The incumbency advantage makes sense. My wife is more likely to have sex with me than my next-door neighbors, only partly because they are very old and very gay. Medium probably won’t replace me with a far better columnist next week because that would upset tens of readers.

This is because of a psychological phenomenon called “people don’t like change.” And it holds true across human behavior.

Until it doesn’t.

When people are unhappy for long periods, they get divorced, quit their jobs, try drugs, exchange their money for imaginary digital currencies, and vote out the bastards in charge.

From the 1940s to 2000, incumbents in American elections at all levels had a huge and ever-growing advantage — rising to around 8 percent. When I spoke to George Clooney in November of 2020 about the presidential election results — which I mention not simply to make me look important because I talk to Clooney but because he is a political expert whom I happen to talk to — he said, “I was surprised by how hard it is to beat an incumbent. I’d forgot that the actual power of the presidency is worth two or three percent.” In Aaron Sorkin’s movie The American President, he calls it “the single greatest home court advantage in the world,” largely because he didn’t know about my situation living next to two older gay guys.

But Clooney might have been as wrong about that as he was about wearing a Batman costume with nipples. It’s possible that incumbency may have cost Trump the election.

I suspect we are entering an Era of The One-Term Presidents.

It wouldn’t be the first time we had a series of one-termers. While presidents have won election to second term 21 times and lost 11 over our history, during the turbulent era before the Civil War, from 1837 to 1860, none of those six presidents won a second term. This is why you didn’t graduate from Martin Van Buren High School, James Buchanan High School, or Franklin Pierce High School, and why every single day on the calendar of the James Buchanan High School says nothing but “Website New Look Coming Soon!” It’s also why Head of the Class, All in the Family, and The Brady Bunch all named schools after Millard Fillmore.

Whenever I totally make up a theory in an area in which I have no expertise, often referred to as “writing a column,” I call someone who knows something. A few hours after emailing him, I got an excited call from Douglas Brinkley, the history professor at Rice who is the presidential historian for CNN. He’s also written books about Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, and edited The Reagan Diaries and The Nixon Tapes. If you asked Brinkley which people living or dead he would like to have dinner with, he would definitely name presidents.

To my shock, and probably the dismay of the people who hired him at CNN, Brinkley agreed with my Era of The One-Term Presidents prediction.

“Reagan used to say if you don’t have 50 percent approval then you’re selling your product wrong,” Brinkley said. “I don’t know how a president gets to 50 percent approval in this polarized environment where centrism isn’t kinetic and it’s base politics.”

When party-affiliation is this tribal, merely being a member of one of them makes you an enemy to the opposing party and a nutcase to the few people left in the middle. “They’re not being honored for compromise and there’s nobody to compromise with. It feels like the 1850s. Every time someone compromised, they got burned for it,” Brinkley said in total agreement with me. “Look how bad the poll ratings are for Congress as a whole. Look how low the journalists are. There’s a pox on anybody’s house in government or reporting on politics.” Another cause of hatred for people who report on politics is that we say things such as “a pox on anyone’s house.”

In an era of decentralization of media, the financial system, taxi rides, and vacation stays, distrust of institutions and the people who run them is intense.

Getting 50 percent of people to like you for two terms is even harder now that humans live in dog years. Eight years ago, people were freaked out because Chase bank got hacked. Eight years ago, your office didn’t torture you by communicating on Slack. Eight years ago, Bill Cosby was a charming paternal comedian. “Obama got in under the wire because social media didn’t have quite the impact. Now the news cycle is moving at such a rapid clip that you’re president for a year and people are tired of you,” Brinkley said, agreeing with me even more. “We’re microfollowing every moment. It will suddenly feel by year two of someone’s presidency that it has been eight years. You get celebrity burnout.”

I haven’t made it through season two of any TV show in years. You’re a hero if you made it this far in the column. A President Show that runs eight years is hard to fathom. We get it, Biden. “C’mon, man,” “Here’s the deal, folks,” “Not a joke.” We’re ready to move on.

This, of course, will lead to a less stable nation, bouncing from extreme to extreme in a world that needs stability. Our deals with other countries will have too short an expiration date, our tax laws too uncertain to do any long-term corporate planning. Our elementary school classroom walls too short for all the presidents’ faces.

We need to make people happy enough that they fear change again. Because that seems more fun than a civil war.

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times, and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.