I am no fan of the current President, but there is no doubt that his ascendancy confirms a certain prediction from The Fourth Turning – namely, that during the era, the civic order will be transformed.

Even if this is done simply by ignoring the Constitution, that would do it. The opposition can complain that this is unlawful, but with no one to stop the administration, what does that matter? The vaunted “checks and balances” of the Constitution won’t work if the Supreme Court is bought and paid for and if Congress is weak and submissive, both of which look to be the case.

If the 14th Amendment can be ignored, that’s pretty much the end of the United States as it has been defined since the Civil War aftermath. And the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy means the end of the New Deal order. Even if these aren’t completely demolished, only stressed and transformed (“tempered,” to put it generously), what emerges in terms of new legal understandings could qualify as a new constitutional order.

Back in the Trump 1.0 days, I posted that we were seeing the emergence of a new constitutional order I jokingly called the “Mafia State” – rule by a criminal gang out to make as much money as possible grifting and extorting. Since version 2.0 of the administration is a little more prepared, it looks like a more profound change is forthcoming. Will it be the dreaded White Christian Nationalist Theocracy spelled out in Project 2025? Or something emerging from the fever dreams of the tech billionaires who surrounded Trump at his inaugration?

This cadre of billionaires, who took great pains to obey in advance, has been affectionately termed the “broligarchy” by the media and general public. They are indeed all men, mostly but not all white, and almost all Gen X. This last fact rarely gets commentary – all those billionaires behind DOGE that are ready to subvert democracy and seal in the new Gilded Age are from that often-overlooked generation, Generation X!

Strauss and Howe wrote about how my generation, with its scattered, individualistic, market-oriented mentality, would split into winners and losers as we aged. This tiny elite that comprises the broligarchy are indeed the big winners of the previous market-driven era, and they are ready to transform the civic order now in accord with their techno-utopian fantasies.

One of them, Marc Andreessen (he wasn’t at the inauguration but he is part of DOGE) even has a manifesto that spells it out. This is an excerpt from his manifesto that I found on a substack that is not too friendly to him, and it is blatantly Fourth Turning:

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness. Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

-from Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto

It’s so very Gen X to oppose credentialism and expertise. We are the generation that believes that any savvy person can figure things out for themselves. You might say we’re the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s also very Gen X for the ultimate winners of the previous competitive age to consolidate their power and impose their will, under the banner of a stupidly named pseudo-government agency, no less. Suck it up, snowflakes!

As a demonstration of how rule by a Boomer (the President) on top of a pyramid of Gen Xers (the broligarchs) might look, consider the recent action to purge the federal workforce. It looks exactly like what one of the broligarchs did when he took over a major social media company, as this substack post points out. This kind of ruthlessness is exactly what you would expect from Generation X.

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I break down the broligarchy by generation below. This is all the tech billionaires who were either at the inauguration or are affiliated with DOGE:

• BOOMER
  Tim Cook (b. 1960)<-on the cusp!
• GEN X
  Jeff Bezos (b. 1964)
  Peter Thiel (b. 1967)
  Elon Musk (b. 1971)
  Marc Andreessen (b. 1971)
  Sundar Pichai (b. 1972)
• MILLENNIAL
  Mark Zuckerburg (b. 1984)<-wannabe; he tries so hard to be cool!

These two get a mention but don’t really count. Vivek got kicked out and Shou isn’t a U.S. citizen. Besides, nether one is technically a billionaire.

• MILLENNIAL
• Vivek Ramaswamy (b. 1985)
• Shou Zi Chew (b. 1983)

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The content of this post has already been shared, in modified form, on social media. If you are interested in generations and in the Fourth Turning, there’s a great discussion group on Facebook. Just search for “Fourth Turning Discussion Group.” All are welcome, so long as they agree to the rules.