What Happens Post Trump: There’s Good News but Mostly Bad News

I2I4, the rotund, dull-orange, short-fingered, vulgar Star Wars inept larceny bot, will win the Republican nomination no matter what happens. He doesn’t need to campaign. He doesn’t need to run commercials. He doesn’t need to debate. He just needs to be on the ballot. The MAGA base will take care of the rest. That’s the bad news, I guess.

The good news is that This really is Trump’s swan song. This is the end of I2I4. He won’t be a factor after 2024… unless he actually wins. Well, there is that possibility. However, the likelihood is that he’ll lose. He’ll continue to grumble and piss and moan, but his influence will wane and MAGA will drift off to do whatever it is MAGA types do with their free time.

Even though, we’re likely to be done with Trump, it doesn’t mean that our democracy is safe. Republicans are all in on authoritarianism, oligarchy, kleptocracy, and fascism. They really do mean to continue weakening our democracy until it is just a hollowed out carcass stuffed with the rot of autocracy. Do you think Maddog Greene, Gym Jordan, Cancun Cruz, Sister Lindsey or any of the rest of the crew are going to quit the grift just because I2I4 has left center stage?

I2I4 is a symptom not a cause of what is happening to us right now. He’s the magicians distraction, if magicians used morbidly obese poorly dressed vulgar stage assistants. He’s the wrecking ball that the GOP is using to hammer our democracy into rubles — Hammer it into rubles… RUBLES! Get it, rubles? Not rubble? Oh, man, sometimes I just crack myself up.

Welcome to part 2 of our series on the cliodynamics model of political integration and disintegration. In part 1, we looked at the basics of the model, and, now, we’ll apply the findings of the model to our current situation to see what might be in store for us in the years ahead.

Cliodynamics and the Model of Political Integration and Disintegration Briefly Explained

Cliodynamic is the application of deep data to the study of history as developed by Peter Turchin and explained in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Reliable data from various historical societies is encoded in a large database, the numbers are crunched to determine which factors were pertinent to the rise and fall of each society, and then sifted through to find trends and a mathematical model. The model has been tested by using data from societies not in the data set to predict their outcomes. All of this was inspired by Tengrain’s post on Mock Paper Scissors wondering whither the Republican Party would be going post-Trump.

The Role of the Wealth Gap and the Wealth Pump in Political Disintegration

One of the key factors in this model is the wealth gap and the wealth pump. The wealth gap is the difference in wealth that is controlled by the top 10% of the population compared to the bottom 90%. When that gap grows, the model predicts trouble. The wealth pump is the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population to the top 10% causing the wealth gap to widen.

Money has to go somewhere, so, if the middle class isn’t saving or spending its money, it’s going to the 10% through the obscene Republican tax cuts. Given that we’ve gone through four iterations of these tax cuts, the wealth pump has been turned up to eleven. They’ve been milking us for every farthing since Reagan. It’s no wonder the wealth gap has grown to Grand Canyon proportions and no one in the middle class feels like they can get ahead no matter how many jobs they work. That’s the real reason everyone no one is feeling Bidenomics.

The Role of the Overproduction of Elites in Political Disintegration

Seriously, every society who has an over-production of elites and a huge wealth gap has ended up in trouble. There are only so many positions for the well-heeled to occupy and right now we’ve got too many elites and not enough dead-end jobs for them. It used to be that you could shunt them off to ambassadorships or the senate or give them two billion in petty cash and let them go play with themselves in a corner. Every room has only got four corners…

Because the number of elites suckling at the teat of the middle class has sky rocketed, there is now a bloated burgeoning bored band of elites who cannot find anything useful to do other than cause trouble like common Tucker Carlsons or Steve Bannons.

The Possible Outcomes of Political Disintegration

According to Turchin’s analysis, most countries that are going through what we’re going through right now, experience a decline in overall population or a decline in the number of elites either through downward mobility or death. Here’s a summary of his findings:

• POPULATION LOSS: Half of the societies studied experienced a decline in their population. Let’s see we’re having deaths of despair and shorter life-expectancy. At the very least, our population — our white population — isn’t growing.
• MAJOR EPIDEMIC: Thirty percent had a major epidemic that decimated the population. We did have the #COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to a dramatically shorter live expectancy.
• DOWNWARD MOBILITY: Sixty-six percent lost elites to the lower classes due to poor economic performance. The Great Recession certainly set us back, but we’ve been growing new millionaires and billionaires like they was bamboo rabbits.
• EXTERMINATION: While none literally ate their rich, as the saying goes, one-sixth did genocide the rich. Tempting as it is, it does go against all of our liberal values.
• ASSASSINATION: Forty percent had their “ruler” assassinated. Aren’t you surprised that we haven’t had an assassination or real solid attempt yet? I know I am.
• CIVIL WAR & REVOLUTION: Seventy-five percent experienced civil war or revolution or some combination of the two. And, you wonder why the right is constantly harping on about civil war.
• DISSOLUTION: Sixty percent resulted in the state disintegrating into pieces or being conquered, either way, it ceased to exist. We tried and failed in the 1860’s to dissolve the country, maybe we’ll succeed this time.

A few states were able to avoid these fates. They did so by shutting off the wealth pump and weaning the elite from seemingly endless bounty of middle class wages. The two best examples we can use are the Great Depression and Great Recession.

Lessons in Responding to Political Disintegration from the Great Depression

They were so frightened, that they were willing to join FDR’s Big New Fucking Deal that ushered in nearly fifty years of social cooperation between the elites, white workers — No one was so frightened that they thought they’d have to include the Blacks in this deal — and government. White workers could unionize and share more fully in the profits generated from their labor. The social safety net would be funded by higher tax rates on corporations and large incomes. The Southern aristocracy went along with it because Blacks would continue to suffer.

During the Great Depression, the remaining elites were genuinely afraid that there would be a communist revolution in the country. The Great Depression halved the number of millionaires over night.

That’s how disaster was averted in the Great Depression. It was a crisis of such magnitude that the wealthy made a bargain with the devil to stave off complete disaster, and the US entered into a period of prosperity unmatched in human history.

Lessons from the Great Recession

During the Great Recession, Republicans were drug kicking and screaming to the negotiating table and we barely passed The American Recovery and Rescue Act. No House Republican voted for the act, and only three Senate Republicans did. And, it barely did the job, hobbling the recovery. There was no compromise between elites, workers, and government in the face of the vast immiseration sweeping our land. The Republicans did not meet the moment with empathy and concern, they met it with an eye for political advantage.

Cliodynamics: The Good News and the Bad News

Cliodynamics suggests that Biden is right. The solution to the problems that ail us is to cut off the wealth pump and tame the overproduction of elites. That’s the essence f Bidenomics. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the Republican Party is completely irredeemable. Our modern history has been that Republicans destroy the economy with their tax cuts to the wealthy, Democrats restore the economy, only for the cycle to repeat. It took the Great Depression to stem the flow from the wealth pump to the elites and force them to address the structural issues in our society. We’ve now been through four crises, the Great Recession, the #COVID-19 pandemic, the Insurrection, and a growing climate crisis. None of them appear to be cracking the hard-edged shell of short-term self-interest that Republicans have encapsulated themselves with.

I can only assume that means that a greater more horrific and violent crisis is looming on the near horizon. Perhaps, if I2I4 loses, and Biden’s vision of growing the economy from the middle class out, we might avoid the worst of it. But, bad stuff, really bad stuff, is about to happen unless we rally around Biden and elect Democrats up and down the ticket in 2024.

Image Attribution

“Councilmember Brooks Hosts Rally for Philly Wealth Tax 9-21-2022” by PHL Council is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.