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I believe we now have to face the fact that fighting for democracy as we know it—with thoughtful disagreement and compromises governed by rule of law—is unlikely to work. People like me who had a long shot hope for the emergence of strong middle that fights against the extremists to bring the country together and makes major reforms to improve the system must recognize that the differences are becoming too irreconcilable for this to happen. Based on the lessons I learned from studying history about how things typically transpire under similar circumstances, I believe that what we are now seeing is the parties increasingly moving to greater extremism and a fight-to-win at all cost mode.

This is threatening the rule of law as we know it and is bringing us closer to some form of civil war. (As I will explain below, this is not necessarily a violent conflict, though that is possible). When I wrote my book , which looked at the rises and declines of domestic and world orders over the last 500 years, I chronicled the six stages of the “big internal order cycle,” their symptoms, and the cause-effect relationships that drive them.



Just like life cycles, these stages are logical and everyone goes through them, typically about once in a lifetime. Toward the end of the cycle, which is where all the signs and symptoms show us to be today, people typically face a choice between fighting for one side or another, keeping their heads down, or fleeing. When I wrote the book in 2020, I.

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