Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss & Neil Howe
Amazon is an attempt to begin constructing the "Science of Psychohistory" that Isaac Asimov imagined for his
Foundation Trilogy. Strauss & Howe stare into the "noise" of our culture (the stuff that we're taught to ignore while looking at the "signal") and find an oscillation in our social values that has been repeating, roughly every 88 years, for more than four centuries.
I think they're basically right that the cyclic instability actually exists, but they fuzz out many "irrelevant" details in order to bring the oscillation into sharp relief. The book's tone is academic and its structure is quite repetitive, sounding at times like a raw compendium of every paper they're ever written on the topic.
Writing in 1990, they use their generational-oscillation theory to predict the future. Below the fold are some thoughts on the Bush era.
I think this is what they have to say about the Global War on Terrorism (bolding is mine):
The Crisis of 2020
When will this crisis come? The climactic event may not arrive exactly in the year 2020, but it won't arrive much sooner or later. A cycle is the length of four generations, or roughly 88 years. If we plot a half cycle head from the Boom Awakening (and find the 44th anniversaries of Woodstock and the Reagan Revolution), we project a criss lasting from 2013 to 2024. If we plot a full cycle ahead from the last secular crisis (and find the 88th anniversaries of the FDR landslide and Pearl Harbor Day), we project a crisis lasting from 2020 to 2029. By either measure, the early 2020s appear fateful.
What will precipitate this crisis? It could be almost anything, including incidents trumped up by a generation of elderly warrior-priests, gripped with visions of moral triumph. The spark that catches fire may seem accidental, but—as with many past examples (the overthrow of Andros, the Boston Tea Party, Lincoln's election, and Pearl Harbor)—the old Idealists may have a hand in stirring events to maximum political effect, mobilizing younger generations into action.
How significant will this crisis be? Recall the parallel eras: the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the years spanning the Great Depression and World War II. The Crisis of 2020 will be a major turning point in American history and an adrenaline-filled moment of trial. At its climax, Americans will feel that the fate of posterity—for generations to come—hangs in the balance.
What will the national mood be like? This crisis will be a pivotal moment in the lifecycles of all generations alive at the time. The sense of community will be omnipresent. Moral order will be unquestioned, with "rights" and "wrongs" crisply defined and obeyed. Sacrifices will be asked, and given. America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing, and fix what needs fixing.
How will this crisis end? Three of the four antecedents ended in triumph, the fourth (the Civil War) in a mixture of moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory. We can foresee a full range of possible outcomes, from stirring achievement to apocalyptic tragedy.
What happens if the crisis comes early? What if the Millennium—the year 2000 or soon thereafter—provides Boomers with the occasion to impose their "millennial" visions on the nation and world? The generational cycle suggests that the risk of cataclysm would be very high. During the 2000‒2009 decade, Boomers will be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and institutional power. From a lifecycle perspective, they will be exactly where the Transcendentals were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper's Ferry. Boomers can best serve civilization by restraining themselves (or by letting themselves be restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual energy would find expression not in midlife leadership, but in elder stewardship.
Not bad for a couple of guys writing in 1990! The main thing they got wrong was the idea that Boomer warrior-priests would actually
care about whether their actions are bad for the civilization.
Spoiler: the social-values oscillation is caused by an oscillation in child-rearing practices, which is caused by the relatively low ratio between childhood-length and elderhood-length for our species. Children tend to repeat the same mistakes that their great-grandparents made because information about those mistakes is not passed on to them. People live longer nowadays, but they also delay child-bearing more, so the four-generation cycle continues. Overbearing parents produce children who are less overbearing, producing grandchildren who are allowed to run wild, producing great-grandchildren who are a little stricter, producing great-great-grandchildren who are just as overbearing as their ancestors were 90 years earlier.
Strauss & Howe's viewpoint is almost entirely nationalist—these are the "Generations of America", although the process that causes the oscillation seems to be part of the design of our species and should show up in every culture. They mention that the American oscillation was originally synchronized to the oscillation in Europe during the founding. Is Canada's oscillation synchronized to America's because their French and English populations also came from Europe? Is a "nation" a group of people that oscillate together, but separately from their neighbours? These cultural-anthropology questions seem to be of no interest to Strauss & Howe, who are apparently sociologists.