Peter Turchin Predicts: One Last Chance to Avoid End Times Political Disintegration

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 I was withdrawn and despondent.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.

Image Attribution

This image was found on WikiMedia Commons and has a Creative Commons license.