Stocks

From here.

It is an open secret that the stock market in the U.S. is currently being driven by fewer than a dozen wildly overvalued tech stocks that account for the lion's share of it's growth (like the ones shown above, particularly Tesla and SpaceX).

The stock market is not particularly good at accurately estimating the true value of public held companies.

Inaccurate stock prices are an objectively bad thing at the level of the aggregate economy, because they cause investment capital to be misallocated. Too much money is allocated to investments that don't have as good of a likely return on investment, while too little money is allocated to investments that could produce better returns. And, since the stock market is huge, the economic consequences of these misallocations of investment capital on the economy are huge and negative.

Inaccurate asset prices also allocate personal wealth to people who hype their stocks to be worth more than they really are to stupid investors, basically, systemically creating immense returns to dishonesty.

Asset price bubbles aren't bad for everyone. There are two basic ways you can profit from them. One is to invest in the bubble asset despite knowing that it is overvalued, to ride its irrational surge in price, and to get out before the bubble pops. The other is to short the bubble asset and profit when the bubble pops, but this requires your short to be timed for when the bubble pops.

Why is the stock market so bad at pricing these stocks despite the fact that some of the smartest people in the country are employed to analyze and act on this data, and despite the fact that there is a lot of very good quality data about publicly held companies that can be used to value them accurately that is available?

One possibility is that a lot of investors in the stock market are on autopilot trading schemes, like index funds, that are free riding off the people who are actively trading individual stocks, that increasing numbers of ill-informed investors are actively trading individuals stocks as it has become easier to do so, and that the bad decisions of this dumb money is being amplified by autopilot trading.

Another explanation, not necessarily inconsistent with the first, is that this is a generational effect. Baby boomers are moving into their final years of employment and into retirement. They have immense stock market wealth. They are retired and bored, so they try actively trading individual stocks, and they are pouring money into the stock market that exceeds the extent to which stocks have reasonable values (as are individuals who save for retirement believing Social Security to be in peril and knowing that unlike Boomers, they have no defined benefit pensions). Due to the geriatric character of people with power who know what is going on, this is not a problem that they want to solve because they benefit from overvalued stocks in their retirement when they are living off of their investments. Political momentum for reform will come when the Boomers retire or when the bubble collapses, whichever comes first (and asset price bubbles inevitably collapse sooner or later even though the timing of when the bubble pops is notoriously difficult to estimate).

If the bubble sustains itself until the Boomers are mostly dead, the pain will be felt by Generation X and to a lesser extent Millennials (who will at least have more time to recover), in other words, by people like me.

40 Acres

An acre was traditionally meant to be the amount of land that a farmer could plow in a day with a farm animal's assistance.

40 acres was traditionally the amount of land necessary for a single family of unmechanized subsistence farms to support themselves. It is the most typical economic unit in which farmland and vacant land is sold, even today.

40 acres and a mule was what post-U.S. Civil War advocates for reparations to former slaves had advocated for (and obviously, did not achieve).

A square 40 acre plot is a quarter mile on each side (a.k.a. 1320 feet a.k.a. 440 yards), with a one mile circumference and a 16th of a square mile area.

The population density of subsistence farmers at this traditional pre-modern scale is about 100 people per square mile.

A survey township has 36 square miles (6 miles a side) and was traditionally the presumptive size of the smallest unit of local government, which at subsistence farming population density would have had about 3,600 people, and perhaps a bit more for a hamlet of perhaps 400 people who would make up the 10% or so of non-farmers who would have been present in a predominantly subsistence farming pre-modern society at the technology level that would have prevailed around the time of the American Revolution (250 years ago), so it might have had a total population of about 4,000 people. Non-farmers in hamlets like this would often include clergy, craftsmen in the skilled trades, doctors, veterinarians, and merchants.

In the brief period where there was democratic government and a predominantly pre-modern subsistence farming economy, people under age twenty-one couldn't vote, and neither could women, so perhaps 400-500 of those people would have been eligible to vote and/or participate in town meetings (in areas without slavery, as slaves couldn't vote either and were usually used to farm cash crops in any case).

In townships that were not governed in the town meeting style of New England towns, a typical town council would have had three elected trustees and sometimes an elected town clerk as well, so about one voter per 100 to 167 people would have been elected officials. This rate is similar to the rate at which people serve as precinct organizers in modern political parties.

A community of this size might have a single church that doubled as a community center and while pre-mechanized subsistence farming largely predated universal public education, a township would typically have something on the order of 2,000 school age children.

In that era about a quarter of children would have died in their first year and about half would have died before reaching adulthood. In any given childbirth, about 1% of pregnant mothers would have died in childbirth, and a typical woman would give birth six to eight times in a lifetime, leading to an excess of widowers over widows. There would be post-menopause age grandmothers in the community, but far fewer, proportionately, than there are today. Most elderly people would have lived with extended family. Then, as now, about a third of pregnancies would have ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth.

It would be unusual for a subsistence farming community to have more than a handful of people with post-secondary education (perhaps a priest and a government official or lawyer), and the percentage of people with the equivalent of a full high school education today would have been comparable to the percentage of people with graduate degrees today, although in some regions, a significant number of people without formal second education would nonetheless have been quite well-read autodidacts. Journalists and school teachers and merchants would typically not have a post-secondary education and would often not have the equivalent of a high school diploma today.

How We Got Here, And Where We Might Go Next

Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.

Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.

This post surveys some of the possible answers.

An institutionalist approach

An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy. 

This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).

Fundamentally Broken Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.

Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.

Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.

Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.

Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.

Culture

The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.

This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.

Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules. 

There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.

The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.

For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.

This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.

Malleable culture

One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.

A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration. 

In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.

Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.

Static culture

In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.

It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.

In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.

Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.

This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.

This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.

More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.

Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.

Environmentally determined culture

A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.

While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.

Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households. 

Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households. 

Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties. 

Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.

Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.

Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.

The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.

Synthesis

Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true. 

Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.

On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.

If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.

The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."

Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).

In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.

Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.

How We Got Here

Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.

Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.

The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.

Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.

Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.

Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.

Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.

People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair. 

A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.

We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.

Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.

Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.

The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right. 

While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.

What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?

I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.

One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from  the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.

The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon. 

If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century. 

This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.

There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.

One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.

Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).

If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.

Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).

Other 30-90 Year Time Horizon Predictions

In my previous post, Oil and Water, I made some predictions on a 30-90 year time horizon. 

What are some other predictions I'd make in that time frame?

* The U.S. birthrate will fall significantly from current levels, and the U.S. population will decline. Later in that time period, peak global population will be reached as Sub-Saharan Africa reaches is demographic transition, and the global population will start to fall.

* Life expectancies will rise significantly, not only in the less developed world, but in the developed world. Many diseases that are commonplace today with be virtually eliminated or will become much more effectively treatable. These include: M.S., lupus, gum disease, most common STDs, many kinds of cancer, and conditions like Down's Syndrome and cerebral palsy.

* The proportion of people who are non-religious will reach a majority in the U.S. Mainline Protestantism will take the biggest hit. Evangelical Christianity will become much less influential politically and much less conservative as it undergoes generational transitions of leadership. Mormons will experience some of the smaller declines among Christian and Christian adjacent faiths.

* Legacy communications technologies like shortwave radio, a.m. radio, landline phone service, and broadcast television will finally go dark.

* Most global military forces, including the U.S. military, will stop using manned tanks.

* Large surface combatant naval ships will become more scarce globally.

* Everyone's whole genome will routinely be recorded as an infant.

* Existing U.S. race categories will break down and be re-conceptualized as more and more Americans are mixed race.

* There will be at least one major political-economic catastrophe that greatly reduces income inequality.

* Drugs like marijuana and psychedelics which are just being legalized now, will not be re-criminalized.

* Putin's regime will collapse, possibly accompanied by a further break up of the components of the Russian state, and will be replaced by a flawed democratic regime or regimes that are still less authoritarian than the current regime.

* China and the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will join the ranks of fully developed countries.

* The Palestinian territories of Israel will cease to be. There are multiple, hard to predict scenarios regarding how this comes about. Also, since this is such a hot topic (managing fights over Israeli-Palestinian issues was the worst part of being a moderator at Politics.SE), I want to make clear that this does not reflect a preference about whether this is good or bad, and instead simply represents a prediction about what is likely to happen, particularly in light of recent geopolitical developments in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Southern Lebanon, especially since the events of October 7, 2023, and also in light of trends in Israeli-Palestinian relations during the 21st century (which we are more than a quarter of the way through, yipes!).

* Moderate and modernist tendencies within Islam will eventually start to prevail over extreme Islamist factions in most countries. This will happen earliest in countries where fossil fuel production is the least important part of the economy on a percentage basis.

* Cryptocurrencies will go out of style and will be relegated to a historical curiosity.

* The number of people employed to transport goods will dramatically decrease.

* Drones in all transportation modes, and sessile automated systems will pervasively influence both civilian life and the nature of military conflicts, transforming both profoundly.

* Global manufacturing employment will decrease to due increased automation and Africa will become a manufacturing center due to its cheap labor and permissive regulatory environment, once political stabilization is achieved.

* A much larger share of construction employment will work in factories making large subcomponents of buildings to be transported to the building site for final assembly.

* Economic growth rates will start to stagnate, especially outside Africa.

* People on Earth will launch a space probe to the nearest star, although it probably will not yet have reached its destination and will be in deep space moving very fast towards its destination. In the meantime, it will function as a deep space, space telescope.

* Social norms will increasingly devalue privacy.

* Popular consumer software will become much less buggy, and will eventually get easier to use, after somebody sees the potential for profit in improving on the widely known defects of the current leading software programs in wide consumer or business use.

* The concept of dark matter will be abandoned in favor of some gravitational law based explanation for phenomena attributed to dark matter. This will probably also be the case with dark energy, and the time period half half a century to a century when these theories were the conventional wisdom will be known as the dark ages of astronomy and cosmology.

* While it will never die entirely, I suspect that beyond the Standard Model physics research will lose a lot of luster and support and empirical evidence for it becomes more scarce with an additional generation or three of improved high energy physics experiments that further narrow the gaps where it could play a role, even though physicists will never entirely abandon this pursuit. 

* There are also at least even odds in this time period that theoretical explanations for most of the two dozen experimentally measured physical constants of the Standard Model will be found. Indeed, going towards the next point, this may be a particularly promising place for quantum computing and AI to play a role.

* Quantum computing will be developed, but it will only make much of a difference in specialized applications. Quantum computing seems particularly promising for applications like high energy physics (especially QCD), numerical general relativity capturing non-perturbative effects there, and cryptography.

* I'd be remiss not to mention it, as this time from is critical for AI, but I don't have strong predictions about the impact of AI and machine learning. It seems most useful practically in efficiently analyzing big data sets, for doing something similar to Bayesian statistical analysis to discovery hidden subtle patterns in data,  for digesting research information quickly for people who don't need to understand it in depth, in serving as an efficiency amplifier for computer programmers and other people who write text whose quality isn't important, and for automating customer service, and for automating fairly narrow tasks and jobs even if they require high level "thinking" (as opposed to more general unstructured roles). Visual image interpretation is further down the line but we're getting there. The impact of generative creative fields like art, fiction, and audio-visual presentations is hard to gauge - will it be a curiosity and fad, a tool for serious creators to increase efficiency as in other fields, or will it be transformative in ways unforeseen. And, the non-transparency of AI will continue to be an ongoing issue, although it is hard to know if its current tendency to hallucinate and have no sense of what is true or not is an early beta test version bug or if it is likely to be an ongoing issue. AI alignment as we progress toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) and artificial super-intelligence is also a key issue with some signs already emerging of consciousness and self-preservation tactics by AI models and social cooperation between AI models already starting to emerge. I don't see it as an apocalyptic or existential threat, but there are definitely serious risks involved in the technology, many of which are unknown unknowns.

* The mix of jobs in the job market will change a lot, with many traditional job categories shrinking a great deal and replaced but large numbers of new jobs in sectors that we barely even conceptualize as distinct job roles now. This structural change in the job market will have immense, but hard to predict in detail, political implications.

Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

New Almanac Data Points

I have my 2026 World Almanac now and there are some statistics I keep a close eye on.

* As of March 31, 2025, the U.S. had 1,307,679 active duty military personnel. This is as small as the U.S. military has been by that measure since before World War II. At its peak, it was more than 50% bigger. Roughly 55% of U.S. active duty military personnel are non-Hispanic white men (with significant variation from one military service to another).

* Birth rates for women in all age categories under age 25 were at their lowest for all of recorded history and prehistory in North America.

* Infant mortality has increased each year since 2020. The anti-vax movement and the impact of the ban on abortions in many states could be factors.

Cheese Is Good, Teens Are Tame, Crime Is Down, Lot Of Americans Are Immigrants

* A study linked eating cheese to lower dementia risk.

* Teen alcohol, nicotine, and drug use in the U.S. is at record lows, and cocaine and heroin use, while not at record lows, it much lower than it was a few decades ago.

Teen use of alcohol, nicotine and marijuana remains at record lows, according to national survey results released Wednesday. . . .

Two-thirds of 12th graders this year said they hadn’t used alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or electronic cigarettes in the previous 30 days. Thirty years ago — before the advent of e-cigarettes — the figure was closer to about one-third.

Among 10th graders, 82% said they hadn’t used any of those substances recently. Among eighth graders, 91% didn’t use any of them. Both are records for those ages in the annual survey. . . .

The new results come from the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey, run by the University of Michigan. The annual survey has been operating since 1975 and has long been considered a top source of national data on teen substance abuse. This year’s findings are based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 in schools across the country. It was conducted from February to June this year.

Teen drug use has been gradually declining for decades, and fell dramatically at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when students across the country were told not to go to schools and to avoid parties or other gatherings. Experts expected at least a bit of a rebound as pandemic restrictions eased, but that hasn’t happened.

The 2025 results show no increases in teens’ use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or nicotine vapes in any of the three grade levels. In 2024, researchers had noted an uptick in the use of nicotine pouches, but that too held steady this year, the survey found.

Energy drinks are as popular as ever, with daily consumption reported by 23% of 12th graders, 20% of 10th graders and 18% of eighth graders.

The survey also found a striking increase in heroin use. Use by 12th graders in the previous 12 months rose to 0.9% in 2025, from 0.2% the year before. Use by 10th graders hit 0.5%, up from 0.1%. And use by eighth graders also rose to 0.5%, up from 0.2%.

Cocaine use held steady for 10th graders, but rose for eighth graders — to 0.6% — and 12th graders — to 1.4%.

Teen heroin and cocaine use are “leagues below what they were decades ago,” but the increases warrant close monitoring, said Richard Miech, survey team lead at the University of Michigan.

The teen heroin and cocaine figures are small enough that they could just be mostly a statistical random sampling variation.

* Teens in the U.S. are having sex less (from an AP news story of May 13, 2023):

[A]ccording to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . . . 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.

Teen pregnancies and the teen birthrate are also at record lows for all of history and prehistory in North America.

* As noted in the previous post, property crime rates are at record lows. And, violent crime rates are also very low.

* Meanwhile, prior to Trump taking office, the percentage of Americans that were foreign born was at an all time high.

Extinction Burst!

A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.

This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.

The Complicated Story Of MAGA Politics

The modern Democratic party operates to a great extent like politics is supposed to work in Civics 101, and follow on political theory says that it is supposed to. It has found policies, that its leaders believe are good ones for the nation, that can unite a diverse big tent coalition. Democrats believe that government can be a force for good and want to use it the implement policies that make the world a better place. They go to great lengths to demonstrate with evidence that their policies do indeed do so. They aren't saints, but they also view stupidity, bad character, and malice in their leaders negatively and are generally happy to cast out leaders who demonstrate those traits.

The Republican party, in living history, was a pretty similar organization and movement that assembled a different bundle of policies to unite a different, smaller tent coalition.

But, that Republican party is almost gone and rapidly dissolving, even though most of its top leaders got their political start in that party.

The MAGA Republican party and movement, in contrast, is something else entirely. It absolutely still has its roots in the pre-FDR solid south Democratic party, in the Dixiecrats, and in the post-Southern strategy anti-civil rights Republican party. But unlike the Republican party that preceded it, it doesn't fit the Civics 101 model.

MAGA Republicans don't accept a lot of the bipartisan consensus about many aspects of policy making and governing that preceded it. It is isolationist. It is anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-NATO, and unconcerned about alliances with foreign dictators. It has no respect for expertise. It doesn't think that government does anything good (and is oblivious to the benefits that its members receive from government), so it isn't troubled by having the government run by incompetent fools. It has strong authoritarian leanings, no commitment to democratic ideals, and little concern for the rule of law. It sees power as a tool to utilize to fight culture wars and its political opponents, rather than as a means to advance the greater good

Republican political leaders know perfectly well that most of President Trump's executive branch appointees, like RFK, Jr., are incompetent idiots whose only redeeming quality is their momentary personal loyalty to Trump. Most of them are also well aware that many of the policies that Trump is pushing for are objectively bad ones.

Then why do these Republican leaders back Trump anyway?

They can read the room. They know that they face mafia style backlash from Trump if they cross him. They also know that their not terribly bright constituents in the MAGA base firmly support Trump (or at least have until very recently within Trump's second term when they've discovered personally, the hard way, how bad his policies really are) seeing any deviation from Trump's agenda as a betray of Trump's MAGA base including them. The MAGA base also sincerely believe in a lot of the misguided elements of Trump's agenda because unlike most Republican leaders, they don't know any better.

Billionaires and the political representatives of many big businesses also know personally well that Trump is a horrible person who supports mostly bad policies who is basically trying to destroy the federal government from the inside. But, for them, the immense tax cuts that Trump has delivered to them, and the dismantling of federal laws and regulations that cost them money have seemed worth it to them so far.

The conservative leaning members of the college educated upper middle class, who used to work in think tanks formulating conservative policies that they thought furthered the national interest on a basis similar to that of their liberal peers, who served as senior civil servants, and served as professionals in roles that either supported conservative economic and religious interests, or were at least apolitical, meanwhile, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves, some to be unaffiliated politically, some to be libertarians, and some to become "moderate" and "neo-liberal" Democrats. Fools loyal to MAGA and Trump's cult of personality, and powerful hypocrites, have rushed in to fill the vacuum that they upper middle class conservatives left behind.

The agenda of Trump and his MAGA cult of personality isn't sustainable. But it wasn't really meant to be. The objective of MAGA is to burn it all down, and to entrench far right cultural dominance and political power now, knowing that in the long run, the democratic process and respect for the rule of law and settled political norms, run fairly, will undermine those objectives.

Destruction can be accomplished more quickly than building something that works. So, it doesn't have to last long. And, if the MAGA base comes to realize that the face eating leopard they supported ate their faces once the damage done is irrevocable, that's their tough luck in the eyes of the billionaires and far-right cranks who actually benefit from its agenda. By then, if the MAGA agenda is successful, they will have dug the United States (and even the larger world) into a hole that will be very hard to get out of again.

The system struggles to stop them. Trump has installed enough people loyal to him that share his far from the mainstream agenda in key institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court, the military, and senior government offices that he wasn't supposed to be able to oust and oust, and key policies that he wasn't supposed to have the legal right to control, that the systems and people designed to stop him aren't doing their jobs. The system wasn't designed to to stop a President who had no respect for his oath of office, no commitment to the good of the nation, no respect for the rule of law, and immense political power arising from a base brainwashed by decades of lies from clergy, Republican political leaders, and cynically manipulative conservative mass media outlets that jettisoned their journalist ethics long ago.

Of course, the willingness of the MAGA base to be manipulated and accept these lies didn't come from nowhere. It isn't that information that reveals that these are lies isn't available. It isn't that members of the MAGA base unanimously agree that Trump has good character.

They are motivated to accept a false worldview because the last half century of American progress has left them behind and greatly diminished their socio-economic status in relative terms. They are willing to take the gamble of destroying the system because of they feel that it has done nothing for them, and that they have no prospects of improving their lot within it.

Most of them made a bad bet. Trump's agenda will leave them worse off and reveal to them that they actually did have something to lose in the system that they are trying to destroy. The policies that they thought were the problem aren't the source of their dismay. Their future prospects within the system that they support destroying were better than they believed them to be. But, now that they've made that bet, a psychological unwillingness to admit that they've been duped and made a mistake, and the fact that much of the damage to both the system and the political process has already been done, makes remedying their mistake difficult.

The situation could still be turned around: If enough of the MAGA base is disillusioned fast enough. If enough old guard Republicans and conservative judges who are hypocrites wake up to the fact that the end game isn't a good one before it is too late. If Trump dies or implodes (which is a bet the left is trying to make by pushing the Epstein files issue) and no successor to Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement arises. 

But if it is turned around, the most likely failure mode for MAGA will be a dramatic collapse of the entire political movement. It will look like an economic bubble popping. It will look like the sudden death of the Whig party in favor of the new Republican party shortly before the Civil War. It will look like the collapse of Naziism at the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will look like the post-Herbert Hoover Republican Party of the 1930s. It might even look like the French Revolution with guillotines and all.

There isn't much room for a middle ground business as usual alternation of power at the margins at this point.