NOTES FROM THE GYRE

Vol. 1, No. 1

January, 2026

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…”

— W.B. Yeats in The Second Coming

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The start of a new year is a time for predictions. Here are a few that popped up:

• Interest rates will fall, inflation will increase, recession lies ahead.

• Viktor Orban will prevail in Hungary’s elections.

• Democrats will regain a majority in the midterms and Trump will be impeached.

• AI agents will handle 90% of all customer contacts for America’s biggest companies.

• U.S. stocks will yield 4–5% annualized. Non-U.S. stocks will yield 6–8% annualized.
  
  

These are one year guesses for 2026, but open your apertures a little wider and you may want to think bigger. 

My musings jump off from a piece of fiction coming out February 24th called The Duck Springs Defiance: A Novel of the Next Civil War. I started writing it as an experiment during the darker days of Covid and Trump 1.0 and it eventually wrote itself.

My imaginary tale is set in the near future and centers on a former Marine and defrocked lawyer who is escaping from an unhappy past and is drawn into the rhythms of a quirky, out-of-the-way rural community in Washington state. His timing coincides with a violent coup d’état that throws America into conflict with armed militias and right-wing fanatics. The story tells how his spirit is revived and how his adopted community resists and prevails when attacked.

The book is a literary fiction raising the same existential questions and ideas we are all confronting now. Although it makes for a good story, truthfully, I think it’s not a civil war that is coming. We are tumbling into an extended “1968.”

History matters and I’m attracted to cycle hypotheses. I am especially intrigued by Willian Strauss and Neal Howe’s The Fourth Turning (Crown, 1997). They see four generational turnings, each around 20+ years long, that cycle like this:

1. After a period of crisis, their new eighty year cycles start with a “High” which involves a generation rebuilding a new social order with strong institutions and greater social conformity. Their U.S. example: post-WWII America, a time of comparative stability after the crises of World Wars with Germany and Japan; 

2. Then comes an “Awakening” which creates a new generational impulse toward individualism and the start ofserious questioning about institutions.;

3. This is followed by an“Unraveling” as institutions weaken, fragmentation rises, and cynicism sets in;

4. And then, to complete their 80 year cycle, a fresh “Crisis” (their Fourth Turning) emerges. Now, the social compact frays, there is more apparent upheaval, threats of war, internal collapse, national mobilization, and a return to a new order. When that passes, the cycle repeats. Their U.S. examples: the Civil War, the Great Depression, and WWII. 

Strauss and Howe believe our current Fourth Turning began with the 2008 financial crisis. The next big shift happens in the early 2030s. 

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. We are moving into an extended generational 1968. If you remember, those years brought us the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, walkouts on college campuses, and massive anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights backlashes that filled the streets, often with tear gas.

That era saw 50,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, 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 Dick Nixon’s triumphal march to the White House. It also brought a new environmental consciousness, the assertion of women’s rights, and a hunger for more sensible and productive politics.

Despite my yarn about The Duck Springs Defiance and a coming civil war, we are now in Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning.”  The world is especially nervous and disconcerting but I remain optimistic.As poet Robert Frost said, “The way out is always through.” History will turn and we will make a new and healthier country.