Trump pushed us to the edge of disaster. It will soon be too late to step back

There is something deeply unsettling about Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning 80 years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every 80 years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy.