seemingly unlikely, history has shown that people can be inventive when faced with seemingly intractable
problems and get around them. For example, though seemingly unlikely, perhaps a third party for moderates who
are no longer comfortable in their existing parties will be created, which could quickly increase the power of
moderates because it wouldn’t take many votes in the Senate or House to give moderates the swing votes that
would give them great power.20
We will soon find out in what directions Democratic and Republican party members will be pulled and how well
the representatives of the two parties deal with each other, as described above: either with gridlock or compromise.
I just hope all parties recognize where they are in the cycle and what could come next—i.e., the costs of increased
conflict and the benefits of reduced conflict.
Stage 6: When There Are Civil Wars
This section is about the part of the Big Cycle when there is a fight to get rid of the existing system/order—i.e.,
when there is a civil war.
History shows us that civil wars inevitably happen, so rather than assuming that “it won’t happen here,” which
most people in most of the countries assume after an extensive period of not having them, one should be wary
of them and look for the markers to indicate how close to one one is. In this section we will look at those
markers.
While in the last section we looked at nonviolent revolutions that took place within the order, in this section we
will be looking at the patterns of civil wars and revolutions that were almost always violent and toppled the old
order and replaced it with a new one. Though there are an innumerable number that we could have examined to
understand how they work, we chose what I believe are the 29 most significant ones, which are shown in the
following table. We categorized this group into those that produced big changes to the system/regime and those
that did not. For example, the US Civil War was a real bloody civil war that failed to overturn the system/order, so
it is in the second group at the bottom of the table, while those that toppled the system/order are at the top. These
categories are of course imprecise, but once again we won’t let imprecision stand in the way of seeing what we
couldn’t see if we insisted on being precise. Most of them, though not all of them, transpired in the archetypical
way described in this section.
A classic example of a civil war breaking the system and having to build a new system is the Russian Civil
War/Revolution of 1917, which put into place the communist internal order that entered Stage 5 in the late 1980s,