How to avoid a civil war, by the man who predicted Trump
Across
the west, popular misery and ‘elite overproduction’ are fuelling
crisis, argues data-driven historian Peter Turchin. So what can we do to
turn things around?
Sat 10 Jun 2023
Last modified on Wed 21 Jun 2023 06.17 EDT
In February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter
to the distinguished journal Nature. He was responding to their “2020
visions” issue – an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected
predictions of progress from across science and politics. Turchin
assumed the role of Cassandra. “The next decade is likely to be a period
of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he
wrote, “which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you
describe.” He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50
years. “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.”
There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve
wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, “records show that societies
can avert disaster”.
Normally scientists enjoy
being proved right, but for Turchin, the way the following decade panned
out must have seemed a bit too on-the-nose. The response to the
financial crisis wasn’t a New Deal-style rescue package as he’d
recommended, but austerity and a widening of the gap between rich and
poor. Frustration at the established order threw up Brexit in
Britain and Trump in the US. Right on cue, 2020 delivered a pandemic,
economic chaos and a president who refused to concede defeat at the
polls. The following January saw the storming of the Capitol, and images
of insurrection that seemed like a throwback to an earlier
revolutionary era.
In the 70s I saw the end of the Golden Age, from the common people’s perspective – and it’s been downhill since then
Now
Turchin is having another go at explaining those cycles of disruption
and what it might take to emerge unscathed (though he tells me that,
unlike in 2010, it’s past time to avoid the consequences entirely: “We
are in crisis – but it’s not too late to take a less bloody exit.”) His book’s title, End Times,
doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it does provide a clear theory
about how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it. There are
some familiar concepts here – falling living standards leading to mass
discontent – but others, “elite overproduction” in particular, are much
less widely recognised, and genuinely eye-opening.
For
a global prophet of doom, Turchin cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure.
He speaks to me over Zoom from the sofa in his modest living room in
Storrs, Connecticut, essentially a village with a huge university campus
attached. “We have a house in the woods,” he tells me, and praises the
area’s “low population density” in a way that makes me wonder if he’s
prepping for the apocalypse. The reality is less alarming. “You know, my
wife has a garden, it’s very comfortable.” A bit like a dacha, he
observes – a reminder, alongside his strong accent, that he was born in
the USSR – “a country that doesn’t exist any more”. He emigrated with
his dissident parents in 1977, when he was 20.
That
background makes him less sanguine than others might be about the
prospect of societal upheaval – even state collapse. “I went back for
the first time since leaving in 1992, and I experienced a failed state.
Now, when I’d moved to the United States in 1977, the [country] was
really at the brink of several trends beginning to point downwards,” he
says, tracing the path of a rollercoaster with his right hand. “I saw
the end of the Golden Age – from the common people’s point of view – and
it has been downhill since then. So I’m really worried about ending up
in another failed state.”
I point out that this
will seem like hyperbole to lots of people. “I don’t say that it’s 100%
certain,” he counters – and notably refuses to be drawn on whether Trump will
be re-elected in 2024. “The road out of crisis opens up a whole set of
possibilities, from pretty mild instability all the way to collapse. At
this point, pretty much anything is possible.”
‘I’m really worried about ending up in another failed state’ … Peter Turchin, who emigrated from Russia to the US in 1977. Photograph: Peter Turchin
What
were those downward-pointing trends in the 1970s, then? That decade,
Turchin argues, was when the social contract established in the 1930s –
Roosevelt’s New Deal
– began to disintegrate. For 40 years, America had effectively
replicated the Nordic model under which the interests of workers, owners
and the state were kept in balance (he’s careful to point out that a
significant portion of the population – mostly Black Americans – were
always shut out of this cosy arrangement). After that, things began to
shift in favour of owners. The power of unions was eroded, as were
labour rights. Typical wages started to lag behind economic growth, or
even decrease. Quality of life suffered, and with it life expectancy.
“Diseases of despair” such as opioid or alcohol abuse grew. Turchin even
links the rise of mass shootings to a generalised hopelessness he refers to as “popular immiseration”.
At
the same time, the rich got richer – far richer. A system of taxation
that weighed most heavily on the highest earners, including a top rate
of 90%, was dismantled. The number of decamillionaires, or households
worth over $10m, increased from 66,000 in 1983 to 693,000 in 2019,
accounting for inflation. The economy chugged along nicely, but the
share of it controlled by the wealthiest got larger at the expense of
the average earner. Turchin calls this the “wealth pump”. Things are now
set up, he argues, so that money gushes away from workers and towards
the elite, like a blowout from an oil well.
This
has an interesting effect: so-called “elite overproduction”, a phrase
coined by Turchin’s colleague, the sociologist Jack Goldstone. “The
social pyramid has grown top heavy,” he explains, with rich families and
top universities churning out more wealthy graduates than the system
can accommodate. To illustrate this, Turchin describes a game of musical
chairs with a twist. There’s always been a limited number of powerful
positions, be they senator, governor, supreme court justice or media
mogul. In an era of elite overproduction, rather than chairs being taken
away whenever the music stops, the number of competitors increases
instead. Before you know it, there are far more people than can
realistically attain high office. Fights break out. Norms (and chairs)
are overturned as “elite aspirants” – those who have been brought up in
the expectation of a say in how things are run – turn into
counter-elites, prepared to smash the system to get their way. This
isn’t just a US problem, by the way; Turchin says that Britain is on a
similar trajectory. In fact, among OECD countries, it’s next in line.
Germany is further behind, but also on the same “slippery slope”.
One thing we know about historical exits from crisis is that at some point the different factions have to be reconciled
Turchin,
who was a mathematical ecologist before turning to history in the
mid-2000s, brings a numbers approach to his adopted subject. He was able
to predict the turbulent 2020s by looking at economic and social
indicators from 100 historical crises, gathered together in a database
called CrisisDB. They range from medieval France to 19th-century
Britain, and show that periods of instability are pretty consistently
preceded by a decline in wages, the emergence of a wealth pump, and most
combustibly, elite overproduction.
Why is the
latter so important? Well, the masses may be miserable, but without
someone who has the status and resources to organise them, they’ll
simply languish. Their revolutionary potential is only realised once a
“political entrepreneur” – usually a frustrated elite aspirant – gets
involved. Robespierre, Lenin and Castro are all examples of highly
privileged individuals who felt excluded from existing power structures
and led popular movements to overthrow them. In 19th-century China, a
young man from a well-to-do family failed the exams that would have
enabled him to become a top flight imperial administrator four times.
Hong Xiuquan went on to lead a rebellion in which at least 20 million
died.
Things may not be quite as bad as that yet, but it’s not hard to identify modern-day figures who fit the elite aspirant mould. Donald Trump
is the most obvious, a beneficiary of the wealth pump whose only route
to power was as a political entrepreneur stoking grievance. Nigel
Farage? “He’s a good example. He’s personally wealthy, a member of the
economic elite. And he has been channelling discontent.” Sometimes
counter-elites mount their takeover from the inside. With Brexit, “there
was a traditional segment of the Conservative party, but then there was
an insurgent part. And they were [also] using this discontent. What we
see in history is that one segment of the elite channels popular
discontent to advance their political careers. This happened in
Republican Rome 2,000 years ago, and it happens now.”
Another
distinctive feature of elite overproduction is the fierce ideological
competition it generates. Turchin believes we’ve transitioned from the
pre-crisis period, where political entrepreneurs largely attacked the
established order, to a phase in which newly powerful factions are
fighting among themselves. This, he argues, is one of the mechanisms
behind “cancel culture”. “Such vicious ideological struggles are a
common phase in any revolution,” he writes. There is a race to the
extremes, with denunciations becoming more and more intense. “In the
struggle between rival factions, the ones willing to escalate
accusations win over the moderate ones.”
So
how do we fix things? It strikes me that there are some pretty obvious
political conclusions to be drawn from Turchin’s research, but he’s
reluctant to be led too far down the road of punditry. “I don’t want to
enter into the political infighting,” he says. “One thing that we know
about historical exits from crisis is that at some point the elites and
population have to pull together … the different factions have to be
reconciled. That’s why I try to stay away from taking sides.”
He
will, however, admit to “several recommendations”, saying that “some of
them will please liberals, others will please conservatives”. Liberals,
presumably, will be heartened by the idea that “we need to give workers
more power”. In order to turn off the wealth pump you have to increase
labour’s share of the pie at the expense of business. Partly by
redistribution, but partly by beefing up workers’ ability to demand
higher pay.
What kind of thing would please conservatives? Here he seems to hesitate slightly. “Let’s say … massive immigration does
depress the wages of common workers. Actually, this is a paleo-left
position. It’s just now the new left is focusing more on cultural
issues, and they are all for immigration, but conservatives are now
against immigration.” He elaborates, saying it’s an “iron law” of
economics that if you increase the supply of something – in this case,
labour – then its price will decline. “But,” he points out, “it won’t
happen if workers have enough social power, if there are good labour
organisations and, also, if the elites internalise the need for dividing
fairly the fruits of economic growth. So if you have those
institutions, then immigration is not a problem.”
![End Times by Peter Turchin]()
And
what about those surplus elites? Well, if you happen to be one, look
away now. Halfway through End Times Turchin remarks, somewhat blithely:
“In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to
be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the
surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or
voluntary downward social mobility.” In fact, CrisisDB allows us to be
even more precise: in 40% of crises, rulers were assassinated; 75% ended
in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in 20%, those civil wars
dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of the time the state
in question disappeared, either through conquest or disintegration.
It
would be nice to avoid a century-long civil war. Perhaps instead we can
select “voluntary downward social mobility” from Turchin’s grisly menu.
This would require elites to be persuaded to give up some of their
wealth, or to decide to do so off their own backs. Patriotic Millionaires,
a pressure group made up of rich people, including members of the
Disney family, who “share a profound concern about the destabilising
level of economic and political inequality in America” is probably
unrepresentative of the class as a whole. More likely, things will have
to get so bad that a new social contract becomes the only alternative to
levels of discontent that would threaten private fortunes in any case.
That’s what happened in the 1930s. It also happened in Britain in the
1830s, when the prospect of a revolution like the ones sweeping Europe
was kept at bay by the Great Reform Act and the repeal of the corn laws
(it also helped that frustrated elite aspirants could try their hand at
running distant parts of the empire).
In any
case, it seems we’ll know what the denouement is before too long. “The
nice thing about CrisisDB is that we now have statistics on how long
these periods last,” Turchin tells me. “Roughly speaking, it’s 10 to 20
years. Very few shorter, some much longer. But for those who think that
we’re [already] out of it in the United States? That’s not very likely.”
I nod, and make a mental note to speak to him again in 2033.
End
Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration
by Peter Turchin will be published by Allen Lane on 13 June. To support
the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.