READING TIME: 5 minutes
SUMMARY: Elon Musk is a paper trillionaire, and it is a symbol of our times — the wealth pump is turned up to eleven, the gap is widening, and immiseration stalks the land. Peter Turchin says we’re in End Times facing political disintegration or forty years of suffering as we try to reintegrate. Worse, we know what to do to cure what ails us, only Republicans and the elite are fighting us the entire way.
KEY TERMS: Peter Turchin, End Times, Overproduced Elite, Wealth Pump, Wealth Gap, Election 2024, Great Depression, Great Recession, Republicans, Elite
COMMENT: Is it just me or are times feeling pretty desperate? Do you think the electorate responds to the desperation and elects Democrats during hard times?
End Times Herald: Election 2024
Let’s take a trip in the WABAC machine (Let me know in the comments if you get the reference. Inquiring minds — mine — want to know!) and return to the night of 5 November 2024, the night of the last US presidential election. Do you remember how you felt as the vote totals came rolling in, and it started to become clear that El Gran Jefe Estúpido would win?
It just felt surreal to me. I felt dissociated. And, after the nausea dissipated and a restless night’s sleep, depressed. I remained depressed for the next few months. I was withdrawn and despondent. I couldn’t believe we would return the beast to the White House. I wouldn’t believe it.
Trump didn’t even win by that much. He didn’t get the most votes of any presidential candidate in history. That honor goes to America’s Grandpa, Joe Biden. He only got 312 Electoral College votes — just eight more than 2016. Neither one of them amounted to a decisive victory. And he only won a plurality of the popular vote, not a majority — Thank you California! But, he did flip all seven of the so-called battleground states.
I had thought that with Biden’s election, we were through the Grifting Glass, putting our excursion into anti-democratic authoritarian minority rule in the rearview mirror. Trump’s humiliating loss in 2020 — the Electoral Collage totals were nearly identical to those of 2016 — would give the GOP a graceful way to step away from open oligarchy and back into the fold of democratic norms. But somehow the story of Biden So Old became theme of 2024 — how much did they pay the 77 year-old 29 year House back bencher, Lloyd Doggett, to get that ball rolling? Huh, Lloyd? How much you make off that? — instead of the 6 January Insurrection and shambolic #COVID19 response.
Turchin’ End Times
Returning the Orange Oaf and his Merry Band of Grifters to run the government showed that we were not through Peter Turchin’s ten years of political disintegration and moving into reintegration. It showed that we were firmly in his End Times, the twenty to forty years of struggle before a return to equanimity is possible.
Back in 2023, I read Peter Turchin’s book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration and wrote two posts. Part 1 summarizes his theory of the two hundred odd year cycle of political integration and disintegration that countries go through. And, the other demonstrates how we were right smack dab in the middle of it and how Biden’s policies were the right moves to lead us back to integration.
Turchin’s use of the term End Times doesn’t refer to the whole world ending because of an angry and wrathful God’s spite or due to a benevolent and kind God’s grace. We’re talking the end of a polity like we’ve flirted with several times before. The Civil War. The Great Depression. The Turbulent Sixties. The Great Recession. The #COVID19 Shambles.
The Great Depression, Example of Political Disintegration
Turchin uses the Great Depression as the perfect illustration of his theory. It occurred in the window of his two hundred odd year time frame for political disintegration, albeit on the shorter ended since it was only one hundred fifty years after our founding. Yet, it was a severe enough crisis that the elites voluntarily stopped their raping and pillaging of the country to cooperate with us peons to save the system. The threat to the country and the world was so dire that they willingly allowed their number — only millionaires at that the time — to be halved by FDR’s economic reforms. Halved. Can you imagine our own billionaires and trillionaire sacrificing themselves for the good of the country? I’ll wait for you to stop laughing and climb back into your chair. Anywho, the US entered into a period of political integration that lasted about thirty or forty years or about what Turchin predicts for successful recovery from disintegration.
Wealth Gaps & Overproduced Elites Drive the End Times
These periods of political disintegration are driven by widening wealth gaps and an overproduction of elites. We all get the wealth gap, right? The difference between the wealth held by the top one to ten percent and the that held by the rest of us. It is a precise measure and predictor of social unrest. The larger it is, the more likely social unrest becomes. The poster child is the French Revolution. The “let them eat cake” moment that still resonates today.
Tucker Carlson is the embodiment of an over produced elite, and I’m not talking about his make up and coif, either. I’m talking about him being the scion of a wealthy family. Unable to fill his daddy’s journalistic boots, Tucker drifted from job to job and ideology to ideology trying to find purpose and meaning in life. Like many of the offspring of the wealthy, he grew frustrated that family name and wealth hadn’t provided him the life he had been promised, so he finally settled on the only option left to him, shit-slinging white supremacist. If bored twenty year olds are a problem every culture has to deal with, bored wealthy forty year olds are the harbinger of calamity and disaster.
The Great Recession: Obama to the Rescue & Republican Sabotage
Seventy-eight years later, the Great Recession fell upon us alike a ton of bricks dropped from the heavens. It was our generation’s wake up call that the wealth gap had grown to a chasm and that our over produced elites were weighing the entire country down. We responded like we had so many times in the past, we overwhelmingly elected a Democratic president who immediately set about putting together the economic policies that would tame the deficit — read that as transfer middle class wealth to the elite — and set the country on the course to political integration.
Unfortunately, the Great Recession didn’t quite scare the elites as much as the Great Depression had, so the Republican Party hobbled Obama’s Recovery Act, receiving exactly zero House Republican votes and only three Senate Republicans. They forced so many compromises that it barely had the spending necessary to rescue the economy and extended the immiseration of real live suffering Americans for years as we waited on the economy to rebound.
The #COVID19 Pandemic: Biden to the Rescue & Republican Sabotage
Twelve years later with the deficit ballooning after Trump’s newest round of Trickle Down tax cuts to the rich — read that as transferring middle class wealth to the elite — already damaging the economy, the #COVID19 pandemic struck and really put the whammy on us. Not only did over a million of us die unnecessarily, millions more suffered the longer term effects of having been sticken with an avoidable preventable severe disease, we had infected the economy with supply chain shortages and bottlenecks. And, the country turned, like it always does in times of crisis, to a Democratic president to set things right.
Biden had the right medicine for what ailed us, too. He engineered the softest landing of the #COVID19-wrecked economy of any country in the world, using the economic principles that FDR and Obama did. He built a New Dealish response featuring expanded child tax credits — FDR and LBJ lifted our elderly out of poverty; Biden lifted children out of poverty — infrastructure investment, antitrust enforcement, and the greening of America. It was an effective closure of the wealth pump that would slow if not end the transfer of middle class wealth to the elite that Republicans had championed since Reagan.
The wealth pump had so bloated the upper class with middle class money that it nearly capsized the nation twice in recent times. The solution is clear and the Republicans fought both efforts, Obama’s and Biden’s. We had two chances at the reintegration Turchin says it takes a generation to pull off. And, our Merry Band of Grifters made sure each were either watered down or stillborn.
We’ve had too much experience with spending our way out of the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and economic crises to not understand how this works. Not only do Republicans want to drown the federal government in the bathtub, they want to drown the entire damn democracy. They know what they are doing. At worst, they will end American democracy and usher in an era of global oligarchy condemning billions to misery. At best, they will condemn America to forty more years of struggle and immiseration to restore our democracy and our country to stability.
Luckily, we have two more chances to mitigate the suffering that the Republicans are inflicting on us. We can reign in this madness in the 2026 midterms by electing a Democratic Congress and turn, once again, to a Democratic president in 2028 to right the ship of state.
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I’ve been thinking about the anti-democratic mindset as world view, aside from drives of greed, control (a word I prefer to “power” from a systems point of view), and racism. It come down to this:
If someone believes in a god who is the Creator, Law Giver, Judge, and Ultimate and Infallible Authority, they live in an authoritarian universe in which all legitimate authority passes down from that source through levels of hierarchy, enforcing a well defined set of values, prohibitions, permissions, and obligations, which their God says should apply to all people. All that may be in some degree less intense if they imagine a benevolent and merciful teacher type of deity rather than a strict, judgemental one prone to anger, but the basic structure of reality remains the same.
In Christianity writ large, the two versions of the deity correspond to the Jesus of the Gospels, and the other, to the Imperial Jesus of “The Book Of Revelation” which the Counsel of Nicea included in the Cannon as part of making The Church an arm of empire.
Democracy, real democracy of human defined goals and values does not fit well in that kind of mind.
Howdy Bob!
You’re right that the hierarchical strata that the one supreme being omniscient creator of all sets up is antithetical to democracy. In those human adherents, it requires narcissism. The person or persons at the top are “special.” They deserve exceptions to the rules the rest of us live by to be made for them. They are better than everyone else below them.
Democracy is the recognition that if we can tame our narcissism, then we are all much better off working cooperatively, collectively, collaboratively. It’s the same problem in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, though. Once someone breaks the trust, it is hell getting it back again.
Looking back across the history of the country, though. We’ve been fighting this same fight all along. There is the side of the oligarchs exemplified by the slaveocracy of the Confederacy and the abolitionists and suffragettes. I don’t know that we’ll ever actually win — which also means we don’t ever actually lose? — but only beat them back for a short period of time.
Huzzah!
Jack
It’s not just us, and not just recent history. It was written about in Athens, and Rome, and everywhere else the notion of democracy has raised it’s head. France beheaded a king and wound up with an emperor for a while. Real democracy is work. Worse, it requires that discipline of taming narcissism. But it can be done.
Starting with the inception of democracy, people have been using it as a way to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others and the governed. The other piece of that is is that once the democratic ideal takes root, people rarely tolerate devating from it for long.
One of the long-term theses I work with is that democracy never really took root in the Deep South and Appalachia, which explains why the slavers and their successors are always holding the reins of the authoritarian endeavors when they arise.
Jack
The point at which the democratic idea began to take root, or at least had a chance to, was Reconstruction. It was quickly squashed. It raised it’s head again when some Southern cities began to industrialize and develop prosperous Black communities (I’m thinking of Wilmington, NC and Tulsa, OK). Those bloomings were savagely cut down.
Howdy Bob!
Like so much else in the US, the firmness of the conception of democracy directly depends on where in the country you are. The Civil War Union states are all part of the portion of the country where democracy had already been firmly planted. The Confederacy was the part of the country where democracy was being actively resisted and supplanted. The western parts of the country are more democratic than the Old South but, perhaps, less so than the Union, with the possible exception of the Pacific coast strip of California, Oregon, and Washington.
And, racial prejudice has been alive and well in the US since before the beginning, just varying in how explicitly it can be expressed.
One of the things that concerns me most is just how readily and quickly a significant minority of the population jumped on the authoritarian white supremacy bandwagon.
Jack
They were already there, waiting for somebody to come to start it up and get it moving, waiting for permission to say in public what they had been thinking all along.
As a teenager and young man, I had been led to believe that racism was on its way out. It was taboo and no one really believed in racist rhetoric. I find it shocking that it isn’t the case. Utterly shocking. But, those people are there, have always been there, and , I’m afraid, will always be there.
Jack
Some recent scientific findings have caught my attention in this regard.
What happens when a large portion of at least one generation (possibly two) of a large population grow up to be cognitively compromised? (And this finding is just one recent example)
https://neurosciencenews.com/maternal-fructose-epigenetic-brain-development-30983/
And then, a pervasive technology makes them cognitively lazy?
https://neurosciencenews.com/effort-recalibration-digital-media-cognition-30985/
And, when these people are offered simplistic pseudo-solutions to their grievances and feelings of lack of agency in their lives?
It occurs to me that the main draw in any Populist movement, campaign, or platform, Left, Right or Center, is offering people a feeling of agency who have been lacking that.
Howdy Bob!
I saw the second article about social media recalibrating our brains — very concerning, but explains why it seems like our attention span has been shortened, but when measured, it hasn’t been. I missed the first one, so I appreciate the link.
Social media seems like it shortcuts our sense of agency. We are even more passive consumers of even smaller bits of information than we were when the TV came onto the scene. At least with the TV we could go outside and enact the shows we were watching. How many of us played Star Trek, the Lone Ranger, or the Rifleman? I don’t think very many of us played Bonanza, though. Hunh. Go figure. At best, kids nowadays can try to film whatever challenge comes across their social media.
We are all vulnerable to simplistic pseudo-solutions. Weakening our ability to think critically and evaluate incoming messages just makes us more vulnerable to manipulation, and, frankly, allows the wealthy manipulators to feel even more justified in doing it.
That’s a hellva one-two punch.
Huzzah!
Jack
Jack….do you see this country capable of healing itself as it stands today? I wish I could say yes but I doubt it more and more. chuq
Howdy Chuq!
I do see the country as capable of healing itself.The thing is sensitivity to differences, tolerance, and acceptance all existence on a continuum. Some of us are just much more sensitive to physical differences, including skin color and gender markers, and much less tolerant and accepting of them. We also exist on a continuum of authoritarianism. There are some of us who prefer authoritarian governments. But, the biggest thing is that we need to elect people who are dedicated to democracy, following the law, and less interested in corruption. We do that and we can start to heal. If we don’t, we won’t.
Blog On, Sibling!
Jack
The diagnosis seems correct. So does the prescription.
Howdy Bob!
I’ve been really impressed by Turchin’s work. Unfortunately, his sub stack is pay walled.
I think his findings are reliable. Human beings are very similar in the ways we deal with situations, so if you get a big enough data set, you start to have reliability. He’s achieved that threshold.
I still find it difficult to accept that there are people in the country who are actively working to destroy our democracy. It just astonishes me everytime I confront it, but it is true. The Republican Party and many of the one percent do not want democracy.
Huzzah!
Jack