Demographer, historian, and author Neil Howe hasn’t just coined the term “Millennial,” he’s also predicted the future to an eerie degree—and he thinks America’s in for very rough seas ahead. He says a civil war in the U.S. is far more plausible than most people think, and he dismisses the reasons Americans often discount that possibility. In 1997, he published a book with Bill Strauss, “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.” In that book, he suggested five catalysts for a major crisis—and four of the five have already come to pass. “One of our events was a crisis over the debt, which would issue forth in a new tea party movement,” Howe tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.” He calls it “just completely random that we happened to use that phrase,” which the tea party movement adopted in 2010. The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now “The other one was a WMD [weapon of mass destruction] attack on New York City,” Howe says, noting the eerie parallel with Sept. 11, 2001. “The other one was the [COVID-19] pandemic, and the fourth one was Russia invading a former Soviet republic,” such as Ukraine. The final potential catalyst? “A nullification crisis, where one or more of the states would actually nullify federal regulation, which would lead to a new secession movement,” Howe says. According to his generational theory, America should expect a major crisis about every 80-100 years, and we’re due for another “rendezvous with destiny” such as the Great Depression and World War II. He calls these periods “fourth turnings,” and they force society to create a new order in the civic “outer world” about 40 or 50 years after “awakenings” drive people inward, seeking order in their spiritual “inner worlds.” Why a Civil War Is Likely Howe notes that “our politics have taken on this kind of Manichaean style, where the red zone and blue zone are so mutually exclusive in their sense of themselves, their agenda for the nation’s future, that it hardly even matters who’s leading the party.” (“Manichaean” refers to the tendency to view one side as perfectly good and the other side as perfectly evil, and it traces back to a world religion that arose with the prophet Mani in the 200s A.D., which taught that the physical world is evil and the spiritual world is good.)

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