What Happens Post-Trump: The Path of Political Disintegration, Part 1

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Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump… Desperate ones do.

Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution

I LOVE that quote, but HATE it that (a) Tucker Carlson wrote it; (b) it is so snarky; and (c) it is so accurate. To be sure, I didn’t read Carlson’s book. I didn’t even know it was published in 2018. As Jungian synchronicity would have it, I was reading Peter Turchin’s book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, about his mathematical model of the ebb and flow of the cohesion of nations and empires. He’s brought big data to the study of history in a field that he calls cliodynamics, when I stumbled across the quote. However, that’s not the synchronous part. The synchronicity came to play when I read this request in friend-o-the-blog’s, Tengrain’s post on Mock Paper Scissors:

So ask yourself this: what comes next? For the sake of argument, let’s say that Trump loses BIGLY in November, but if the party exists only in the service of that man, then what happens in 2028 when he is not on the ballot? What do they do? What happens to a Cult of Personality when that Cult Leader is gone (for whatever reason)?

(And this might be a good question to pose to our pal and Scissorhead Calico Jack at the Psy of Life blog.)

And that is why 2028 is what interests me today.

Tengrain, Mock Paper Scissors, 2028

That’s where Turchin and cliodynamics comes in because they are attempting to mathematically model what happens next. Cliodynamics is a portmanteau of Clio and dynamics where Clio is the Greek Muse of history and dynamics is, well, dynamics.

Turchin claims that by using an intricate database of information on various complex human societies that have cropped up over the millennia, it is possible to determine some general organizing principles. From their analysis, political instability occurs regularly and is caused by “the same basic set of forces,” so it might could be possible to predict when instability could occur. Apparently, history unfolds in periodic cycles of political integration and disintegration. Indeed, when Turchin made like a common Jeane Dixon and predicted the Turbulent Twenties back in 2010, we all ignored him much to our chagrin. In case you missed it, that means we’re now in a period of disintegration.

This here is part 1 of our dive into Turchin’s cliodynamics model of political stability and instability. We’re going to look at the model. In part 2, we’ll be looking at the implications of the model. That’s the way these model things go. You gotta understand them before you can apply them, and it all takes words. Lots of words. TL;DR. Story of Ye Olde Blogge.

Understanding the Cliodynamics Model of Political Integration and Disintegration

The model focuses on two broad variables: the wealth gap and the number of elites in a society. The wealth gap can be seen in metrics like income and wages, the average height of the population and average life expectancy. Elites are defined as people with over one million dollars in assets and have social or political influence. Not every wealthy person is a Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber Burns; some are Kardashians.

The Widening Wealth Gap: Implications for Political Stability”

Here’s what we know about the wealth gap in the US at this time:

• WAGE DISPARITY: The good news is that if you have a university degree or an advanced degree, you’re income more than likely increased substantially since the 1970’s. The more you know, the more you made, so to speak. The bad news is that if you have a high school diploma or less, your wages decreased. Between 1976 and 2016, our wages have lost 30% of their value.
• UNIVERSITY TUITION: The solution then is to get everyone a degree so everyone can make more money, right? Oh, you naive fool. Don’t you know that university tuition has skyrocketed since Reagan decided that your Pell Grant should be taxed as income? It’s only gotten harder for the less educated to join the more educated and reap some of that windfall.
• HEIGHT:
  • You can tell a lot about the long-term health and well-being of a population if you just look at average height. Height is determined in the first twenty years of life and depends on nutrition, medical care, and how much heavy labor was required of the child. And you wonder why Republicans want children to be able to work longer hours at more dangerous jobs?
  • The US of A had the highest average height in the world in the 1700’s and average height increased until about 1830. It declined until 1900 when it trended upward. In 1970, we no longer were getting taller. Europe left us behind height-wise.
  • Funny how our stagnation in height matches our stagnation in wages.
• LIFE EXPECTANCY: Life expectancy for white Americans fell by one-tenth of a year in 2013. Worse, life expectancy for all Americans continued falling for three years! Then when #COVID-19 hit, life expectancy fell by 1.6 YEARS compared to 2014. Since the 1990’s we’ve seen these trends:
  • Life expectancy for those with degrees continued rising, but for the less well-educated, life expectancy declined bigly.
  • Deaths of despair, the poorly educated that I2I4 loves so so much are drinking, gunning, and opioiding themselves to death because living a Red State is oh, so much fun.
  • The death rates of real live dead Americans in their thirties and forties grew faster than those of their parents, starting in 2005. Parents were burying their children.

As the wealth gap widens, so does discontent and misery in the general population as can be seen by a variety of metrics. If we break these issues down by race, we see that Black and Brown Americans are hurt first and worst by all of the growing poverty. No wonder no one is feeling Bidenomics.

The Implications of the Overproduction of Elites

Here’s what Turchin says about elites and their role in the cycles of political integration and disintegration:

• WEALTH PUMP: The rich have to get their money from somewhere, and they get it from the not rich. As long as the gap between the top 10% and 90% remains small and constant, you know, like it was from say 1950 to 1980 or so, then we have a stable society, but after Reagan, things went into the shitter.
• SWELLING NUMBERS: You’d think that if the number of millionaires and billionaires per capita grew it would be a sign that the country was doing well, but it ain’t. People figure out how to get some of that money for themselves. The elites have babies. They want their children to have elite jobs or no jobs or whatever. The problem is there are only so many jobs for those elites to have. Turns out they aren’t great at creating jobs even for themselves much less the rest of us. So, what do they do? They sow unrest.
• DESTABILIZING EFFECT: There is nothing worse than a bored trust fund baby-man. They are white, entitled, and just don’t care about the rest of us. The best example of this is Tucker Carlson.
  • While Tucker Carlson isn’t really directly connected to the Swanson TV dinners folks — like John Kerry isn’t reaping the windfall of the Heinz Ketchup fortune — he is one of the overproduced elites that destabilize countries. It’s not like Carlson didn’t know the effect he was having on his audience.
  • The demographics of the 6 January insurrectionists tell us a bunch about it, too:
    • The states the people charged in the insurrection have been in proportion to the state’s populace except for Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana. They sent more than their fair share. Kentucky, sure, but Maryland? Really?
    • Fifty-two percent of the insurrectionists were from counties that Biden won. What? Before you go scratching your ass, there’s something else these counties have in common: they have all seen declines in the white, non-Hispanic populations. Hunh? Go figure.
    • The demographics of arrested insurrectionists: average age, 40; 40% are business owners or hold white-collar jobs; and only 9% were unemployed.
    • The median household income of the average Trump voter is $72,000.00 per year, which is well above the average.

What happens to all those folks who got their degrees, especially an advanced degree, but couldn’t get a job with it? The big joke in college towns is that your server has a useless PhD, right? We’ve got way more lawyers, engineers, MBA’s, and other professionals than we have jobs for them.

CONCLUSION: White America is populated by Tucker Carlsons only without the million-dollar-a-year TV job. These people are frustrated because they’ve been sold a bill of goods. They were told that if they worked hard and got a degree, daddy or mommy’s firm would give them a job, you know, legacy-style. Only that ain’t happening. Now, we’ve got a cadre of entitled frustrated angry brats looking for something to do to make their lives worthwhile.

Imagery Attribution

“USA Falling Apart” by shannonkringen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.