11-12-2020, 06:45 PM
(11-12-2020, 03:29 PM)sbarrera Wrote:And this article about Turchin just posted in The Atlantic December 2020 issue:(11-12-2020, 02:32 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:(11-12-2020, 01:30 PM)User3451 Wrote: It's interesting that these threads on Turchin have gone silent, given that he's been extremely accurate in his predictions.
I've seen some thought here and elsewhere that Trump is done, and it's mostly up from here. I think Turchin would disagree and say we are about to enter into the crisis
Given that the election was neck and neck, I tend to agree.
Turchin’ s assessment of the long-term effects of the pandemic is especially relevant right now, as the coronavirus ravages the United States:
The Long-Term Consequences of Coronavirus
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/lon...ronavirus/
I found his concluding paragraphs particularly insightful, if also discomfiting:
The shock of Coronavirus has the potential both to create social solidarity within a country, and to break the country apart. In my estimation, two Nordic countries, Norway and Denmark, have the best chance to follow the first route. Twenty years ago, I would have no doubts predicting such a response. But in the last decade there have been signs that the Nordic model may be fraying at the edges.
For the United States my forecast is rather gloomy. Our governing elites are selfish, fragmented, and mired in the internecine conflicts. So my expectation is that large swaths of American population would be allowed to lose ground. Government debt will still explode, with most of the money going to keep large companies and banks afloat. Inequality will rise, trust in government decline even more, social unrest and intra-elite conflict will increase. Basically, all negative structural-demographic trends will be accelerated.
I think he got it right in that last bit, unfortunately. Biden is trying to make a concerted national repsonse to Covid the primary agenda of his Presidency, but first he has to survive Trump's coup attempt. Fourth Turning, indeed.
The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.
Here are some excerpted passages from the introduction in the article that may pique your interest. Turchin’ s “star” is definitely rising in the universe of “mega historians.”
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”