Colin Powell's resignation

[dougo]

Shortly after 9/11, Strauss & Howe posted to their Fourthturning.com forum about whether the Fourth Turning was starting early. In retrospect, it's clear that it was more of a "shift toward the nastier edge of a Third Turning mood", and that Bush's "easy deference to a Silent-dominated board of advisors" was an important restraint preventing a plunge into full-on Crisis Era. With Colin Powell's departure, the coolest head is gone, and I think the only Silent-generation advisors left are Rumsfeld and Cheney (who spent part of the weekend in the hospital). Bush's Cabinet re-org is acknowledged as an attempt to "'control the government, not just the White House' in the second term and to give the president 'an enhanced ability to control the broad sweep of policy undertaken in the second term.'" Together with his purging of the CIA, we're headed toward an ideologically—and, not a coincidence, generationally—pure administration. This seems like a recipe for the "Crisis of 2020" to arrive well ahead of schedule (much like the Civil War).