The Fire This Time: 2nd Excerpt From My New Book
This essay is an excerpt from my NEWLY RELEASED Essays on the Counterrevolution, which you can get for FREE when you become a Premium Member.
The following is an excerpt from my NEWLY RELEASED Essays on the Counterrevolution, FREE to all our Premium and Founding Members.
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The Fire This Time: 2nd Excerpt From My New Book
by Rod D. Martin
June 10, 2025
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time
— Mary Don’t You Weep
What’s happening now may be more consequential than you think.
America is not drifting toward a crisis — we are in one. And it is not a crisis of the ordinary sort — an election, a recession, or a bad foreign policy decision — but a fundamental systemwide reckoning. We are nearing the end of a nearly century-long era, and the birth of another.
Throughout history, certain patterns reappear with unsettling regularity. Time is linear — the ancient pagans were wrong — but cycles spiral within the forward motion. Civilizations do not rise and fall linearly. Beneath the onward march of technology and progress, there are rhythms — cycles of cohesion and decay, faith and apostasy, construction and fire.
The ancients saw this more clearly than we. What they missed was that these cycles don’t negate history’s forward motion — they shape its cadence.
Modern Americans like to think ourselves exempt from such things. We are not. Our founding was a cycle-breaker, yes — but it was also a cycle-starter. Since that founding, our nation has moved through a series of roughly eighty-to-ninety-year upheavals, existential crises that remade our institutions and redefined who we are. The American Revolution. The Civil War. The Great Depression and World War II. Each of these moments ended an old world and forged a new one.
We are now in America’s fourth such moment. The pattern is unmistakable. The pillars of the postwar order — military, monetary, moral — are hollowing out. The center does not hold because the center is gone. America’s elites have failed: economically, culturally, strategically, morally. The public knows it. Trust is dead. Rage is rising. And the regime believes itself capable of achieving through mass censorship and coercion the suppression of all those things.
It cannot. The old order is cracking. And underneath it, the fire is already lit.
I have long said and written, decades before Donald Trump began using the term, that America stands on the cusp of a new Golden Age…or of a high-tech Dark Age. The two could not be more different. One unleashes American creativity and lifts much of humanity out of poverty and into prosperity. The other falls somewhere between 1984, Brave New World, and The Matrix.
But this was also true before. Losing World War II would have meant the triumph of a global totalitarianism not at all dissimilar to Orwell’s warning. A Southern victory in 1865 would have meant the shattering of the nation, the permanence of de facto aristocracy in the South, and a weakness which likely would have led to recolonization by various European powers, or at least the establishment of “spheres of influence” as in the China of that era.
And losing the Revolution? Unthinkable. No America as a beacon of liberty to a world composed of monarchies. A dictator’s Mexico dominant in North America. A Europe with no choice but to stand alone in the conflagrations of the 20th Century. A dearth of the liberating technological advance uniquely the product of the American Experiment.
When the Crisis comes, it reshapes everything after. Americans have been blessed (in whole or in part) in the outcomes of the Crises thus far. There’s no guarantee that will continue.
Neil Howe describes this moment as a Fourth Turning. Others like George Friedman speak of overlapping institutional and economic cycles, ending — perhaps colliding — at the same time for the first time in our history.
The ancients had a word for this: ekpyrosis — a purging fire, a civilizational conflagration from which a new cosmos emerges.
This is where we are. Not at the beginning of a storm, but in its eye.
And what happens next — the shape of the next America — depends entirely on what we do with the fire.
Linear Time, Cyclical Patterns
One of the great gifts of Christianity to civilization was its insistence that time is linear — that history is not an endless loop of rise and fall, but a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Pagan antiquity assumed recurrence: that golden ages gave way to decline and collapse, which might be followed by some renaissance, but only for the cycle to repeat endlessly. In their view, progress was impossible. They believed in fate. They believed in the wheel of time.
Christianity smashed the wheel. God created the world. He acts in history. Redemption progresses. Christ is risen, not reincarnated, and will return triumphant. The Kingdom advances. And though setbacks and trials abound, they serve a larger arc, an all-encompassing metanarrative. History becomes meaningful, directional, purposeful.
But that doesn’t mean there are no cycles. They are embedded in the created order. From seasons to business trends, from revolutions to revivals, we see rhythm and return within the arc of progress. This is not contradiction; it is harmony. The cycles are not the whole story. But they are real.
In The Storm Before the Calm, George Friedman introduced a dual-cycle model of American history: one political, driven by institutional dynamics and presidential transitions; the other socio-economic, driven by broader technological and class realignments. These cycles unfold over roughly 80 and 50 years respectively. The 80-year institutional cycle neatly corresponds to Howe’s thesis. The socio-economic cycle adds depth.
Assuming these cycles exist, for the first time, both are ending at once. And they are ending at exactly the moment Howe posits as the end of the Fourth Turning: the ekpyrosis.
There’s tremendous opportunity in that, and tremendous danger. But either way, what happens now is likely to define the rest of the 21st Century.
Franklin Roosevelt shattered the assumptions of the 19th century and gave birth to an elitist technocratic New Deal order that has dominated America and the West ever since. He saved the world from foreign totalitarianism, but not before subverting the American constitutional order and instituting stealth one-party rule.
Likewise Trump is in the midst of wrecking the exhausted elite consensus FDR birthed — one no longer capable of producing growth, stability, or national unity. Will he succeed? Very possibly. But if he fails, the alternative is a far worse, far more open tyranny than what has gone before.
FDR took office amid economic collapse and gathering war. He had no perfect solution to the problems of the 1930s — he contradicted himself constantly, improvised wildly, made enemies everywhere, and as Amity Shlaes shows all too well, greatly deepened the Depression. Had it not been for World War II his experiment might well have failed.
But Roosevelt understood this: the old order was spent. It would not return. He saw his task not as restoration but re-founding. And with all the elitist arrogance that suffuses what came to be called “the liberal international order”, he replaced the older, small-r republican order with a technocracy insulated from elections or any other sort of accountability.
This worked for a long time, depending on your point of view. It maintained the old forms, it gave the appearance (though not the substance) of responsible governance, and it built on the widespread consensus that emerged from the experience of war. But make no mistake: the technocratic elite was firmly in charge, paternalistically ensuring that its own views were the only acceptable range of discourse.
Trump, likewise, is seeking to redefine not just our institutions but our national consensus (such as any remains, though one will surely emerge from the Crisis). His project — not fully formed in 2016, intricately thought-out by 2024 — is to demolish an elite order built on hyper-financialization, managed decline, open borders, woke orthodoxy, and cultural self-loathing. He is not a manager. He is a wrecking ball. And like Roosevelt, he is a signal that the old order is ending.
The resemblance goes deeper. FDR’s enemies accused him of recklessness, incoherence, and even fascism (the latter of which was at least partly true). But the public, battered by Depression and disillusioned with orthodoxy, didn’t want precision — they wanted a savior, someone who understood the magnitude of the crisis and of their pain, someone willing to break eggs to make an omelet.
That is Trump’s gift: not policy nuance — he has other people for that — but big picture thinking combined with great moral clarity about the scale of elite failure and the urgency of disruption. He is not presiding over the maintenance of normality but over its collapse — and the globalist consensus that governed the post-Cold War era is in ruins.
Moreover, just as each prior founding cycle produced new technologies and new challenges — Jackson’s canals, Lincoln’s railroads, FDR’s automobiles, Reagan’s microchips — so too will the next. We are witnessing the beginning of a technological revolution not just in space, AI, and automation, but in medicine and material science, driven by a demographic transformation no less profound than the economic ones of the past.
America’s aging population and declining birthrate will demand entirely new frameworks for healthcare, productivity, and civil society. The opening of a new frontier will restore a measure of “rugged entrepreneurship” and risk-taking lost since the old frontier was fully settled. The deployment of laser weapons will render ICBMs and even hypersonic weapons as obsolete as 12-pounders and ships-of-the-line.
Or not.
A free, republican future — one in which whatever is not forbidden is permitted — will largely eradicate poverty and unleash an era of positive change like none that has gone before. But it’s opposite — a doubling down on rule by elites, on the belief that economies are largely zero-sum games, and that innovation is threatening to the established order — will quickly create the sort of dystopian future that is the stuff of movies.
Choose one.
The first future — the Golden Age — cannot emerge from the top-down engineering of bureaucrats and globalist NGOs. It will arise — if it arises — from a cleared field, from a new birth of freedom, and from the restoration of the Founders’ constitutional order. That’s what Trump is doing: burning down the old structures that no longer serve, so that something new, rooted in the vision and promise of America, can rise in their place.
Friedman’s model is different from Howe’s in certain respects. But what’s remarkable is how closely they converge. Both describe systemic, civilizational crises that arrive roughly every 80 years. Both describe the exhaustion of consensus and the imperative for rebirth.
And both now point to the same figure, at the same hour, Friedman willingly, Howe perhaps unwittingly.
With this, we return to Howe’s thesis — and to the generational engine beneath it all.
The Fourth Turning
In 1991, two men — William Strauss and Neil Howe — wrote a book that would quietly become one of the most important works of the past generation. Generations (1991) laid out a bold, cyclical theory of history rooted in generational dynamics, arguing that American (and Western) history moves not randomly, but in a rhythmic pattern of four distinct “turnings,” each lasting about 20 to 25 years. After roughly 80-90 years, the cycle repeats.
Strauss and Howe followed this up with countless books developing their theory and addressing unfolding events, most notably The Fourth Turning (1997) and Howe’s solo The Fourth Turning is Here (2023).
Their insight was stunning in its simplicity and scope: just as there are seasons in nature, there are seasons in a nation’s life. These “turnings” form a repeating cycle, roughly 80 to 100 years in length — a saeculum, the Roman word for “natural century” — stretching from the birth of one generation to its passing from power and this life.
It’s not prophecy. Nor is it astrology.1 It’s generational sociology that identifies recurring patterns of behavior driven by the interaction between generational archetypes and the larger historical moment.
Let me explain it a different way.
Howe identifies four broad parenting types. Each raises a certain kind of kids, with its own ideas on childrearing. Those kids rebel against whatever their parents taught them, of course, and do things differently. But the one general mindset predictably begets the next, and this continues until the process repeats.
So for instance: the Boomers raised young GenX children like me without seatbelts, drinking water from the garden hose, and staying out unsupervised until dinner time. We were called “latchkey children” for a reason. But our children see everything very differently: they’re a generation of “helicopter parents”, their own children sheltered from virtually everything.
Obviously there are some pretty extreme variations from parent to parent. But generations are shaped by their collective experience, and that produces a new and different collective experience in their offspring, of which it turns out there are only four.
This isn’t to say history repeats. It does not. But as Mark Twain said, it definitely rhymes.
Here’s how this works.
First, a society emerges from a great crisis — an ekpyrosis, the ancient Greek word for conflagration, a total purging by fire. This Crisis — be it a revolution, a war, an economic cataclysm, or all of the above — fundamentally reshapes society. Out of the ashes comes a new order that establishes the framework of the next 80 years. Institutions are rebuilt. Confidence is high. The culture prizes unity, duty, and collective purpose. This is the First Turning, what Howe calls a High.
Second, after a few decades of peace and prosperity, a younger generation rises up chafing against conformity. They demand personal authenticity and spiritual awakening. They throw off the moral and institutional strictures their elders built in the wake of the Crisis. The culture shifts from outer order to inner meaning. This is the Second Turning, an Awakening.
Third, that Awakening sows division. The civic order erodes. Institutions lose credibility. Society fragments into distrust and cynicism. Public purpose wanes. Private interest dominates. Ideological extremes grow. This is the Third Turning, the Unraveling.
Fourth, all that internal decay builds pressure until the system breaks. A moment of profound crisis — economic, political, military, or more likely all three — forces the nation to reckon with itself. Wars are fought. Governments fall. Constitutions change, explicitly or in practice. A new founding occurs. That is the Fourth Turning, the Crisis — the ekpyrosis.
And then the cycle begins again.
What makes this model so compelling is that it’s not abstract. It maps perfectly onto actual Anglo-American history going back to the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). Starting with our independence these Crises are:
The American Revolution and Creation of the Constitution (1773–1794), the First Fourth Turning. That Crisis destroyed the colonial system and the rule of aristocracy, expelled the British, and gave birth to a new constitutional order under Washington and Madison.
Roughly 80 years later, the Civil War (1860–1865) shattered the Jacksonian order and remade the Union with a new national identity, centralized government, and abolition of slavery (and the de facto aristocracy that entails).
Eighty years after that, the Great Depression and World War II (1929–1946) obliterated the order birthed by the Civil War and forged the modern welfare state, the unelected unaccountable administrative “Deep State”, and the global (or at least Western) “postwar consensus”.
And now, roughly 80 years after World War II, we are reaching the climax of America’s fourth Fourth Turning.
Howe and Strauss published Generations in 1991, long before 9/11, the tech bust, the 2008 financial crisis that gave us Barack Obama, the COVID-19 lockdowns, or the Biden censorship and lawfare state. Yet they predicted, with eerie accuracy, that America would enter its next Fourth Turning around 2005 (it actually began in 2008), likely triggered by an economic collapse or a major terrorist event. That Crisis would last through the 2020s, involve serious institutional upheaval, and lead to the rise of a new political order by the early 2030s.
That’s exactly what is happening.
The genius of the theory lies in its core mechanism: generational archetypes. As I have already described, Howe argues that there are four generational “types” that appear in the same order every time, each shaped by their place in the cycle:
Prophets (like the Baby Boomers): born after a Crisis, raised during a High, come of age during an Awakening (in the case of the Boomers, two at once: the hippies on the one side, the Jesus people on the other). They are moralistic, values-driven, and focused on vision.
Nomads (like my own GenX): born during the Awakening, they come of age during an Unraveling. They are skeptical, snarky, pragmatic, and toughened by neglect.
Heroes (like Millennials, or 80 years ago the “Greatest Generation”): born during an Unraveling, come of age during a Crisis. They are institution-builders, team-oriented, and optimistic about reform.
Artists (like GenZ): born during a Crisis, protected as children, and come of age in a post-Crisis world. They are sensitive, adaptive, and focused on healing.
Each generation plays its part in the cycle, not because of fate, but because of formation. The conditions into which you are born shape how you view authority, purpose, and risk. The Boomers rejected their WWII parents’ conformity. GenX rejected the Boomers’ otherworldly impracticality. Millennials, scarred by 9/11 and 2008, crave security and collective meaning. GenZ, raised amid chaos and collapse, seeks authenticity and stability.
This is not deterministic. It’s just human.
What’s critical is this: the Crisis turning requires the forging of new institutions, and much of that task typically falls to the Hero generation — today, the Millennials. Born into an unraveling world, they yearn for order, direction, and collective meaning. And rightly so. Their generational role is to rebuild what others have torn down.
But rebuilding requires more than raw energy and idealistic dreams. It requires wisdom. It requires steel. And it requires leadership — usually not from the idealistic Heroes themselves, but from the generation just ahead of them: the Nomads.
Enter Generation X
GenX, born between 1961-1981,2 came of age during the chaos of the Awakening and Unraveling. We saw institutions crumble. We learned not to trust the experts or the system. We were latchkey kids, children of divorce, shunted between different, warring parents. One-third of our generation was killed in the womb by abortion. We were the first to be raised in an America that no longer even pretended everything was fine. No participation trophies. No helicopter parenting. We grew up watching the idealism of our Boomer parents implode into narcissism, stagflation, and retreat.
We also watched Ronald Reagan restore much of what had been lost, and save the world from Soviet Communism and the ever-present (to us) fear of nuclear annihilation. We watched him do this in large part by rejecting the received wisdom and consensus, and charting a new path.
The truth? The people who fought World War II may well be “the Greatest Generation”, but GenX is the best generation. There, I said it. Sue me.
In any case, Strauss and Howe have always demarcated GenX not as 1966 to 1980, but rather 1961 to 1981, and Millennials not as 1981 to 1995 (also absurd) but rather 1982 to some as-yet-undetermined time in the early 2000s, possibly as late as 2005. This is based on their assessment of the shared experiences that define a particular generation. I would contend that by that standard, the Millennials must terminate in 2001 (9/11), because everything after was very different. Howe counters that Millennials’ shared experience will, like the Greatest Generation’s, be defined by the experience of the Crisis, the end date for which is still unknown. We shall see.
And we adapted. We became skeptical, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, anti-authoritarian. We didn’t expect the system to work for us — so we built our own. We are the builders of the modern tech economy, the veterans of the War on Terror, the quiet engines of American productivity and leadership through the last quarter-century of decline. We haven’t screamed for attention: we’re virtually invisible. Rather, we’ve quietly taken responsibility. Since childhood.
This is always the role of the Nomads in a Fourth Turning. Washington’s generation — the GenX of the American Revolution — were the pragmatic veterans who held the line during the war and quietly governed afterward, building a revolutionary America that has remade the continent and the entire world. Lincoln was a Nomad, raised in log-cabin poverty, forged by personal tragedy and war, ultimately steering a broken country through its darkest hour with wisdom, resolve, and a new covenant of freedom. FDR, on the cusp between Prophet and Nomad, created the institutions that define the entire modern world, for good or ill. Dwight Eisenhower, another Nomad, led the Allied armies to victory and presided over the postwar American High with calm, principled strength.
Nomads don’t clamor for power. They pick up the gun when others drop it.
So yes, Millennials will build the next civic order. They are the institutional generation, and they will supply the manpower to carry the vision forward. But that vision — if it is to be grounded, restrained, and rooted in something more than utopian fervor — will and must be shaped and led by GenX.
The fire of the ekpyrosis burns hot. And in times like this, it is the Nomads — the hard-bitten, world-weary survivors — who step forward to wield the tongs.
Well, plus at least one Boomer Prophet: Donald J. Trump. Prophets rarely lead in the Crisis, but they are often (like Benjamin Franklin) its elder statesmen. In Trump, as in Roosevelt, we have both.
That’s where we are today. The baton is passing. The Boomers, for all their impact, are fading. The Millennials are coming of age. But the steady hands at the tiller — the ones who can still see through the fog — belong to GenX.
We’re not idealists. We’re realists. And in a time of conflagration, that is exactly what America desperately needs.
The Coming of the Crisis
The American Revolution led to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. The Soviet Revolution led to Stalin.
Fourth Turnings give birth to new orders. But they don’t tell you whether those new orders will be good.
That’s our challenge. We’re in the Crisis, whether we like it or not. The only question left is how we resolve it.
If Strauss and Howe were right, and I believe they were, then America entered its current Fourth Turning with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. That collapse of trust in financial and political elites — compounded by the corrupt, incestuous bailout of failed banks and mortgage giants — marked the unraveling of the unraveling. It ended an era of individualism and deregulation, and began a long twilight of elite failure and growing rage.
Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 as a unifier, a healer of the national soul. But he governed as a hard-left technocrat. The hope-and-change moment died quickly, replaced by weaponized bureaucracy, IRS abuse, lawfare, and cultural warfare from the top down. Faith in institutions, already weak, cratered. The Tea Party rose. Occupy Wall Street followed. So did Trump.
The 2016 election was no fluke. It was the harbinger of the Fourth Turning’s true character: populist revolt against elite, Democrat dominance. Not just economic revolt — though that too — but revolt against the unelected, unaccountable Deep State, against the managerial class, against globalism, against top-down enforcement of values the people never voted for. The revolt came from the right first, but not only from the right: Bernie Sanders was not an aberration. Nor was Brexit. Nor were the Yellow Vests in France.
But if 2016 marked the revolt, 2020 marked the fire.
COVID-19 exposed what little institutional legitimacy remained. Bureaucrats lied, preened, and imposed. Governors ruled by decree. Experts contradicted themselves weekly. “Trust the science” became an Orwellian punchline. Meanwhile, rioters burned cities while the Enemedia told us they were “mostly peaceful”. A sitting president was banned from the internet by unelected oligarchs. School boards hid curricula from parents while blatantly sexualizing children. The Pentagon prioritized pronouns over preparedness.
A nation cannot long endure such division. Nor such rot.
Trump as the Counter-FDR
Friedman sees this moment too. His 80-year institutional cycle neatly corresponds to Howe’s thesis. His 50-year socio-economic cycle adds depth. But both scholars arrive at the same conclusion: we are at the culmination of a cycle — possibly more than one. Those cycles have never before ended at the same time.
In Friedman’s view, America has passed through three prior institutional eras: the Founding, the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the post-WWII Order. Each brought with it new governing norms, administrative structures, and constitutional interpretations. Each lasted roughly four generations.
We are now at the end of the third. Just as the Civil War upended the Jacksonian Era, and the Depression-WWII nexus remade the Wilsonian-Progressive model, so too is our own postwar order collapsing under its own contradictions. The administrative state is bloated, lawless, and unaccountable. The courts have failed. Congress doesn’t legislate. The people have lost all faith.
Friedman’s Socio-Economic Cycle, meanwhile, is also ending. It began with the Reagan Revolution — an explosion of entrepreneurial capitalism, innovation, deregulation, and global trade. But over time, it morphed into managerial capitalism, tech monopolies, and what George Gilder calls “the hypertrophy of finance”. Wall Street soared while Main Street died. Open borders and outsourcing hollowed out the heartland. DEI and ESG replaced merit and excellence.
Voters want none of it.
This is the perfect storm. A double-cycle crisis all crashing at once.
And just as in the past, someone must navigate through the fire.
For years, both Howe and Friedman wrote that there would be a transitional figure — the Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter of our time — who would be elected in 2024. They assumed he would flounder, giving way to a more transformative figure in 2028, someone who would reshape the new world born of the fire. In The Fourth Turning Is Here, Howe explicitly describes this expected pattern.
But Friedman now believes otherwise. In his view, Donald Trump is that transformational figure. Not Hoover, not Carter: that role falls to the hapless Joe Biden. Trump is the Fourth Turning’s answer to FDR.
That is no small claim. FDR rebuilt the American state. He cemented new institutions — Social Security, the administrative state, Bretton Woods — and redefined the very idea of the federal government. Agree or disagree with the outcome, the scale of transformation was epochal.
More essentially, FDR conducted a stealth coup. By transfering the majority of legislative, executive, and judicial power to unconstitutional “independent” agencies, he ensured that a permanent bureaucracy — made up almost entirely of Democrats — would rule regardless of the outcome of elections. He did not do this to give up his own power: he knew the Democrats he hired to staff his mushrooming agencies would be loyal. He did this for when the other team won, to prevent an Eisenhower, or Nixon, or Ford, or Reagan, or Bush, or Bush, or Trump from actually changing course.
This coup d’etat, this silent revolution, “fundamentally transformed” the American system of government. It established unelected, unaccountable one-party rule, by a technocratic elite increasingly disconnected from those it ruled.
Ever wonder why nothing seems to change no matter who’s elected? This is why.
This is why I refer to the transformation in progress as a counterrevolution. After 90 years, Trump is taking decisive action to reverse that coup. If he succeeds, America won’t look like it did in 1920, or 1880. But technocracy will give way to consequential elections, greater participation, and true representative government.
If he succeeds. If he doesn’t, we’ve seen what his Socialist opponents have in mind for us. They are uninterested in FDR’s constitutional fig leaf. They mean to suppress all opposition.
In any case, if Friedman is correct — and I contend that he is — 2024 will not turn out to have been a transitional election like 1976, 1928, or 1856. Rather, it will prove to be a founding one.
Rebuilding From Ashes
Every Fourth Turning ends with a rebirth. The fire does not merely destroy: it purifies, or at least it has in the past. After the Revolution came the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Jeffersonian democracy. After the Civil War came a new union, a new positive nationalism, a new currency, and an expanded understanding of freedom. After World War II came Pax Americana, the suburbs, and the middle class. Though the Republic was suppressed down to the present day through Roosevelt’s actions in the 1930s, it was saved from utter destruction through his successful prosecution of the war in the 1940s. That outcome, however mixed, is certainly preferable to the contrapositive.
Unfortunately, it also demonstrates that the outcome of the Crisis is not foreordained (except by God), and certainly not guaranteed to be positive. And the question is never whether the turning will end. The question is what comes next.
The old order will not return. Something much better, or much worse, will replace it. The post-1945 consensus is in its last throes. The neoliberal fusionism of Reagan and Clinton is gone. The Supreme Court’s Chevron doctrine, which for decades shielded bureaucrats’ decisions from judicial scrutiny, is no more. So too is the naive trust in “experts”, technocracy, and the constant eroding of national sovereignty in favor of unelected foreign elites.
The question is whether we rebuild on sand or stone.
The challenge before us is staggering. The economy must be re-industrialized. Education must be reclaimed. The Deep State must be defanged and re-subordinated to the elected branches. Borders must be real again. The military must be rebuilt for real threats, not imaginary ones. And the soul of the nation must be reawakened — by faith, by families, by a recovered love of liberty.
Perhaps most important is a rebirth of the Christian doctrine of ordo amoris: Augustine’s term for the proper ordering of affections. J.D. Vance recently sparked controversy by asserting it. Simply stated, you owe a greater duty to those closest to you than to those far away. This does not mean you shouldn’t also love your distant neighbor: it simply means that you owe a greater duty to your wife, or your child, or your nation, than to a stranger you’ve never met.
The religious and political Left (but I repeat myself) have inverted this, and not without reason. They claim that caring for your immediate neighbor is selfish, while you owe an unlimited obligation to military-aged Syrian illegals, or the government of Ukraine, or a man who wants to “compete” in girls’ sports, or any other cause the Left chooses (and those can change on a dime).
Some of these are worthy causes. Some are not (the trans “women”, for instance, though they should certainly receive our pity and our mental health resources, just not our daughters’ medals or locker rooms). But their worthiness or lack thereof is irrelevant. I can love my distant neighbor without sacrificing my immediate one. Democrats demand the opposite. As in all Socialist movements, there are many duped “useful fools”, but the leaders know exactly what they’re doing. They are using Americans’ generosity and compassion to chip away at their legitimate affections, to subvert their liberty, and to harness the wealth and power of the nation to global causes of the elite’s choosing.
Augustine’s doctrine is the principle behind “America First”, which does not demean anyone elsewhere, but only seeks to establish that the American government’s first duty is to its own people. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the idea that citizenship has unique privileges not common to all people everywhere, or that a wall is not to keep anyone out, but rather to send them to the door. I may no more enter your country unlawfully than your house; you should respect my similar rights. That’s all.
All of this is anathema to the program of international socialism, as is the very idea of sovereign nations. Marxism is aristocracy, of the same brutal sort Communists created in China, Nazis established in Germany, and Democrats imposed on blacks and poor whites in the antebellum South. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” is in fact a dictatorship over it. The terminology changes, the reality never does.
To have freedom, you must have the right to rule yourselves. Elections have to matter. And nations must exist for those elections to have meaning. Trump is resetting the left’s Bizzaro World, restoring truths our not-so-distant ancestors all assumed.
It’s far from a foregone conclusion that we will succeed. Democrats in an array of institutions have enjoyed their near-monopoly on power these last 90 years. They will not go gently into that good night. They will fight, as they have been fighting. They are creative and well-funded. They could win.
But their victory will not represent a resurrection of the old order either. Quite the contrary. The unraveling and the Crisis have shown the Left that they cannot trust fig leaves, will not tolerate inconveniences to their rule like freedom of speech or religion. They have become more and more brazen in their exercise of raw power. They will not turn loose of it again.
It will take more than one man to beat them, much less to restore the Republic. But it took that man to begin.
The Fire This Time
There is a real risk that the fire consumes us instead of refining us. Revolutions don’t always birth republics. Sometimes they birth empires. Sometimes they devour themselves. The Soviet Revolution was a turning. So was the French Revolution. So was Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In every case, the crisis was real — but the rebirth was hell.
America must not go that way.
We are a unique and special nation. We were born not of blood and soil, but of a creed. Anyone who lawfully adopts that creed is welcome. Our Founders entrusted us with a republic — but warned it would only endure if we were virtuous, if we feared God, and if we loved liberty more than ease.
That kind of people can come through fire and emerge refined. They have before. They can again.
But if we fail to become that kind of people again, the fire will surely consume us. There will then be no new founding. Only ash.
The fire is not coming. It’s already here.
The question is not whether we face a crisis. The question is whether we will face it with courage — and whether we will lead our countrymen through it.
Donald Trump appears to be the leader for whom history cries out. He is not another manager of decline, but a determined would-be restorer of the Republic and founder of the next American century.
Whether or not that proves true, he’s what we’ve got. There’s no going back.
The hour of the ekpyrosis is now. And the eyes of history are upon us all.
— This essay is an excerpt from Rod Martin’s new Essays on the Counterrevolution, available for free to Premium and Founding Members. And don’t miss the prior excerpt, available here:
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I say this with a degree of amusement, because my friend James Lindsay, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, dismisses all of this as “astrology for liberal arts majors”.
Yes, the Census Bureau dates GenX from 1966-1980. But that’s absurd, not least in that it allocates a scant 15 years to an entire generation. But that’s pretty typical for the treatment of GenX at the hand of its Boomer elders: my gosh, they even named us “Generation X”, most certainly originally used as an insult. From there they called us all slackers before we’d had any chance to do anything…until we invented nearly every tech company in Silicon Valley.
I read the Fourth Turning, which impressed me, and very much liked your summary and analysis of it, which I am going to forward to a couple friends.
Thorough and Thoroughly enjoyable to read. We're of the same mindset and thinking in the same direction!