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe argue that Anglo-American history moves in recurring cycles of roughly eighty to one hundred years. Each cycle passes through four seasons: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and finally a Crisis —what they call a Fourth Turning.

A Fourth Turning is not merely a bad decade. It is a period when institutions stop being judged by intentions, credentials, or theories and start being judged by outcomes. Survival conditions replace moral posturing. Systems built for abundance are tested by scarcity. Ideas born in idealism are forced to prove themselves under pressure.

The Great Depression and World War II were the last Fourth Turning. The American Civil War was another. We are in one now -eighty years after 1945.

And Fourth Turnings are merciless to institutions that exist for reasons other than the ones they claim.

Progressive Education Was an Awakening Project

Modern progressive education did not emerge from crisis. It emerged from moral exuberance.

Between roughly 1890 and 1930, during what Strauss and Howe would classify as an Awakening era —overlapping with the Third Great Awakening— American elites lost confidence in inherited authority and developed extraordinary faith in reform through expertise. The Social Gospel, scientific philanthropy, managerial efficiency, and progressive education were all expressions of the same impulse: the belief that society, and even human nature, could be redesigned through technique.

John Dewey’s vision of schooling as a social laboratory fit this moment perfectly. Education ceased to be primarily about handing down accumulated knowledge and became a tool for democratic reconstruction. Children were no longer apprentices to civilization; they were raw material for a better future.

That vision thrived because it never had to face existential stress. It assumed stability. It assumed abundance. It assumed trust.

Fourth Turnings revoke those assumptions.

Gatto and the Political Economy of Schooling

John Taylor Gatto understood this before most —and paid a professional price for saying it plainly.

Gatto was not a crank on the margins. He was a New York City public school teacher for nearly thirty years, and he was named New York State Teacher of the Year multiple times in the 1980s and early 1990s. He had mastered the system from the inside before he indicted it.

His most unsettling claim was not that schools bored children, but that the system’s persistence was explained less by learning than by economics.

Two structural functions sit beneath the stated mission.

First, modern schooling functions as an economic relief system for book publishers and educational vendors —textbooks became a guaranteed revenue stream that could be relied upon when market dynamics for books went south. State adoption lists create captive markets. Content is homogenized to avoid controversy. New editions appear on schedule whether knowledge advances or not. What looks like curriculum is, in practice, a publicly financed revenue stream defended by bureaucracy.

Second, schooling functions as a labor absorption system for surplus credentialed adults. Teacher colleges produce far more graduates than an intellectually rigorous profession could absorb. Scripted curricula and standardized pacing solve that problem. They allow the system to hire large numbers of interchangeable adults whose authority rests on certification rather than mastery.

Gatto understood that a highly educated, intellectually independent teaching force would collapse the system’s labor economics. Such teachers would require higher pay, demand autonomy, reject scripted curricula, expose curricular incoherence, resist bureaucratic micromanagement.

Instead, progressive schooling evolved toward a model where teachers are credentialed rather than educated, instruction is procedural rather than intellectual, compliance matters more than mastery.

This allows the system to absorb vast numbers of surplus college graduates —particularly during periods of elite overproduction— without requiring genuine expertise.

Public education thus becomes a hidden employment program.

Administrative Bloat and the Superintendent Trap

Once teaching is deskilled, administration must expand to manage compliance.

Counselors, coordinators, instructional coaches, equity officers, data managers, and consultants proliferate —not to improve learning, but to sustain the system’s internal logic. Each layer justifies the next. Each role creates reporting requirements that require still more roles.

The superintendent sits at the apex of this pyramid —expected to reconcile:

• Vendor demands

• Union contracts

• Board politics

• Federal mandates

• Parental outrage

• Declining outcomes

This role is tolerable only when the public still believes the system is fundamentally legitimate.

That belief has collapsed. These two functions reinforce each other. Deskilled teaching requires more materials. More materials justify more administration. More administration requires more leadership. And the superintendent sits at the top, tasked with reconciling a system whose real purposes cannot be admitted out loud.

As long as public trust held, this arrangement endured.

Fourth Turnings break such arrangements.

Why the Superintendent Role Is Collapsing First

The superintendent’s office is where all of this converges.

Superintendents are asked to defend outcomes they do not control, enforce mandates they did not design, manage labor systems they cannot reform, and reassure parents who no longer believe the story they are being told. They become buffers between a bureaucracy and a public that has withdrawn consent.

During the pandemic, many parents glimpsed the machinery directly —and discovered that much of what schools do is non-essential, thin, or disconnected from real learning. That realization cannot be unlearned.

When legitimacy collapses, leadership becomes an extraction industry. The institution extracts credibility until the person leaves, then recruits another.

So superintendents depart—not because they lack resilience, but because they understand reality.

Coda: To My Friends in the EdTech Industry

I say this not as a critic, but as a friend and former colleague.

Many of you entered edtech with sincere intentions: to personalize learning, to widen access, to modernize an exhausted system. Some of you are doing genuinely valuable work. But you are operating inside the same historical ecosystem. I called it back then, “putting sugar on broccoli.” Digital doesn’t make bad content good.

Fourth Turnings are unforgiving to technologies that exist primarily to optimize a failing institutional model rather than replace its assumptions.

If your product depends on stable per-pupil funding streams, centralized procurement, credential-based labor markets, or the assumption that schools will continue to look roughly like they do now, history is not on your side.

What will survive are tools that reduce overhead, restore human authority, serve families directly, function outside credential bottlenecks, and help people learn without pretending schooling and education are the same thing.

Fourth Turnings are not kind to middlemen.

What the Revolving Door Is Telling Us

The superintendent revolving door is not a management crisis. It is a civilizational signal.

It tells us that an Awakening-born ideology —hardened into bureaucracy during a past Crisis (Depression and WWII)— has reached the end of its moral and economic credibility. It tells us that systems designed to subsidize publishers and absorb surplus labor cannot survive an era that demands truth, competence, and survival.

Fourth Turnings do not ask whether institutions are compassionate or well-intentioned. They ask whether they can tell the truth, transmit knowledge, and form citizens capable of survival.

Public education must now answer that question.

And many superintendents, sensing the answer, are already walking away.

Public education is collapsing not because leaders are weak, but because a system designed to subsidize publishers and absorb surplus labor can no longer pretend it exists to educate children.