In 2012, Peter Turchin predicted violent upheaval in the USA in 2020

[muriel_volestrangler]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10021189551

Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in violent political, social and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect a violent upheaval in the United States in a few years.

It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut.

Turchin has led the development of a field of study called "cliodynamics," in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns in history. The endeavor flies in the face of the traditional study of history, which assumes the countless variables interacting within a society lead to chaotic fluctuations in outcomes like violence and social unrest. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher of science at CUNY-Lehman College, said most historians believe that "the factors at play are so many and so variable that there is little reason to expect quasi-regular cycles, or a unified theory to explain them."
...
Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then the society will slide into the second civil war," he wrote. "As a result, periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a period of roughly two generations (40–60 years)."



https://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles-violence-2020.html

This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States
between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supplemented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots,
lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years covered by the
database, following a complex dynamical pattern. Spectral analysis detected two main oscillatory modes. The first
is a very long-term – secular – cycle, taking the form of an instability wave during the second half of the 19th century,
bracketed by two peaceful periods (the first quarter of the 19th century and the middle decades of the 20th century,
respectively). The second is a 50-year oscillation superimposed on the secular cycle, with peaks around 1870, 1920,
and 1970. The pattern of two periodicities superimposed on each other is characteristic of the dynamics of political
instability in many historical societies, such as ancient Rome and medieval and early-modern England, France, and
Russia. A possible explanation of this pattern, discussed in the article, is offered by the structural-demographic theory, which postulates that labor oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in
turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.

http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf

Via Wonkette

[roamer65]

1. This election is the most important since 1860.

Eventually the United States is going to break apart.

If Dump steals it, it will come hard and fast.

If Biden wins, I expect it to be delayed for another 4-8 years. Reminds me a lot of how the Compromise of 1850 delayed civil war by 10 years.

[CrispyQ]

2. This will be the ugliest, most chaotic election ever.

There is no bottom to the Con. He will do anything to stay in office.

[C_U_L8R]

3. Apparently it takes rightwingers 50 years to climb out of their holes

And history shows, we'll keep kicking their ugly asses back into them. We can do this all... millennia.