Peter Turchin is not like most historians.
For starters, he has an unusual background as an evolutionary biologist studying lemmings and mice. He says that analyzing the complexities of the natural world has allowed him to understand the most complex system of all: human society. He has pioneered a field of history that he calls cliodynamics that applies hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of historical data points to a mathematical model in order to understand the present and to predict future trends.
Using these tools, Peter and his team published an article in the journal Nature in 2010 making a bold prediction. They said that economic, social, and political instability in the United States would hit a “peak” in or around the year 2020. Many of Turchin’s critics said he was crazy to make such a speculation, that it’s too hard to predict how history will progress, that the study of history is more art than science. But then came 2020.
It turned out to be a massively turbulent year, one that would bring outbreaks of political violence that the U.S. hadn’t experienced in decades. It felt like complete chaos, between Covid lockdowns, mask and vaccine protests, BLM riots, and then, only six days into 2021, the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
What did Peter see that everyone else missed?
Peter is the author of over 200 articles and eight books, and his fascinating new one is called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. It argues that societies operate cyclically, going through golden ages and end times. And he says that we’re currently looking at the telltale signs of an imminent revolution.
On today’s show, Peter talks to us about how he studies history, what American history can tell us about our current moment, why 2024 is going to be a year to watch, and what individuals can do to change the direction of history.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
To start, a few of Turchin's main points are unarguable. The first is elite overproduction. There's no need to belabor that point: it's obvious. The absurdity of college graduate overproduction and explosion of expensive academic administration are just two symptoms. His theory of counterelites, while not completely original, is also on target.
That the big political and other changes are coming from the right is also unarguable. But it's not the Anglo-American libertarian-leaning conservatism that we grew up with, that founded by Buckley in the 1950s and represented by Goldwater, Reagan, and Thatcher. That kind of right effectively merged in the 1990s and 2000s with the neoliberal establishment that has dominated the Democratic Party since 1992. It's now gone. The "new new" right we see now had its avatars in the 1990s in Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, in opposition to globalization, deindustrialization, and top-down cultural revolution. In the 1990s, this movement split the Right into small-government and populist-nationalist wings and made the election of Clinton possible. But it's now inching toward majority status because of the growing defections of once-Democratic voters and the realization that much of the "conspiracy theories" and fringe doom-mongering of the populist right of the 90s has turned out to be right.
There are some other problems with Turchin's points though. The core problem with fiscal breakdown is not about taxation or Reagan or anything before the 1990s. The US was in decent fiscal condition as late as 2000. The core problem is the monetary revolution that quietly began in the late 1990s, of ultralow interest rates (almost a quarter century now) which has made asset bubbles possible and inevitable -- this is the origin of the explosion of unequal wealth. This disease led first to overindebtedness in the private economy and, then, in response to the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, fiscal extravagance on an unprecedented scale. One key difference between now and 1980, and why no Volcker-style rescue is possible, is that the US economy is far more indebted now. Interest rates simply cannot be raised much. Much of America's productivity problem is rooted in the squandering of capital in speculation enabled by ultralow rates. Nothing will really get productivity, labor, and wages back on track without investment instead of manias. To do that requires major changes to monetary and tax policies. (My recommendation is Karen Petrou's Engine of Inequality, a book on the modern Fed since the later Greenspan years.)
There have been multiple turning points in US history along the lines Turchin discussed, roughly 40-60 years. One thinks of the Revolutionary generation 1770-1790; the end of gentleman politics and the rise of popular democracy around 1830; the Civil War period (1850-1870); the WWI-WWII period (1917-1940); the breakdown of New Deal America (1965-1982). Only the Civil War period was truly world-historical in the deepest sense, the single most important turning point in the English-speaking world since the 17th century. It didn't just mark the victory of free soil over plantation slavery; it presaged the end of agricultural America and the rise of urban-industrial America and of America as a world power. That period in some ways was more important than even the Revolutionary era.
I doubt if we're in a period quite like that. However, it is comparable in my view to the 1970s and maybe to the 1930s. The collective politics that's coming will be populist, nationalist, protectionist, somewhat xenophobic, and hostile to immigration. It will encounter a lot of opposition from the newer neoliberal Democratic elite and what's left of the older Republican elite.
Interesting discussion, but I'm hung up on a data point that he uses to make his argument that seems suspect - average height in the U.S.
Does his analysis control for immigration? Over the last 100 years, Hispanics have gone from under 2% of the population to almost 20%. They are typically about 5 inches shorter than non-Hispanic whites.
Also, Nassim Taleb, who is likewise concerned about elite decision-making, argues that people are constantly moving in and out of the top income/wealth brackets, i.e. it's not static. So just arguing that wealth is concentrated is inadequate.