This is The End
Our Worlds Are Overheating in the Turbulent Twenties
I’m Scribe1, welcome to my weekly notes on The End, as it unfolds in 2024. The end of democracy. The end of decency. The end of life on the planet as we knew it. The end of my hopes for political progress. The endnotes that explain the main text. Notes on The End.
This year feels like The End — a bleak view embraced across the political spectrum. Trump’s trials and replay for presidential power will be a riveting, high-stakes endgame, however it plays out. The heat records and weather weirding of climate change feel apocalyptic. Manifestations of political extremism at both poles deserve analysis and mockery. Global conflicts could easily morph into World War III, if it hasn’t begun already.
Things aren’t clear until the end in most good stories. Mysteries don’t get solved until the end. Dramas and thrillers have a surprise twist lurking near the end. Even political biographies can feel painfully incomplete — then-Sen. Al Franken’s 2017 book Giant of the Senate comes to mind, which I was reading when he resigned — until the main character’s last curtain call. Don’t think you know what’s what until the end.
As the country climaxes in 2024, I’ll write the denouement. And maybe try to mop up some of the messes and spray some disinfecting commentary on it.
Covering the end doesn’t need to be bleak, not with all the comedic ridiculousness that now characterizes our polarized politics. Call it gallows humor, partying down the apocalypse, or laughing so we don’t cry, but we’re going to have some fun with this. Just because the situation is serious doesn’t mean we should take ourselves too seriously. Humanity regularly demonstrates just how absurd we’ve become.
And, if I can still allow myself a little hope, The End could be followed by the beginning of new stories. That’s what I’ll be looking for as I chronicle this pivotal year and sift through the embers and ashes of our old stories.
Hot As Hell: For decades now, climate models warned us that burning fossil fuels was heating up the planet. So Big Oil and its acolytes attacked the scientists, trying to sow doubts and block action. Now, all we need to do open our front doors or read the weather reports from global hotspots to feel the reality of climate change.
If those visceral, personal observations aren’t enough, we also have data showing 2023 was by far the hottest year on record (once again). And that each of the last six months broke their monthly heat records by an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (that’s 2.7 degrees F for we Americans) — which just happens to be the maximum allowable increase nations set with the Paris Climate Accord, the threshold when things get really squirrelly.
Yet it’s still getting hotter out there and will only get worse. Along with this undeniably dangerous global warming, we’re also seeing the weather weirding long predicted by climatologists, from the first-ever major hurricane to hit Mexico from the Pacific (Hurricane Otis in October, killing almost 50) to new flooding risks displacing millions.
Will any of this matter? Last month’s COP28 international climate summit, laughably led by Emirati oil baron, failed hard. And we could have another presidential election in the United States — the country most responsible for global warming — where the issue gets ignored.
No wonder the kids are so pissed off.
Science of End Times: My recent thinking about The End has been influenced by a some insightfully terrifying books, including End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Author Peter Turchin, who has long predicted the 2020s would be a period of great danger for the United States, he called it the “Turbulent Twenties,” with political violence and even the collapse of the state real possibilities.
Turchin is a former wildlife scientist who uses data from political disintegrations of the past around the world, which he assembles into complex models for predicting the future. The new field of research he’s helping to develop is called cliodynamics (Clio being the ancient Greek muse of history). I generally don’t worship at the altar of Big Data, but I find his analysis compelling and chilling.
The two biggest predictors of political disintegration are popular immiseration (that is, the suffering of the masses from forces like declining real wages) and overproduction of elites (which causes competition that leads to discontent and transgressive behaviors by powerful actors). You can see the latter factor at work in today’s massive overproduction of lawyers, those with doctorate degrees, and Big Tech billionaires in the U.S.
Together, the dynamic turns on a “wealth pump” that sends money from the poor masses to the coffers of the elites, a feedback loop that makes both factors worse. That increases political radicalization and makes the whole society increasingly unstable until something like a civil war reduces the ranks of the elites and restores equilibrium, at least temporarily.
“At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers,” Turchin writes, later adding, “The inertial scenario thus predicts a rather grim future: an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the pump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.”
To break the cycle, we need to end the unwise and unsustainable consolidation of wealth and power that’s been building since around 1980. Shared prosperity leads to political integration. But how we actually get there from here — that’s a much trickier question, one that has caused me to lose my hopeful optimism in recent years.
Trump Barred: Another tricky question is whether Trump should be barred from the ballot because he’s an insurrectionist, as Colorado and Maine have done and other states are considering. Trump definitely engaged in insurrection — as defined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — by trying to illegally overturn the 2020 election results and urging his supporters to besiege the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But it seems like a very bad idea for judges to make that call right now. Trump is truly a danger to democracy, but we undercut that argument if we use undemocratic tools to stop him. No, it’s better to at least wait until the trial over his election interference crimes has played out.
If Trump emerges as a convicted felon guilty of insurrection before November, then we can revisit barring him from the ballot. Or we just let him flee into political exile in Russia, North Korea, Hungary, or some other autocratic country that he admires so much.
Scribe. Let me introduce myself and preview what I’ll be covering. I was a California newspaper journalist for 25 years, culminating as editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Bay Guardian before the paper was shut down in 2014. Then I spent eight-plus years working for national environment nonprofits, leaving me with mixed feelings on the environmental movement (more on that later).
I took the city editor job in San Francisco in 2003, the same year Gavin Newsom was elected mayor and Kamala Harris was elected district attorney. So I’ll have lots to say about the roots and politics of those two Democratic Party heavyweights. That year was when the U.S. chose to launch an unprovoked war on Iraq, a foreseeably terribly decision still reverberating today, politically and psychologically.
In San Francisco, and Sacramento before that, I watched how identify politics subsumed classic liberalism and how capitalist-friendly neoliberalism took over the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Republicans just lost their fucking minds. Those changing political dynamics had seismic impacts on issues like housing, transportation, criminal justice, poverty, Big Tech, media and misinformation, and how electoral politics are conducted — all of which I’ll cover this year.
Along the way, I reported on and wrote a book about Burning Man and its cultural impacts, picking up the monicker Scribe in the process. Spoiler alert: despite its grand pretensions, Burning Man didn’t end up shaping America’s counterculture, instead settling for being a cool, otherworldly party.
But last year, Burning Man seemed like a great metaphor for these turbulent times. Unprecedented heavy rainfall shut everything down, many people freaked out, and media coverage of the “disaster” made things worse. But it wasn’t really The End. If you were patient, kept your cool, and took care of each other, it turned out to be the best Burning Man ever.
Maybe 2024 will be like that. Somehow I doubt it, but maybe. See you next week.
Feedback, suggestions, corrections requests, counter-arguments, and general gibber-gabber can be G-mailed to me at SFscribe.
Also, a pet peeve of mine. I wish that American climate writers would use Fahrenheit when they describe the degree of warming. Although we know better, most of us probably don't appreciate that 1.5 C degrees of warming is really 2.7 degrees as Americans understand it. In October, the planet was fully 3.1 degrees (F) hotter than average. That sounds worse than 1.7C.
"Scientists warn of systems collapse with global warming of 3.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. In October 2023 we were at 3.1 degrees."
But isn't it always the end of the world old men?
For us it soon will be.
Perhaps what we are witnessing is the end of the American Empire and the beginning of something we can't quite imagine yet. I'm not convinced it's the end, but I'll keep reading your posts because I love good apocalypse porn. Let's get a beer soon.