I recommend you have a look at
Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on the past 10,000 years of human history that in 2010 predicted that an "age of discord" worse than most Americans have experienced would get serious around 2020. Here are some clips:
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.
“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for
the same position, and some portion of them will convert to
counter-elites,” Turchin said....Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton
degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His
government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of
previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes
because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies.
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.
So, if these clips whet your appetite, you should read the whole article,
(This is a re-post of my 11/12/2020 post.)
