To start, a few of Turchin's main points are unarguable. The first is elite overproduction. There's no need to belabor that point: it's obvious. The absurdity of college graduate overproduction and explosion of expensive academic administration are just two symptoms. His theory of counterelites, while not completely original, is also on …
To start, a few of Turchin's main points are unarguable. The first is elite overproduction. There's no need to belabor that point: it's obvious. The absurdity of college graduate overproduction and explosion of expensive academic administration are just two symptoms. His theory of counterelites, while not completely original, is also on target.
That the big political and other changes are coming from the right is also unarguable. But it's not the Anglo-American libertarian-leaning conservatism that we grew up with, that founded by Buckley in the 1950s and represented by Goldwater, Reagan, and Thatcher. That kind of right effectively merged in the 1990s and 2000s with the neoliberal establishment that has dominated the Democratic Party since 1992. It's now gone. The "new new" right we see now had its avatars in the 1990s in Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, in opposition to globalization, deindustrialization, and top-down cultural revolution. In the 1990s, this movement split the Right into small-government and populist-nationalist wings and made the election of Clinton possible. But it's now inching toward majority status because of the growing defections of once-Democratic voters and the realization that much of the "conspiracy theories" and fringe doom-mongering of the populist right of the 90s has turned out to be right.
There are some other problems with Turchin's points though. The core problem with fiscal breakdown is not about taxation or Reagan or anything before the 1990s. The US was in decent fiscal condition as late as 2000. The core problem is the monetary revolution that quietly began in the late 1990s, of ultralow interest rates (almost a quarter century now) which has made asset bubbles possible and inevitable -- this is the origin of the explosion of unequal wealth. This disease led first to overindebtedness in the private economy and, then, in response to the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, fiscal extravagance on an unprecedented scale. One key difference between now and 1980, and why no Volcker-style rescue is possible, is that the US economy is far more indebted now. Interest rates simply cannot be raised much. Much of America's productivity problem is rooted in the squandering of capital in speculation enabled by ultralow rates. Nothing will really get productivity, labor, and wages back on track without investment instead of manias. To do that requires major changes to monetary and tax policies. (My recommendation is Karen Petrou's Engine of Inequality, a book on the modern Fed since the later Greenspan years.)
There have been multiple turning points in US history along the lines Turchin discussed, roughly 40-60 years. One thinks of the Revolutionary generation 1770-1790; the end of gentleman politics and the rise of popular democracy around 1830; the Civil War period (1850-1870); the WWI-WWII period (1917-1940); the breakdown of New Deal America (1965-1982). Only the Civil War period was truly world-historical in the deepest sense, the single most important turning point in the English-speaking world since the 17th century. It didn't just mark the victory of free soil over plantation slavery; it presaged the end of agricultural America and the rise of urban-industrial America and of America as a world power. That period in some ways was more important than even the Revolutionary era.
I doubt if we're in a period quite like that. However, it is comparable in my view to the 1970s and maybe to the 1930s. The collective politics that's coming will be populist, nationalist, protectionist, somewhat xenophobic, and hostile to immigration. It will encounter a lot of opposition from the newer neoliberal Democratic elite and what's left of the older Republican elite.
To start, a few of Turchin's main points are unarguable. The first is elite overproduction. There's no need to belabor that point: it's obvious. The absurdity of college graduate overproduction and explosion of expensive academic administration are just two symptoms. His theory of counterelites, while not completely original, is also on target.
That the big political and other changes are coming from the right is also unarguable. But it's not the Anglo-American libertarian-leaning conservatism that we grew up with, that founded by Buckley in the 1950s and represented by Goldwater, Reagan, and Thatcher. That kind of right effectively merged in the 1990s and 2000s with the neoliberal establishment that has dominated the Democratic Party since 1992. It's now gone. The "new new" right we see now had its avatars in the 1990s in Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, in opposition to globalization, deindustrialization, and top-down cultural revolution. In the 1990s, this movement split the Right into small-government and populist-nationalist wings and made the election of Clinton possible. But it's now inching toward majority status because of the growing defections of once-Democratic voters and the realization that much of the "conspiracy theories" and fringe doom-mongering of the populist right of the 90s has turned out to be right.
There are some other problems with Turchin's points though. The core problem with fiscal breakdown is not about taxation or Reagan or anything before the 1990s. The US was in decent fiscal condition as late as 2000. The core problem is the monetary revolution that quietly began in the late 1990s, of ultralow interest rates (almost a quarter century now) which has made asset bubbles possible and inevitable -- this is the origin of the explosion of unequal wealth. This disease led first to overindebtedness in the private economy and, then, in response to the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, fiscal extravagance on an unprecedented scale. One key difference between now and 1980, and why no Volcker-style rescue is possible, is that the US economy is far more indebted now. Interest rates simply cannot be raised much. Much of America's productivity problem is rooted in the squandering of capital in speculation enabled by ultralow rates. Nothing will really get productivity, labor, and wages back on track without investment instead of manias. To do that requires major changes to monetary and tax policies. (My recommendation is Karen Petrou's Engine of Inequality, a book on the modern Fed since the later Greenspan years.)
There have been multiple turning points in US history along the lines Turchin discussed, roughly 40-60 years. One thinks of the Revolutionary generation 1770-1790; the end of gentleman politics and the rise of popular democracy around 1830; the Civil War period (1850-1870); the WWI-WWII period (1917-1940); the breakdown of New Deal America (1965-1982). Only the Civil War period was truly world-historical in the deepest sense, the single most important turning point in the English-speaking world since the 17th century. It didn't just mark the victory of free soil over plantation slavery; it presaged the end of agricultural America and the rise of urban-industrial America and of America as a world power. That period in some ways was more important than even the Revolutionary era.
I doubt if we're in a period quite like that. However, it is comparable in my view to the 1970s and maybe to the 1930s. The collective politics that's coming will be populist, nationalist, protectionist, somewhat xenophobic, and hostile to immigration. It will encounter a lot of opposition from the newer neoliberal Democratic elite and what's left of the older Republican elite.