The Next '68 - 2

THE NEXT ‘68

Cycles of History and a “What’s Coming” Scenario

Peter S. Adler, PhD

February, 2026

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1.  

Right after college, I joined the Peace Corps and spent 1967 and 1968 working in a small town and its outlying hamlets halfway between Mumbai and Goa. My roomie and I lived in a poor rice growing area not far from the Arabian Sea. We were trained to help construct rural infrastructure projects like market roads, culverts, and community wells. We spent our two years there, learned a new language, made friends, built a few schools, fought rat infestations, and helped some entrepreneurial gentlemen start small poultry businesses. 

Before the annual monsoon each year, when it was astonishingly hot, we sweltered in temperatures running to 115 degrees. Most of those pre-monsoon days were windless, cloudless, and scorched—everything wilting and waiting for rain. At midday, there was no shade. The earth was powder, the road in front of our house, a dust bowl, and the landscape, chalky and hammered flat. I could have used a cold beer but Maharashtra State was under prohibition. We found iced soda pops at the bus station.

During the worst of it, we moved our rope beds outside and slept under the stars, sometimes waking up with cows and water buffaloes folded up on the ground next to us, eyes closed, chewing in their sleep. Those nights in 1968 we were preoccupied with little local challenges but ours were minor compared to what was happening back home.

On those hot nights, we stared at the Milky Way, smelled the woodsmoke from cooking fires, and heard what was happening in the world courtesy of a short wave radio and BBC. A lot of it was about rugby and cricket, telling us who was behind Australia by 4 wickets, and that  stunning new flower show at the Surrey Garden Club. 

That was also how we learned Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968 and Bobby Kennedy murdered at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles two months later. Through those radio reports and aerograms from home, we heard about the U.S. troop buildup in Vietnam, then approaching five hundred thousand, and I got news that one of my high school classmates, Lt. Jeff Gurvitz of the196th Infantry Brigade, was killed when he jumped on a hand grenade.

Even from 8,100 miles away and in that pre-computer era, it was crystal clear. The mood at home was darkening. While we campaigned against rats, raised chickens, and built some little schools, these were hard years for the U.S., full of dissension, partisan discord, and slow motion generational change.  

The antiwar demonstrations at the Pentagon, H. Rap Brown’s cry to “burn this town down,” race riots in Detroit, the emergence of the drug culture, the decision by Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection, and Nixon’s triumphal march to the White House brought it all home while we hung out with rice farmers waiting for the 160-inches of monsoon rains they needed to grow enough food. 

Mark Kurlansky, in his best seller 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, said “There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again.” 

He is wrong. Another one is here.

2. 

My people are immigrant Holocaust refugees and their experiences are still family memes. Being an optimist, a skeptic, and an incurable scribbler, my musings in the dark days of Covid and Trump-1.0 led me to experiment with fiction writing resulting in a story out from All Night Books called The Duck Springs Defiance: A Novel of the Next Civil War.

My tale deals with politics, morality, and leadership. It is set in the near future and centers on a former Marine and defrocked lawyer who is escaping from an unhappy past and drawn into the rhythms of a quirky community in rural Washington state. His timing coincides with a violent coup d’état that throws America into a conflict driven by right-wing fanatics and coordinating militias. The story depicts how his spirit is revived and how he and his adopted community fight back. 

A second civil war? A small-town resistance? It’s just a story, but also a possible upsetting scenario of the future. If you really want to understand the dynamics of how a homegrown conflict might plausibly unfold in the United States, read How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter. And if you believe places like Duck Springs are a gauzy nostalgia about the past, read Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America by journalists Deborah and James Fallows. Their odyssey will change your thinking. 

Today, we need to be even more worried. My novel is born out of skepticism and angst. But it also raises the implicit question of how likely an armed 1860s-style conflict really is and whether my familial and literary fears of a second civil war are completely overblown.  Are they? Maybe, or maybe not.

We are slipping into a condition political scientists call “anocracy” which is neither a full democracy nor a total autocracy. It is a condition in between both. Most experts believe a full-scale blue-gray type war is unlikely. There is no superordinate mobilizing moral issue like slavery was in 1861 and our fissures do not geographically and economically align for the kind of fight that took place then. Still, our fractures are deepening and hostilities are amplifying.

My story about our next civil war is just a glimpse of one possible future, but there are other more likely scenarios. Change could come from key electoral shifts or the rise of a new political coalition. Or our hatreds might temporarily eclipse if we go to war with Denmark or Iran. Or maybe, as happens now and then, a unifier like Lech Wałęsa in Poland, Mahatma Gandhi in India, or Nelson Mandela in South Africa emerges and some of our discontents are tempered. 

1968 brought us the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, walkouts and talk-ins on college campuses, and massive anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights demonstrations that filled the streets, often with tear gas. Current and coming events might be a domestic version of what military and diplomatic experts call “Grey Zone Conflict,” rapidly escalating frictions that involve state and non-state actors and put all of us in a simultaneous state of war and peace. 

Like anocracy, Grey Zone Conflict is an analogous term but more primordial, full of real cyber battles, financial wars, the use of espionage and sabotage, propaganda fights, political swatting, outbreaks of militia-led violence, drone fights, and a constant barrage of AI and social media provocations by automated bots and anonymous keyboard cowards. 

It may be a contemporary analog of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland or the civil war in Sri Lanka. Whatever comes, our future may inescapably be in a cycle that replays the years leading up to and trailing just beyond 1968.

3.   

Back in our little town in India, aside from various gastric maladies which we boys tended to attract, life was pretty good. We were doing something useful for the world and worked on real projects that had beginnings, middles, and ends and seemed to make a big difference to local people. We also had plenty of time to read and absorb ourselves in Indian culture. 

I’m not a die-hard believer in any religion, even the one I was born into, but in a predominately Hindu community, I got interested in understanding the structure and cosmology of Hinduism. It took a while, but I had good local mentors. One of them, a deeply religious and delightfully garrulous retired professor named Dinesh Ambedkar, carefully explained the cycle of time in Hindu cosmology. 

He said there are four big epochs called “yugas.”  In Satya Yuga, everything is virtuous. Humans are twenty-one cubits tall, and human life spans run about one hundred thousand years. Then in Treta Yuga, goodness is down a quarter of a tank and you are only three quarters virtuous. Life spans shrink and we are down to ten-thousands. In Dwapar Yuga, the cup is half empty. You are seven cubits tall and only live for one thousand years. Then comes Kali Yuga. Now we all are down to 25 percent virtue and 75 percent sin. By the end of Kali Yuga, humans don’t live beyond twenty.

I remember asking him, when is Kali Yuga coming? 

He said, “We’re in it.” He said it began in 3,140 BC when the Mahabharata war ended and the results are all in plain view. Spiritual beliefs are reduced to external symbols, people change religions willy-nilly from one order to the next, wealth is the sign of a man’s goodness, and law and justice are applied only on the basis of power. Men develop more and more envy and hatred and soon, people even kill their own relatives for money.

And after that, he said, Kali Yuga, which lasts 432,000 years, ends and the world is destroyed. Then the cycle resets. Satya Yuga emerges once more and refreshingly, there is new age of truth, beauty, justice, and peace. 

Hinduism’s big cycle theory of past, present, and future is not unique. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Peter Turchin, Arthur Schlesinger and others have all had ideas about big rotations and successive periods of growth and deterioration. When it comes to the late 1960s, the most pertinent is the Strauss–Howe generational theory.

William Strauss and Neil Howe say that prominent historical events are part of generational personae. Each generational era sets up the next one in what they call a “Turning”. Turnings last roughly 21 years and embody a changed social, political, and economic mood. They present evidence of four 20-year "turnings" - High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. Our current era, they assert, is a "Fourth Turning", a period of crisis, spanning roughly 2008–2030 and marked by social, economic, and political upheaval. 

Are we back to the two decades in and around 1968? My feisty novel, The Duck Springs Defiance, describes the struggles of one small community and the moral choices people face when they may need to kill or potentially be killed. But I know it’s just a fiction, an imagined setting for the telling of more important stories. 

Most likely, we are headed into widespread disturbances that will take us to the edge of kinetic combat, or into the new Satya Yuga Dinesh Ambedkar described back in India in 1968. Those Yugas are the same psycho-historical bones of the Fourth Turning Strauss and Howe wrote about. I’m staying optimistic. They both describe an inevitable new “High."