By Aleksey Bashtavenko,  Academic Composition

When I first arrived in America in 1998, three images on television etched themselves into my memory: the chaos of The Jerry Springer Show, the impeachment of Bill Clinton with its infamous parsing of “the meaning of is,” and the bizarre arithmetic of televangelists promising divine returns on earthly donations. Taken together, these broadcasts captured the essence of late-1990s America — a nation loud, messy, contradictory, and above all performative. They revealed a society where everyone, from a trailer-park brawler to a sitting president to a Southern preacher, could claim a stage.

But much has changed. We are no longer in the Third Turning, the “Unraveling” described by Strauss and Howe. We are deep into the Fourth Turning, the “Crisis.” And those same archetypes that once defined American spectacle have not disappeared; they have mutated into something more consequential, more perilous, and far less ironic.

Trash TV became social media spectacle. What Springer once contained within a studio audience now spills across every platform. TikTok fights, Twitter feuds, YouTube rants — the Springer stage has been democratized. The audience is the cast, the cast is the mob, and the performance never ends. In the 1990s, we laughed at dysfunction; in the 2020s, dysfunction has become the medium of politics, culture, and even diplomacy.

Political theater became existential partisanship. Clinton’s impeachment was a circus of scandal and semantics, a morality play without real risk to the system. Today’s impeachments, indictments, and insurrections are not just theater but trench warfare. January 6 and the trials of a former president mark a shift from symbolic humiliation to structural peril. The laughter of the late 1990s has curdled into fear.

Televangelism became political religion. Once confined to promises of healing and prosperity, the preacher’s stage has fused with the political pulpit. The prosperity gospel gave way to the politics of salvation, where Christian nationalism, QAnon prophecies, and revivalist rallies bind faith and ideology into a single movement. The old “spiritual mathematics” of dollars-for-blessings has transformed into a promise of national rebirth through crisis.

The difference lies in tone. The 1990s were an age of irony: everything was a show, everything was survivable. The 2020s are an age of survival: the show is the war. The spectacle that once amused us now consumes us.

This is the essence of the Fourth Turning — the moment when performance and reality collapse into one another, and the messy pluralism of the American stage becomes the crucible of national destiny.