I’ve mentioned Professor Turchin, and his use of the Arabic term asabiya, a number of times over the year. Asabiya refers to
… a critical concept and term from Ibn Khaldun, meaning the “capacity of a social group for concerted collective action.”
Turchin noted that a key factor in the dissipation of asabiya, and in turn the dissolution of multi-state empires, is the defeat of an existential enemy, such as the final defeat of the Gauls leading to the drifting apart of the Roman Empire.
So I wonder if Professor Richardson has read Turchin:
In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995. [Letters from an American]
This description of internecine warfare by the elite sounds frighteningly like Turchin’s descriptions of agrarian societies tearing themselves into pieces.
