Peter Turchin: Entering the Age of Instability after Trump

[pbrower2a]

(11-12-2020, 06:45 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(11-12-2020, 03:29 PM)sbarrera Wrote:

(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 response to Covid the primary agenda of his Presidency, but first he has to survive Trump's coup attempt. Fourth Turning, indeed.

...you wrote this before the Capitol Putsch. Donald Trump, unlike all other defeated nominees for President, did not concede defeat. He claimed fraud and got a large number of people convinced that they could "stop the steal" by disrupting the formally-definitive act of Congress. I don't see Trump support disintegrating... yet. I can't predict it. A deceitful, despotic narcissist still has multitudes convinced that he is the rightful President because he is so wonderful that he cannot lose. 

America remains severely polarized in politics because of severe economic inequality. I see Confederate flags in Michigan, a state that was militantly pro-Union in the American Civil War.  Michigan has not had lawful slavery since 1787. I see only two valid uses for Confederate flags; re-enactments and monuments to the Confederate dead. 

Nearly ten months after the election and nearly eight months after the Capitol Putsch I saw a pickup truck with two large flags in the bed: one a Trump 2020 banner and the other a Confederate battle flag. In a box store parking lot in Michigan -- not Mississippi or even Missouri.     

Quote:And this article about Turchin just posted in The Atlantic December 2020 issue:

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.

We are in a 4T, and one of the causes is severe inequality. Even if we no longer need it to motivate people to work long, hard, and for bare survival the elites need mass deprivation to assert their power. The elites used to offer plenty of easy, well-paid bureaucratic jobs to college grads to ensure that they would prefer those jobs to organizing unions and protest movements. Get a job that requires a degree in private industry or some part of the public or non-profit sectors that enforce the will of economic elites, never fully understanding what one is doing, put down a down payment on a modest house in the suburbs and buy a Buick or Chrysler in which to commute while listening to music (folk? jazz? classical?) during the thirty-minute commute each way, marry a trophy spouse, get a two-week vacation every year to some trendy place, and you just might not ask dangerous questions. The people who truly understand what they are doing because they are assembling things, running machines, serving customers, pushing stuff around in a warehouse, or doing farm labor understand precisely what they are doing -- and that they are being exploited badly -- both by owners and by managerial or bureaucratic elites who live far better than they do. Even schoolteachers find that they are not so much imparting knowledge as they are training people of minimal-to-average skill to fit into dead-end jobs or are cajoling the few smart kids in class to get into the "college" track. The dead-end jobs come with brutal management and frequent layoffs, backaches, and of course poverty. It's as if the MBA program might have been named after such fictional characters as Simon Legree or John Galt. 

F-- this, you think? I know of one community near me in which nobody owns anything bigger than a family farm, and people in it have limited educations. Eighth-grade, with a school-leaving age of sixteen. They may be deprived of the electronic entertainments that most of us use like an addict uses heroin. Are Mozart string quartets compact disc on a good stereo system or "classic" movies somehow better than rap music or slasher films?

Remember what Plato put into Socrates' mouth: the unexamined mind is a waste. It is also a diversion from the nastiness of our order, and if people contemplated it they would go nuts. It might be best to not think too much if one doesn't want to feel terrible. 

Don't think -- that is exactly what totalitarian orders tell people -- unless to make the economy perform a little better. But do we need such severe inequality? If we didn't, then people wouldn't need to work so many hours just to  support the economic elites and their over-educated but mis-educated toadies.            

Quote: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.”

We Americans have political institutions established in a pre-industrial era, before anyone heard of Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud, in which the fastest methods of travel involved horses, before there was electrical power and before there was any real Big Business. The first true Big Business in America was DuPont, at first largely  government contractor supplying huge quantities of gunpowder to the fledgling United States.Are those old institutions at fault or are we?