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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.
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.
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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