The day Donald Trump was arraigned for unauthorized possession of national security documents — heightening his party's attacks on the nation's justice system — also saw the publication of Peter Turchin's new book, "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration," arguably the most comprehensive explanation so far of the current and ongoing crisis of American politics.
For all its breadth and depth, there's a simple message at the core of "End Times": At the heart of our problems, Turchin writes, is "a perverse 'wealth pump' ... taking from the poor and giving to the rich," and we have to find a way to turn it off. America has essentially done that before, during the New Deal era, and other nations and societies have done it as well. But only about one in five of the nation-states or empires that face cyclical crises like the one we're in today escapes it, Turchin reports. So the odds aren't great, unless we act fast and with purpose, making full use of what we now know.
