In years past, when Americans saw footage of other countries’ parliaments devolving into all-out brawls, they may have laughed at the comical, comforting foreignness of it all. But today, after watching something like the last State of the Union address, which ended with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dramatically tearing up President Trump’s speech, it’s entirely plausible to imagine that with the right triggering event, Congress could erupt into a fistfight. This intense atmosphere of polarization now runs right through America’s elite — from the very top to the precarious but highly educated lower tier of elites who are left scrambling for positions in media, academia, and politics.
Of all the theories in circulation about why political rivalry is so intense, one of the most convincing (and worrying) comes from the Russian historian and scientist Peter Turchin. Turchin is a pioneer of “cliodynamics,” which is a field of research that applies scientific methods of inquiry to history. Cliodynamics employs multiple disciplinary perspectives, ranging from mathematics and statistics to anthropology and complex systems theory, as well as vast troves of historical data to identify patterns of sociopolitical instability over the centuries. It is, in essence, an attempt to identify why states rise and fall and then use this knowledge to make predictions about the future. All the way back in 2010, Turchin warned that the historical patterns were lining up to indicate a coming period of instability and violence in America, which he expected to peak in the 2020s.
In his book War and Peace and War (2006), Turchin applied the cliodynamic method to global history, looking at the factors driving the consolidation and collapse, or “integration” and “disintegration,” of empires such as ancient Rome, China, and Byzantium. In Ages of Discord (2016), he turned his attention to the United States, mapping the patterns of American history from the disintegrative period leading up to the Civil War to the integrative period of the New Deal, through to the present. Today, Turchin believes that we are in the middle of a new period of disintegration that began the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan and has been accelerated since the 1990s.
Turchin identifies a few primary causes of sociopolitical instability in modern states. The most significant is what he calls “elite overproduction,” which happens when society produces ever-larger numbers of educated elite aspirants but cannot provide secure positions for all of them. This reduces elite incomes, creates greater numbers of frustrated elite aspirants, and intensifies intra-elite competition. Sometimes, existing elites will then close ranks and lock out rival factions instead of allowing a rotation that might otherwise calm tensions. This can lead to the creation of radical counterelites dedicated to destabilizing or overthrowing the status quo.
In Turchin’s view, mass immiseration alone doesn’t present a revolutionary threat until elite overproduction creates instability within the ranks of the ruling class. At that point, competition begins to unravel the pro-social, cooperative norms that formerly bound elites together and allowed them to pursue their shared interests. While there is a romantic view of revolutions as uprisings of the people against oppressive rulers, Turchin notes that historically, they are usually sparked by a faction of the elite that, for some reason, has been locked out of power.
We can see this happening in the contemporary U.S. American Affairs editor Julius Krein recently wrote about how the “real class war” in the U.S. is being driven by the widening wealth gap “between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on professional labor.” As Krein points out, the economic “performance gap between the top 1 or 0.1 percent versus the top 10 percent is actually larger than the gap between those right at 10 percent and any part of the bottom 90 percent.” In other words, inequality is growing more within the American elite than between the lower tier of the elite and the rest of the population. But unlike those in the bottom 90%, frustrated, lower-tier elites have enough organization and influence to translate their grievances into political power.
The second-most important factor driving instability is what Turchin calls the “labor oversupply principle,” which predicts that when the supply of labor increases relative to demand, average people will see their well-being decline. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang was influenced by Turchin’s work, citing him in his 2018 book The War on Normal People, and his focus on preventing job loss from automation can be seen as an effort to fight the oversupply of labor. But while automation is certainly a factor, the more obvious but untouchable factor for liberals today is immigration. Turchin points out that immigration moves in a cyclical fashion along with inequality, with “periods of high immigration” in America “coincid[ing] with the periods of stagnating wages.”
Turchin says bluntly that if the pressures of elite overproduction, extreme inequality, immiseration, and labor oversupply continue to escalate, the result could be “a massive outbreak of political violence … ending in a state collapse, a revolution, or a civil war (or all of the above).” For now, popular discontent is still channeled through the electoral system, albeit increasingly through outsider candidates such as Trump on the Right and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the Left. But if formal politics are not able to deliver, what then?
In a 2017 review of Brian Burroughs’s Days of Rage, a book about the political violence of the Weather Underground Organization and other radical groups in the 1970s, Turchin wrote that the violence of the ’70s “provides us with a kind of a road map as to what to expect in the next few years.” The first thing to expect is an escalation of language that draws battle lines, fuses together the in-groups that will later spearhead violence, and demonizes and dehumanizes the dissidents’ opponents. The next phase, the “trigger,” has yet to happen. It is typically a “highly symbolic event,” often involving a “sacrificial victim.” For the Weather Underground and other similar groups in the 1970s, the trigger was the killing of the Black Panther Fred Hampton during a police raid in December 1969. After the trigger comes the spiral of violence and counterviolence. If something of that scale isn’t worrying enough, Turchin says our political elites are more polarized now than they were shortly before the American Civil War.
Back in 2016, it looked as though new possibilities were opening up with Trump’s apparent break from Reaganism and Sanders’s break from progressive neoliberalism. Today, however, it seems certain that absent some deus ex machina, no political figure will be capable of cutting across the ideological divide in order to address all the pressures described by Turchin.
Liberals may instinctively consider Turchin’s cyclical model of history fatalistic, but ironically, Turchin long believed that if he presented his theory to elites, they could avoid repeating the crises of the past. He seems to have changed his mind. In 2018, Turchin wrote that until recently, “I thought that we collectively have a decent chance of avoiding the crisis, but I now have abandoned this hope. A major reason for my pessimism is the resolute refusal by our ruling class (including its both Liberal and Conservative wings) to see the real causes of the crisis.” If past generations were doomed by ignorance to repeat the mistakes of history, our elites have the ability to recognize these mistakes — and to keep repeating them anyway.
Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies.
