National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War

Foretastes of a new American civil war

If a new civil war comes to the United States of America, it will  not come in the form it did in the 19th Century, with two large intact geographic blocks—the Confederacy and the Union–each with their own military locked continuously in armed conflict. It’s likely to take one of two tracks: (1) a coup attempt, like the January 6 insurrection; or  (2) it will look more like the late 20th Century convulsions in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles,” marked by scattered and sporadic acts of violence inflicted by loosely networked paramilitary groups.  In Northern Ireland, more than half the 3,500 people killed were civilians, in a conflict that spanned about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

We are getting foretastes of something similar, now largely committed piecemeal by individual right wing “lone wolves” terrorizing racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities, and increasingly school board members, electoral officials, businesses that openly support progressive causes, law enforcement, and members of the judiciary.

The overall effect is to sow fear and mistrust broadly among citizens, citizen groups, and institutions. The intent of each violent individual is narrow, but the cumulative impact is wide, and deep.  If paramilitary groups like those in Northern Ireland grow in strength in the U.S., the cumulative impact will be all the greater. What’s more, horrifically lethal weapons and ammunition now widely available in the U.S. and being stockpiled by extremists make individuals and groups far more powerful than those in Northern Ireland of the 1990s. The death toll from a low-level but widespread civil war in the U.S. would dwarf the numbers in ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.

Partisan divisions and proliferation of weaponry make for a combustible mix  that threatens a breakdown in the institutions that so far have kept America relatively stable.

The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the attempt by a militia to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan in 2020, and many individual hate crimes—mostly associated with white supremacy—are symptoms of what social scientist and historian Peter Turchin calls “political disintegration.”  The conditions and causes for disintegration follow a pattern seen many times before in history among various states, and more often than not the outcome is bad for democracy.

One of the more common outcomes is civil war. The objective of the Michigan militia was expressly to start a civil war. Likewise, that was the express hope of Dylan Roof,  who shot nine Black parishioners in a church in 2015. These are just two of the highest profile evildoers among many extremists who have sought, or advocated for, a civil war.

In his recent book End Times, Turchin illuminates the patterns of social and political disintegration from the past that closely resemble what is happening around us today.

Crises explained: Peter Turchin on cliodynamics and the origins of political disintegration

“Trump was like a small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave.” So says social scientist Peter Turchin early on in his recent book, End Times. Continues Turchin:  “To understand why Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States, we should . . . pay less attention to his personal qualities and maneuvers and more to the deep social forces that propelled him to the top.”

This is easy to say, as have many others in so many words. The difference with Turchin is that he has brought to the analysis of MAGAism a precise description of those social forces.  Nearly identical  forces have brought numerous societies through disintegration to political upheavals which more often than not end badly:  in civil war, in anarchy, in militocracy, in autocracy,  in dictatorship, in monarchy, in theocracy—any of them at odds with democracy.

There are ways to re-integrate societies before a full-blown crisis arrives, and Turchin describes them as well, with three specific examples from the past, including 20th Century United States in the wake of the Great Depression. These re-integrative successes are the historical exceptions. Right now, Turchin fears, political disintegration has brought the U.S. near a crisis that could end American democracy.

What gives Turchin credibility is his methodology, which he characterizes as a scientific approach to history. It’s no surprise that Turchin began his academic career as an ecologist: “I made my living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer.” When Big Data came along, Turchin worked on modeling such natural phenomena as the boom-and-bust cycles of animal populations. He began to apply these techniques to human history. Over a period of 25 years, he and colleagues “built out a flourishing field known as cliodynamics (from Clio, the name of the Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change).”

We discovered that there are important recurring patterns, which can be observed throughout the sweep of human history during the past 10,000 years. . . . Despite the myriad of differences, complex human societies, at base and on some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles.

Turchin and his colleagues focused on cycles  “of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse.”  They found that “complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent, and to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces. . . . ”

Before we go into Turchin’s conclusions, let’s pause a moment to consider what makes Turchin’s analysis of history “scientific.” Turchin is not content with the hand-waving argument expressed by the epigram, history does not repeat, but it rhymes. He’s seeking the answers to more specific questions—what is the pace of the rhythms, does it change over time, what are the similarities between events and places?

The answers lie primarily, as with so many scientific endeavors, in measurements organized in a systematic way, laying solid groundwork for inductive techniques in combination with deductive reasoning.  For doubters as to just how scientific the methods of Turchin and other “cliodynamicists” are, Turchin devotes 54 pages of Appendices to describe what he calls a “A New Science of History.” In it he specifies the “proxies” of quantitative information used to characterize phases of history,  such as the size of warring armies fighting each other and their quantity of weaponry. Other proxies: the size of skeletons indicating average height and therefore the overall health of a population (the frequency of broken bones in human remains may also indicate the degree of violence in a society); the composition of pollen which settles in layers to the bottom of lakes, indicative of landuse changes; cores of large beams to determine the ages of trees that were cut down for new house construction; and so forth.

Turchin is famous in academic circles for having “predicted” the intense political turmoil of the early 2020s, ten years in advance. When Nature magazine asked leading scientists in 2010 to provide a ten-year forecast of what was to come socially and politically, Turchin forecast that “America was in a spiral of disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in social order circa 2020,” to quote the dustjacket of the book. In 2010 Turchin was not pinpointing 2020, but said the close similarity of developments in American politics to historical antecedents meant disintegration was destined to occur within the next decade or two. Cliodynamics foretold that, as in nearly 200 instances in the past among a wide variety of societies, disintegration was inevitable.

Drivers of disintegration

In essence, the “basic set of forces” that have repeatedly brought about disintegration in the past boil down to three main drivers: (1) “overproduction of elites”—too many people at the top of the heap competing to occupy a limited number of seats of power; (2) “popular immiseration”— the living standards of a large segment of the population are stagnating or declining; and (3) a “wealth pump” that sucks up wealth generated by the nonelites and distributes it among the elites. These drivers compel the elites to start breaking the rules to get ahead, give rise to frustrated “counter elites” who challenge the status quo, and breed despair and anger among the nonelites.  According to Turchin, these drivers had been intensifying since the 1970s in the U.S., and historical precedents foreshadowed “a spike in political instability” in the years around 2020.

Immiseration in the U.S. is more than obvious in the widening wealth gap regularly tracked by the Economic Policy Institute.

As for “overproduction of elites,” we need look no farther than the spectacle of seventeen candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Then in 2019-2020, the contestants for the Democratic nomination numbered no less than eighteen.  Turchin says that between 1960 and 1970, the number of doctorate degrees at U.S. universities more than tripled. The number of positions with power is limited, and ferocious competition for these positions inevitably leads to breaking the rules. The supreme rule-breaker at the top of the Republican heap has been Donald Trump. On the political Left, the most prominent is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has already taken upon himself to defy the Democratic establishment with crank positions such as that  vaccines cause autism and mass shootings are tied to prescription drugs.

The pattern of disintegration takes on different shapes in accordance with existing power structures: monarchies, militocracies, theocracies, autocracies, dictatorships, plutocracies, oligarchies, and democracies have their own variants, but it’s the same basic set of forces pushing their societies toward crisis.

Turchin identifies the current power structure in the U.S. as a plutocracy, and his analysis of the U.S. supposes a “ruling class” of moneyed elites. He holds out hope for a rebalancing of the system to shut down or slow the wealth pump and “reverse elite overproduction in a relatively peaceful way.” He sets forth examples of societies that managed to escape their crises relatively unscathed, including mid-20th Century America (no one should forget that the U.S. had a “progressive era” roughly from 1896-1917, that sowed the seeds for pro-democratic reforms in mid-century)—but he does not see power brokers in America now moving in that direction.  Turchin’s tone implies that the wealthy elites are engaged in willful blindness. There are exceptions such as “Patriotic Millionaires” pushing for a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the wealthy, but it’s been slow going. As things stand, with the Republican majority in the House seeking to make the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and cut social welfare programs using the threat of government shutdown, the conditions for a crisis will persist—and likely worsen.

What I’ve said above paints in broad strokes the features of cliodynamics that point to the instability in American political affairs, and the imminence of a crisis that can’t be avoided without major changes  to halt or slow the wealth pump. For more detail,  I recommend reading Turchin’s book, where you will find his theory amply supported with historical precedents and his incisive portrayal of where things stand today. Second best, go to YouTube and search on Turchin and “End Times” to hear Turchin himself (note it was the publisher not Turchin who picked the unscientific title with its apocalyptic overtones).  At the end of this post (the BONUS) I link to one of the better interviews, where the interviewer challenges Turkin on a few points rather than giving him free rein.  The cordiality and lack of defensiveness with which Turchin responds to these challenges make his arguments all the more credible.

In general, the approach taken by Turchin toward political history focuses on what he calls “structural-demographic” forces. He acknowledges this approach has “been criticized for [its] neglect of ideological and cultural factors,” and that “the process of ideological fragmentation and political polarization is . . . challenging to study with quantitative methods.” He refers to Jack Goldstone’s assessment that ideology tends to be highly fluid and rides on the back of the “basic set of forces” adduced above. In other words, ideology is subservient to the impersonal drivers.

As for cultural factors, Turchin leaves those to the reader. Religion is a big one. The Iranian and Afghan theocracies illustrate the power of religion to enforce domination of the populace by an elite. Religions have deeper roots than secular ideologies.

Cliodynamics vs the “great man” theory of history

Since I began this essay with Peter Turchin shrinking Donald Trump’s political stature down to the size of a “small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave,” I’ll end with the “great man theory,” made popular in the 19th Century but dismissed by Turchin as anti-scientific.  Turchin does concede that “leaders can matter. Although rulers are heavily constrained by the social structures within which they operate, they do have some leeway in nudging the trajectories of the states they lead.” Hmm . . . “nudging?” Consider Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Genghis Khan, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong—it is difficult to argue that they merely “nudged a trajectory.”  Certainly Donald Trump has done more than “nudge”—he has given the  antidemocratic trajectory a hard shove.  His success in animating an army of angry zealots has encouraged imitation by others within the Republican Party: if running roughshod over democracy is the route to power, there is apparently no lack of aspirants.

 

Next post: the anti-democratic properties of Artificial Intelligence, and how it can hasten political disintegration

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BONUS VIDEO:  Peter Turkin on political disintegration

There are plenty of YouTube interviews of Peter Turchin on several topics and several books. I like this one  because the interlocutor challenges Turchin on some points and Turchin responds cordially and substantively—sometimes with humor and usually with enthusiasm.

DOUBLE BONUS VIDEO: NICK HANAUER

Nick Hanauer, plutocrat and unapologetic advocate of  capitalism, is one of the founding members of Patriotic Millionaires, an organization with positions at odds with the sentiments of most plutocrats—those who are market fundamentalists, at least. Hanauer argues for a $15/hr minimum wage (in this video from 2014; certainly he would argue for a higher wage today), and for the rich to pay more taxes. My favorite quote from the video above is: “The work of democracy is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity. . . . government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive.”

(For specifics on the government’s role in teaming with private industry for progress and prosperity, I recommend Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, which puts the lie to market fundamentalism. She has some illuminating videos on YouTube as well.)

Hanauer’s  themes dovetail with Turchin’s  warnings about overproduction of elites, immiseration of the non-elites, and the role of the wealth pump in exacerbating the conditions for disintegration. To Hanauer, trickle-down economics is stupid and risky, and he notes that unregulated capitalism tends toward monopoly. He makes clear that he is not making a moral argument, he is making an economic and business argument.

If you are uncomfortable with Hanauer’s emphasis on growth, mind that Hanauer does not talk here about what kinds of growth are good, but he also does not say all growth is good. That’s a topic for a separate discussion. Growth does not necessarily mean creating a lot of resource-intensive Stuff. One sector for good growth is  the care economy, paying for work  which is currently unpaid, and reflects a huge sector of the economy that is not included in GDP. Growth can mean creating more affordable housing with communities designed to  be made more conducive to mutually beneficial social relations; more affordable medical devices; more efficient vehicles and appliances; more environmentally friendly infrastructure; improving ways to reuse and recycle resources; and so forth. Capitalism, says Hanauer, is good at solving problems—if the problems it is asked to solve involve how to make more junk, that’s what it will do. Give it more socially beneficial problems, it can do a good job of that too. How to create the right kind of demand is a political task.