Decent piece in The Atlantic about Peter Turchin's "cliodynamics" model.

Quotes:

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.

Pretty impressive prediction to be honest. It reminds me of Guillaume Faye's - even more impressive - prediction in his book Convergence of Catastrophes. The part about a possible civil war isn't new of course. We've been predicting that for a while now.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

I find his idea of "elite overproduction" interesting, and what he calls "counter-elites" sounds very similar to the rise of fascism in my opinion. Fascism partly began as a movement of what Mark Lilla calls "counter-intellectuals". Leftists often describe fascism as a form of anti-intellectualism, but Lilla argues that it's far more accurate to describe it as a form of counter-intellectualism. It meant that certain dissident intellectuals on the radical right produced intellectual work that attacked the dominant liberal - or Marxist - intellectual hegemony. It's the same situation we're in today. Our intellectuals are also counter-intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism however is more akin to retarded conservatives like Sarah Palin.

urchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

Needless to say I wholeheartedly agree with both taxing the elites and reducing immigration, but under neoliberalism that's simply unacceptable. As far as his take on higher education is concerned, it would certainly be a good beginning. We all know universities today are cosmopolitan indoctrination centers, and far too many people are attending them anyway.

Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster. He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.

I can't imagine something like that under a liberal democracy...

Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United States, let alone one of human civilization. Turchin’s approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

The fact that so many American historians still believe in Fukuyama's "end of history" nonsense is beyond me.

Article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/