Victory

Edward is King.

The York family celebrate their victory.

Now, they hope, begins their lasting joy.

Thus opens the 1995 film of Richard III, starring Ian McKellen. It was a reminder of a previous thought about the difficulty of knowing the end of the Crisis while moving through it.

It is easy enough, now, to see postwar witch-hunts as a symptom of excess governmental power as the Fourth Turning winds down. There's a tendency to blame those who were involved, for not recognizing themselves what was happening - that with the most dangerous enemy vanquished, the nation will find new enemies with the support of the existing infrastructure.

Really, though, there isn't a trumpet that sounds when the peak of the Crisis is over, confirming that the most dangerous enemy ever is destroyed. Even with the recognition that history goes in cycles, the events marking the end of the Turning could still be seen as a local peak, and that the real dangers might yet be ahead. And sometimes that might really be the case. In 1940, it appeared that the Depression was gone - would it have been more foolish to think that A) the major disaster of the age had been overcome, or B) that the National Socialists were a European problem that Europe would have to handle? Five short years later,  was there more reason to think that the end of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were a well-fought ending to that Crisis, or would we need to fight the USSR to ensure a really peaceful world?

Which was about where the York family was when Edward took the throne.  It's not always obvious that the fight is over, the more so because sometimes it is not.