Here’s something that reminds me of Professor Turchin’s Secular Cycles, as Jennifer Rubin writes in WaPo:
In sum, our politics may be worse than our body politic. I asked Yascha Mounk, founder of a new magazine and community named Persuasion, whether we are as hopelessly divided as we keep hearing. (Persuasion was founded to defend liberal Democratic values and create a civil community for actual debate.) Acknowledging the consensus on coronavirus and very wide agreement on whether there is need to reform policing (yes), whether systemic racism exists (yes) and whether to do away with the police (no). “Maybe the American people are quite united and the elites are the most divided,” Mounk said. The question then becomes whether “elites will impose their division on us or whether ordinary people will resist.”
Sure, Turchin was analyzing agrarian societies, not our high tech society like ours’, but it’s still striking how we seem to follow the demographic cycle.
One of the points that Turchin made concerning the disintegrative phase of a demographic cycle was the internecine warfare in which the elite engaged. Some of it was simply to stay in the elite, but other combative efforts were explicitly about supporting whichever religious, political, or social position each wealthy person or group found appealing.
No matter how nutty it might be.
Wealth enables stubborn clinging to nuttiness. Anyone who has to work for a living, to put food on the table, and engages in a certain kind of magical thinking, quickly finds reality giving them a good ol’ swat upside the head. Not so the elite, though. They can just shrug and pour more money into the cause, motivated by, well, take your pick: religious convictions, ideas concerning how society should be run, narcissism.
So when Mounk suggests we may be seeing a war of the elites, it’s worth thinking about. I try – try – to keep up good relations with friends currently in the Trump camp, as I figure that some of them are still capable of looking around and realizing that Trump’s promises were empty, that even when he tried, he couldn’t fulfill them. Those promises that weren’t empty were unrealistic.
And I want my fellow Americans to stick around.
