There should be little disagreement that the last-wave of G.I.'s formed that generation's core.  For the earlier-born members of the Hero archetype, their '40s took place in the '30s.

These "core" G.I.s then went on to be the predominant parents of early-wave Boomers, who proved to be the core of their generation - younger Boomers having had their '60s in the '70s.  Meanwhile, the older G.I.s parented the Silent, who had no "core" at all.

Then "core" Boomers parented the "core" Xers - the last wave, whose '90s experience so overshadowed the "Baby Busters'" '80s experience that this became a comedic punchline: "The '90s are gonna make the '80s look like the '50s," according to a line from an otherwise-forgettable movie.  The late boomers had to settle for siring the early Millennials, who are shaping up as the "lesser" Millennials.

If this pattern holds, the "edgy" late Xers, who are largely the parents of early-born Homelanders, could get to see their kids grow up to be more "edgy" than late-born Homelanders - or maybe not, because there might be no such thing as a "core" Artist sub-generation, ever.

Bad news for Classic Xer, and former posters JPT and JDFP!

White Christian America is dying
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monk...-is-dying/

(also interviewed on PBS Newshour today)(videos available at this website also)

Robert P. Jones is the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). His new book, “The End of White Christian America,” has been called “quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year.” He kindly answered some questions about the book via email. Below is a lightly edited version.

Let’s start with a graph from the book. I think this won’t strike many readers as surprising, but tell us what you see and how you interpret it.
The chart below reveals just how quickly the proportions of white, non-Hispanic Christians have declined across generations.



Like an archaeological excavation, the chart sorts Americans by religious affiliation and race, stratified by age. It shows the decline of white Christians among each successive generation.
Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults.

Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts — including immigration patterns and differential birth rates — this chart also highlights the other major cause: young adults’ rejection of organized religion. Young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).


What’s the broader implication of this generational pattern?
The American religious landscape is being remade, most notably by the decline of the white Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. These religious transformations have been swift and dramatic, occurring largely within the last four decades. Many white Americans have sensed these changes, and there has been some media coverage of the demographic piece of the puzzle. But while the country’s shifting racial dynamics are certainly a source of apprehension for many white Americans, it is the disappearance of White Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions. Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity — one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos — threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.

One thing you describe is how the decline of white Protestantism isn’t just about the decline of mainline denominations like the Episcopal, Methodist or Presbyterian Churches. It’s also about the decline of evangelical Protestantism. This conventional wisdom that traditional Gothic cathedrals are empty but the suburban mega-churches are bursting isn’t quite right.



Up until about a decade ago, most of the decline among white Protestants was confined to mainline Protestants, such as Episcopalians, United Methodists, or Presbyterians, who populate the more liberal branch of the white Protestant family tree. The mainline numbers dropped earlier and more sharply — from 24 percent of the population in 1988 to 14 percent in 2012, at which time their numbers generally stabilized.



But over the last decade, we have seen marked decline among white evangelical Protestants, the more conservative part of the white Protestant family. White evangelical Protestants comprised 22 percent of the population in 1988 and still commanded 21 percent of the population in 2008, but their share of the religious market had slipped to 18 percent at the time the book went to press, and our latest 2015 numbers show an additional one-percentage-point slip to 17 percent.



These indicators of white evangelical decline at the national level are corroborated, for example, by internal membership reports during the same period from the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the country. It has now posted nine straight years of declining growth rates.


As a result, both white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants are graying. In 1972, white Protestants’ median age was 46 years old, only slightly higher than the median age of the American population (44 years old). Today, white Protestants’ median age is 53, compared to 46 among Americans as a whole. Notably, by 2014, there was no difference between the median ages of white evangelical and mainline Protestants...............

This thread is about techniques to use in generational research.  The thesis is as follows.  The Strauss and Howe generational cycle as a theory of history is just about dead. Strauss is dead and Howe is mostly working as a financial columnist (he's 65 and has decided to focus on those aspects of his ideas that have had acceptance) there will be no further work from him, and when he dies the idea will die with him.

However S&H made an important contribution.  The basic process (generations create history and history creates generations) that we attribute to them was not invented by them.  It's all in Karl Mannheim's 1928 essay, but you have to have to really go deep to see it (unless having read S&H you know what to look for). Others have derived the same mechanism from Mannheim that S&H did.  But as far as I know none have combined the political cycles observed by others with the religious cycles observed by McLoughlin and others. 

A far as I know, Dave Krein is the only historian to have seriously considered the ideas of S&H and has extended their paradigm.  Dave turns 74 this year.  I was working on a paper on generational cycles and have lost it (corrupted file) and will be rewriting it over the next few years.  I have another paper (intact) I plan to submit first so I am at least a year away from submitting the generational paper (it references the earlier paper which is why there is an order).  Plenty of time to rewrite it.  I will probably do it differently (might as well) hence this thread.

In the subsequent posts I plan to give an example of a technique and show how I apply it.  Other T4Ters have proposed theories.  How do you do it?  And how would you seek to make a case in a peer-reviewed situation?

History does not repeat but it rhymes.

Looking out at the geopolitical situation, we seem to be rhyming with the Great Power Saec 4T.

Let us examine without emotion what the next Great War will bring us.

Thermonuclear war will not be the sole means, but it will dominate the experience. Here's the earlier fission version:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pzdpt...des/player

Rebroadcast 70 years after the initial series. Available at the BBC site for another 23 days from the date of this post.

Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?

"Many parents who grew up playing outdoors with friends, walking alone to the park or to school, and enjoying other moments of independent play are now raising children in a world with very different norms.

"In the United States today, leaving children unsupervised is grounds for moral outrage and can lead to criminal charges.

"What's changed?

"One possibility is that the risks to children have changed. What was safe in the past may be unsafe today, placing children in genuine danger. But, for the most part, the data don't support this. Statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, for example, suggest that violent crime rates have decreased since the 1970s (and not only when it comes to children, whom one could argue are benefiting from the increased oversight)."

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08...nreal-risk

So snow the Washington Post is running clickbait headlines ugh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-...&tid=ss_tw

Quote:Over the weekend, I wrote a piece breaking down Donald Trump's remarkably poor performance among Catholics. Some folks disagreed with the premise, arguing that there isn't really even a "Catholic vote" at all — that it's not homogeneous enough to consider it a voter bloc.
But every voter group has significant differences within it. And in fact, new data suggest that there's a little-publicized and rather large difference if you look closely at one of the most-discussed demographics of the 2016 election: Hispanics.
A Gallup poll shows that Hillary Clinton maintains a very big advantage among Hispanic voters — just as you might expect. Democrats, after all, have won this group by increasing margins in presidential elections, and that's a major GOP sore spot, given how quickly the U.S. Hispanic population is rising....



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-...&tid=ss_tw

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...um=twitter

Quote:For the past few decades, presidential elections have been dominated by voters of the Baby Boom and previous generations, who are estimated to have cast a majority of the votes. But their election reign may end this November, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data.



Baby Boomers and prior generations have cast the vast majority of votes in every presidential election since 1980, data from the Census Bureau’s November Current Population Survey voting supplement show. In 2012, Boomers and previous generations accounted for 56% of those who said they voted. And these generations dominated earlier elections to an even greater degree.... 



http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...um=twitter

In case you haven't heard, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before Friday night's exhibition game at home against the Green Bay Packers, basically declaring his solidarity with Black Lives Matter as his motive for doing this.

It has been a rough time for Kaepernick of late: He is battling an injury to his left shoulder that he sustained in mid-season last year, and throughout this summer's training camp new 49ers head coach Chip Kelly has been broadly hinting that he is leaning toward starting Blaine Gabbert, who is 8-27 lifetime as an NFL starter, over Kaepernick, whose 31-22 record therein includes a 4-2 mark in the postseason, in which Gabbert has never participated, in the team's regular-season opener, at home against the newly-rechristened Los Angeles Rams at the 49ers' Santa Clara home in a Monday night game on September 12.  Kelly, for his part, is no stranger to race-based controversy, engineering the running off from the team of wide receiver DeSean Jackson during his stint as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, while coddling fellow Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper after Cooper regaled a black security guard with the N-word at a Kenny Chesney concert.

The controversy that Kaepernick's actions have generated is so hot that the NFL has disabled the comment feature in the article about the incident that appears on the league's web site.

But of course we don't believe in censorship here.

So opine away!

I'd like to take the temperature of the forum on the issue.

From personal experience with two War Baby grandparents ('41 and '43), I'd consider the '43 grandmother to have a basically Boomer disposition, while my '41 grandfather was very much a Silent. So I'm convinced the earliest Prophets can be born during a Crisis.

And based on that personal experience (my Boomer-esque War Baby grandmother's being born in 1943, fourteen years after Black Tuesday), and holding to a 2006 Fourth Turning start date, I'd bet that the cohort of 2020 will look awfully Prophet-like when they've grown up.

Assuming that the GC has any validity as a concept as outlined in The Fourth Turning, it isn't applicable to either Clinton or Trump. 

The Book (doesn't one feel like a Friend of Bill, discussing it that way?) is pretty specific that what makes a Grey Champion a Grey Champion is overwhelming support from the ascending generation. It is the rising Hero generation, after all, that enshrines a Grey Champion's exploits in the annals of Valhalla and records their deeds in the Book of Life &etc. &etc. 

Abraham Lincoln certainly had huge majorities among the rising Gilded in the non-seceded States (he very likely was not a Grey Champion of the Confederacy); the 'Lincoln Shouters' were a paramilitary organization consisting of nothing but male youths in the Union states. And while I haven't been able to find any primary documentation on the demographics of the 1932 election, the overwhelming impression I get from secondary sources is that Franklin Roosevelt was the overwhelming favorite of the G.I. Generation at the time, not the least because of the Democratic promise to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.

You notice my repeated use of the word "overwhelming"?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump runs a serious risk of coming in fourth place in the youth vote, while Hillary is struggling to match the youth enthusiasm Obama had in his two elections. If we judge potential Grey Champions on the support they muster from the newly-minted Heroes, neither of the two nominees this year qualify. Indeed, it's increasingly plausible that Obama will look very much like a traditional Grey Champion in hindsight. The difference may be something as simple as a reverse Civil War crisis - where many observers include most or all of the 1850s in the Fourth Turning of that Crisis (creating a lengthy head in front of the emergence of the Grey Champion), this Crisis may simply have seen a Grey Champion leave office with a tail of Crises behind him, with nothing really resolved.