Identifiers

Here's the official word per LifeCourse.com

1) "Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood."

2) "America's institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up"

3) This is a "response to a perceived threat to the nations very survival"

4) "Civic authority revives”

5) "Cultural expression finds a community purpose"

6) "People begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group

7) The Crisis eventually becomes a "founding moment," "refreshing and redefining the national identity."

Unfortunately, 1 is often tautological: If you are in the Crisis, this is your generational constellation because when you are in this generational constellation you are in the Crisis. There is probably something that can be done there to quantify, say, how many of the Prophets have entered elder hood -- when the first one crosses the line isn’t as important as when n% have crossed the line. And if something indicates that no more Nomads are having children are starting new jobs, or when the youngest Civics are of draft age, we can probably predict....something.

For 2, we can look for places where there are radical changes in institutions. If the NSA - formed very shortly after the end of the last Crisis - gets completely redone, we can propose that this is expected, here in the Crisis.

Isn’t everything a “perceived threat” any more? Yeah, that’s the cynical Xer in me... 3 can perhaps be used to distinguish between events that are short-term or political in nature and those that really are Crisis related.

“Civic authority” has to be in comparison to the previous Turnings’ reliance on personal authority, moving from In Me I Trust to In Us We Trust. It doesn’t have to be governmental, and particularly doesn’t have to be the Federal government. This is a part that may be tricky to see, since it could be anywhere from the consolidation of Federal power in the American Civil War to the rejection of British power in the Revolutionary War. The Affordable Care Act is certainly a move back toward civic authority, and a major change in how government interacts with We The People, but that it doesn’t feel to me like a reaction to a threat. I expect the reaction TO the ACA to be the more Crisis-worthy moment, that socialized medicine will be seen as the greater threat.

“Cultural expression” and “community purpose” - I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean, even if I do think we see in culture a reflection of the current Turning. I’ll grant that “Casablanca” does feel this way, and I expect that “The Best Years of our Lives” does, too. Does “Fantasia,” though (from 1940)? How about “The Thin Man” (1934)? When is this expected to start? “The Hurt Locker” might count. So, too, might “The Hunger Games” and its sequels.

“Members of a larger group” is something that can be identified, at least. It seems related to the “Civic authority” item, and the tricky part is determining what groups are forming and why people see themselves there.

For The Founding Moment, no doubt we will have to wait until after the  peak to realize.  The rest of these, though, have something to work with.