General Discussion

Among the societies in Turchin’s crisis database, the ones that reached the condition America is in now, the outcomes read like a coroner’s ledger. Forty percent saw their rulers assassinated. Twenty percent endured civil wars that lasted a century. Three quarters ended in revolution or civil war or both. And sixty percent of them ceased to exist entirely, dissolved from within or conquered from without. Turchin’s current description of the United States, in his clinical vocabulary, is a society in a “revolutionary situation.”