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I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.
The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.
Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.
I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.
As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.
I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are. The core issue driving social unrest in the US is race and secondly gender (particularly the trans issue). None of those things have any direct bearing with elites per se in a material sense, but rather about identity. Marxists are notoriously bad at understanding this distinction and frankly so are many right-wingers with their naïve (but admirable) colorblind ideology.
That said, on the trans issue, the right has a much better and clearer understanding of the underlying conflict which is why they are, for once, doing quite well in the culture war in this area. Marxist materialism is simply useless here.
It depends on what you mean by materialist. Even Karl Marx himself spent most of the 1840ies laying groundwork for his later thinking, but in 1840ies he was much more theoretical. In his books such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscript he inverts Hegelian idealism on its head. But only in so much as to claim that it is not some ultimate idea , or Geist trying to use history and dialectics, but for Marx the role of the Geist is replaced by Man, specifically Man as species being. For Marx the man recreates himself via his Work, unalienated labor that takes paramount position.
But it is this cycle where man uses Praxis of work to refine Theory, which then shapes society which in turn reshapes man in dialectical cycle. The nature of The Work itself is malleable, for Marx it was literally the manual labor of proletariat wielding literal hammers and sickles. But for modern Marxists it may also be broader work, reality is socially constructed is it not? It is our duty to socially shape reality by doing The Work to bring about better tomorrow, reshaping institutions and seizing the means of cultural production. It is at least as important as seizing the means of industrial and agricultural production, because in the end what we are sculpting is the New Soviet Man and he is product of culture broadly defined.
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But race and gender would not be so salient if we could sufficiently get out of each other's faces, and that has a dry, materialist component, implicating techno-commercial and economic trends.
Tangentially, I wonder, who might be an example of a right materialist? James Manzi?
Michael Lind might count but I think he's sort of been slid into the right wing camp by default, via the left changing its tune.
The more market-oriented libertarians - as opposed to Gadsden flag-waving anti-government types - have been called the Marxists of the right, so there's that.
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ditto. i don't think grand narratives can or should be dismissed outright but I think his is wrong . some narratives are better/accurate than others
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I’m not going to defend Turchin, but I would point out that the emergence of the Woke/Anti-Woke dynamics would require something of an explanation simply because all of the groups involved have always existed in the USA and could get along fairly well until 2010.
They still do largely get along. The feeling they don't is a manifestation of the inescapeability and heightened new sense of memetic domination and the always-on media mindshare.
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wokeism existed well before social media. people have been getting cancelled and protested long before the 2010s such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jensen#cite_note-scarr-14
this was 1969
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Black people and most of the rest have never gotten along. We had detente, but never peace. And Jefferson was probably right -- they never will, the "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" will never fade.
There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.
This is a quibble; we can speak meaningfully of groups "getting along" without worrying about whether it's true for "all people".
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Some hypotheses:
Because the US viciously exploited black people not too long ago, on average white Americans probably feel more guilt towards black people than, say, white French people feel towards Algerians. Of course the French fought a brutal war in Algeria not long ago, but it did not practice chattel enslavement of Algerians on a massive scale. When Algerians riot in France, white French feel relatively little guilt-sympathy towards them compared to how white American feel towards black Americans. And if, say, Chechens riot in France then white French have essentially no reason to feel any guilt towards them at all.
The police in the US are more heavily militarized and more able and willing to shoot people than police in Europe are. This is in part because the US has higher violent crime rates and much higher private gun ownership than Europe does, so as a reaction cops are heavily armed and jittery. And it is probably also in part because of other factors that have to do with the particular history of police forces in the US as opposed to Europe. In any case, the result is that in the US there is a constant stream of stories about cops shooting black people, mentally ill people, and members of other groups that are widely considered to be victims of oppression. This then provides evidence to buttress the woke ideology that "America is a near-fascist state that is massively oppressing black people", etc.
Stronger social safety nets in Europe compared to the US make people more relaxed overall, less willing to believe that their societies are horribly oppressive, and less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.
The sudden 2015 migrant crisis caused Western Europe, in reaction, to lurch on average away from wokism on at least some issues. In the US this did not happen.
European countries, which have much more generous social safety nets, far-right/left parties have actual seats in government, unlike in the US. I posit a bigger social safety net means people have less reason to compete professionally, or to get ahead at work, or be obedient for fear of being fired, so have the discretion and free time to take up fringe political causes, knowing that being fired is not a big deal compared to here. in the US a lot of people outgrow this sort of stuff because they have jobs.
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That doesn't match up with the histories of Europe and the USA either today or historically. The USA like the UK and other Anglo countries have always been less prone to sweeping social movements like Communism or Fascism then their continental cousins. You can't really compare the USA to countries like France, Germany or Russia. Just look at the amount of regime change in these countries compared to the Anglos that have remained remarkably stable.
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Slavery ended 150 years ago. In contrast the French were beating up algerians well within living memory.
This is not the anecdata usually reported by Americans who get off the beaten path in Europe, who report that police brutality is a lot more brutal there.
3 and 4 are possible, but I think the real reason is that African Americans are unambiguously American in a way that French Algerians are not unambiguously French.
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As I recall, he considers Denmark and the Scandinavian countries some of the places that are following his preferred policies to reduce inequality, so would consider their lack of drama a sign that his theory is on the right track.
One of the reasons I am willing to hear Turchin out, despite some obvious flaws, is because it seems like it would be better to consider the race and LGBT+ drama in America as inter-elite, since it seems to mostly be that top 10% vying for position and showing off how unusually tolerant, good, special, and thus deserving they are, unconnected to the challenges of the black working class, or the underclass who could, if circumstanced improved, be working class. This has been discussed to death here already.
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Because US had a headstart on the whole whining begets winning. And in EU the whole blood and soil thing still holds stronger.
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