An Elitist in Sheep's Clothing

Thoughts on Peter Turchin's "End Times"

“But as to risings, I can tell you why:

It in on contradiction that they grow.”

William Empson, “Aubade”

Peter Turchin is the leading - certainly the most prominent - practitioner of what he calls “cliodynamics”: the application of statistics to explain the cycles of history in a systematic and (ultimately) scientific way; the goal being to explain, at least in part, the rise and fall of states. As the title suggests, his latest book “End Times” (Penguin, 2023) is focussed on the latter; in particular, the question as to whether the United States is currently facing, or is soon to face, the sort of crisis which may lead to its collapse.

What makes Turchin a particularly interesting thinker for our spaces - what I like to call the Realist Right - aside from the importance of the subject matter in and of itself, is his wholesale grounding in elite theory. (Although note that he does not specifically name, quote or reference the underlying thinkers at all in the book - I will provide some speculation why this may be later.) Consider this from the preface:

Ultimately, the central question of this book is about social power. Who rules? How do ruling elites maintain their dominant position within society? Who are the challengers of the status quo, and what is the role of elite overproduction in generating such challenges? And why do ruling classes, both historically and today, sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power and get overthrown?¹

Turchin reconstructs examples from history to illustrate his thesis. (If a model fails to predict what has actually happened, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of being a guide to the future!) He finds four factors to be key in providing the necessary ground for state collapse (at worst) or a revolutionary circulation of the elites:

1. Elite overproduction

2. Popular immiseration

3. Unsustainable state debt

4. The wider geopolitical context

In practice, he ignores the third (he is no economist) and rarely talks about the last - although contending is an important factor for minor powers (we will see that he considers the current case of Ukraine). Elite theorists may baulk at the second, but have no fear, he is entirely a realist here. He views popular immiseration as a signal of what he terms a “wealth pump”: simply, real wages are suppressed (by a growing population, through natural increase or immigration), causing greater returns to the elites, and consequently driving elite overproduction and (potentially) intra-elite competition. Popular immiseration is a useful signal that things are “going wrong” - and it is easier to quantify real wage rates, for example, than elite overproduction or competition. At most, popular immiseration may lead to public protests which give the military (or factions within it) the chance not to obey orders to suppress them - a classic example of situations in which sudden regime change does actually occur. Elsewhere he says:

“People” or “citizens” don’t overthrow states or create new ones. Only “organized people” can achieve both positive and negative social change. Again, to understand why a revolution was successful (or not), we need to understand what the contending interest groups were, how much power each wielded, how internally cohesive they were, and how they organized collective action. This is the essence of the structural-dynamic approach. ²

Good stuff.

It is not immediately clear what Turchin’s political sympathies are, although two examples of his takes on historical and more recent situations are interesting. The first is his explanation of post-Civil War America. He shows that conditions were ripe for trouble leading up to the war. But what is particularly telling is his account of Lincoln’s actions during and after the war. He stresses that Lincoln’s core base of northern industrialists were amply rewarded: by the continuation of the tariff regime which had so infuriated the South on his election, and by the lucrative war debt issued. Railroad magnates (who Lincoln had represented in his legal career) directly benefitted through land grants. The Homestead Act provided opportunities for northern “free farmers” to settle new lands to the West; but in order for this not to drive wage rates too high for the industrialists, a very loose Immigration Act was introduced in 1864. And, of course, after the war came emancipation: whatever the moral case, a fringe position at the start of the war, with the result that the economic and power base of the southern elites were destroyed. It is a hard-headed telling which chimes much more with good old boy from the South than with the liberal academy.

A more current example of how Turchin is willing to take a line which is an anathema to academia is in comparing the fates of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in post-Soviet times. Putin allied the military and administrative functions of the state against the excesses of the oligarchs, who were hopelessly disunited and therefore no match. Lukashenko in Belarus simply continued Soviet policies and never really allowed significant oligarchs to emerge, and has been practically unchallenged. Ukraine, by contrast, was fully oligarchical (not dissimilar to Russia), but although as a class the oligarchs were never united, they were neither ever significantly challenged - indeed were positively aided by what he is happy to call US “proconsuls”, epitomised by Victoria Nuland. (It is here that Turchin is happy to grant a significant role to geopolitics, and the driving force of the “Grand Chessboard” strategy of Brzezinski.) As a result, Ukraine’s GDP per capita (PPP terms) by 2013 was just $7,400 - way behind Russia’s of $18,100, and even Belarus, despite Ukraine being one of the richer republics at the dissolution of the USSR. Turchin stresses that Ukraine’s misery has not been a direct result of democracy - there are immiserated dictatorships and stable democracies - but nonetheless this is another brutally realist telling given the current situation.

Of course, the particularly negative incentives of a structure combining extreme oligarchy with performative democracy are well illustrated by a wise Russian lady in the oligarchical frenzy of Yeltsin’s auction of his country: “They know they won’t be elected next time, so they pocket the money and fly away”. ³

Also interesting from the angle of elite theory is research quoted by Goldstone (in the book “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World”) on the incidental role of ideologies in revolutionaries. In a pre-crisis period, many actors with widely varying ideologies compete in the intellectual idea space; in the crisis, one faction (or factions) wins out by force; and afterwards imposes the new ideology on the state. Ideology is fluid:

Ideology fails to provide “a clear to the intentions and actions of revolutionary leaders,” for “in practice revolutionaries frequently shifted their positions in response to changing circumstances… English Puritans sought to create a community of saints, but England became a community dominated by soldiers when the civil wars ceased.”⁴

In other words, post-hoc rationalisation of a political formula.

So, let’s flip to the current situation: is the US on the brink of collapse - civil war or something else? Turchin is at pains to point out that the future is too complex to be predicted, and that even in around a quarter of historical cases, the revolutionary situation is avoided (at least in the short term); the warning signs are there, but may be averted. Elites may come together to assuage the dangerous conditions, as for example occurred in the United States in the 1920s and 30s. Also, he predicts the current wave of troubles as a minor perturbation which, if unchecked, could be expected to get worse only another couple of generations. (Incidentally, why this is his position is not stated - if anything, the lack of political violence since the late sixties, and the relatively small scale of it then, would seem to me to indicate, in Turchin’s terms, that the risk was now, not fifty years down the line. I will return to this.)

Turchin is also clear in his analysis that the United States is a plutocracy, pure and simple. He cites interesting data by Gilans analysing the period from 1981 to 2002: this looks at policies approved of by the poorest decile of US voter, the median voter, and the top 10%. There was no impact of the poorest decile on policy outcomes, and - more dramatically - no impact either of the policy preferences of the median voter! Democracy, eh? Nonetheless, to my mind he overstresses the plutocratic (oligarchical?) component of the elite, and passes over the impact of the military/intelligence and administrative sections of the elites. The separation of corporations and the state in an economy where the state controls 40% of the economy, and directs much elsewhere, is at best optimistic; at worst fictional. Secondly, and directly, many of the new plutocratic elite we have seen rise over the last couple of decades are direct beneficiaries of federal programmes - Musk and Gates are obvious examples. When we also consider the symbiosis of the state and the financial elites, the presentation of the US as a plutocracy along the lines of the early Venetian Republic is unrealistic.

A wider point here is that at no point does Turchin reference the impact on his “wealth pump” of the fiat-dollar regime reigning in the United States since 1971. The capital effects of this, together with the pro-elite wealth pump that is the Cantillon effect, and the effect on the median worker of the “financialisaton of everything” which has resulted, would strongly bolster his case.

“End Times” appears at its weakest when doing what it says on the tin: considering whether the United States really is facing a civilisation-changing crisis, and what to do about it. There is some boiler-plate condemnation of contemporary politics, financial backing of issues, and even “political polarisation”. He devotes some space to considering the ground on the political right, but without much fresh thought. He recognises that the Trump presidency had the potential to be revolutionary, but was doomed to fail with the departure of Bannon. He is dismissive of the lack of organisation of the radical right, but also talks up the rise of the NatCon movement. Perhaps unfortunately, he identifies the most interesting figure in the United States as Tucker Carlson - taken off air around the time that the book was published, and losing credibility with his worrying lack of focus (Andrew Tate?). Commenting on the contemporary political scene is a misguided task for a book, as events will always devalue the writings, and speedily. And the focus on mainstream politics does not fit in with his view of America as a plutocracy - which renders all this a sideshow; at least without something truly revolutionary.

So, for all the interest in this book - of which there is much in 300 pages, and I would recommend everybody to read it, and think about it - we have some questions. Is cliodynamics useful? And does Turchin at the end pull his punches? Can disaster be avoided by just being a bit less “capitalist”, sharing the fruits of growth more widely, and the elites coming together and partying like it’s 1949? Would this be a good thing?

The first question is, to my mind, answered by the simple fact that Turchin predicted a period of turmoil for the United States around 2020 a decade before it happened, in a very different political (and geopolitical) world. That was a bold, and successful, call. He is a thinker with a lot to say - even if (perhaps) not all of it is said out loud.

Some reviewers of the book (see for example this) have criticised the lack of definition of who, exactly, constitutes the elite, from where does a counter-elite emerge, and the lack of agency which he grants to the masses. These points will be of less relevance to those of us more familiar to elite theory: we will accept the existence of elites and their overwhelming influence necessarily; and equally the fact that elites will never be united. The point here is that Turchin is considering the aggravating factors as to the risks of the current era; the particular actors are, if not irrelevant to his argument (and he does consider them), at best a matter of current affairs.

We may question the basis of cliodynamics - its emphasis on data, on the measurable; and the malign influence of modelling we have seen in recent years. A weakness of the book is that it “translates” the hard historical data he and his colleagues work on (“CrisisDB”) into soft, easily written prose, with a few worked examples of, say, real wage trends over time. Nonetheless, for all his attempted justification of cliodynamics as “science”, it is clear that it is in fact very far from that. One could go further, and state that this is in fact a strength, not a weakness - of course history (and prediction) cannot be so quantified. But using hard data, and clearly stated ideas, to help our thinking about what drives society is surely a useful tool.

He is, of course, constrained by what a credentialled professor the universities of Connecticut and Oxford can say without being written out of the narrative altogether. (He refers in the book to Noam Chomsky, who has avoided being “cancelled” by being simply ignored - by the mainstream at least.) Nonetheless, and without for a moment suggesting that I could guess the content of somebody else’s head, I hope I have shown that he is a thinker who is at least adjacent to “our side”. So, is there another way to interpret this book?

I think we can get a clue here regarding what may be seen as a rival “school of cliodynamics”: the Political Instability Task Force (“PITF”). This includes Goldstone, whose interesting research on revolutions Turchin quotes (and I highlighted above). He also refers to the PITF-funded Waller’s research on the proximate causes of civil wars, namely the presence of the following features:

• “Avocracies” (that is, political systems which are partly democratic, partly authoritarian) moving sharply in alignment (in either direction, interestingly);

• Factionalism, particularly ethnic;

• One faction losing ground;

• The presence of an accelerant, such as social media.

Turchin criticises the ethnic element herein, as being a function of the recent bias of the PITF’s sample; whilst admitting that it has been relevant in conflicts in, say, the last 50 years, it need not generally be so: compared, for example, to the period of the wars of religion. (More of this later.) Ideology is that which is imposed by the winner, not (necessarily) the driving factor.

But the killer fact is surely this: the PITF is funded by the CIA. And indeed, later in the book Turchin illustrates the risk of infiltration by federal agents into dissident groups with the story of a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Wheeler, by a “far right” group, half of which where Feds or informers! And indeed, the very plot was suggested by of the Feds!

To quote again:

A successful revolution requires a cohesive and organised revolutionary party with deep popular support… There is no such organisation in the United States, and one cannot be built while the federal police remain effective. The surveillance and coercion apparatus are just too strong.”⁵

How are we to read this, then: as a shrug of relief that violence will likely be avoided, for now at least? Or warning to potential actors to bide their time, keep their heads, avoid infiltration, and wait for the regime to show weakness?

My guess is: a bit of both. Few of us, let alone tenured professors (let alone those of Russian origins) would happily live through the turbulence of a civil war, or anything approaching it. Maybe we would all be happier if our elites could just “reign it in a bit”, make life easier, and drop-kick the can as far as possible.

But I think I have shown that, in various places, he converges enough with thinking of the Realist Right that he realises that this is no answer. Is this behind his hesitation to quote the sources of elite theory directly?

We can’t presume to look into someone else’s head, but maybe the signs are there. The strangest take in the book is that the political turmoil of the 2020s is a minor perturbation, which (if not fixed by wise elites), may lead to much more significant problems in fifty years, or so. His broad theory here is that violent cycles recur in roughly hundred-year cycles, following generational patterns as follows:

1. Period of violence/state collapse

2. Stable generation, remembering the problems of the last generation

3. Another period of violence/collapse (likely less serious than 1)

4. Another stable generation

5. Another - likely more serious - collapse

A generation of 25 years thus gives (approximately of course) a cycle of a century.

The problem I have with his description of the current state of the US, though, is that I can’t for the life of me square it with the facts. The disturbances of the 1920s-1930s were significant, and led to massive and obvious consequences on the polities of the United States and Europe. The perturbations of the seventies fit perfectly his description of a minor cycle: anti-Vietnam protests and hippies compared to the New Deal; the Bader-Meinhofs and CND compared to the Hitler and Stalin. (To be sure, the European political violence claimed a substantial number of lives, but there are doubts about whether even this was truly “organic” rather than inspired by external forces, whether “Gladio” or not.) One possibility is that the fiat regime we have faced in the last half century in some way obscures the data he models for his idea of the “wealth pump”; but of course without access to his models we cannot know whether this could be a factor. His analysis here just does not ring true. I tentatively suggest another possibility: that he is deliberately underplaying the gravity of the current situation.

In a similar vein, we may question whether his downplaying of race is quite what is seems. Again, this just does not sit happily with the facts. Of course, race was not a factor in the wars of religion fought within Europe in the seventeenth century; of course, it may well be a factor in multiracial societies, particularly ones riven by increasingly racialised ideologies. Perhaps he is following the old advice Don’t say the quiet part out loud…

Interesting though it is to speculate on whether there is more to the author’s own opinions than is explicit, one thing is clear. My reading of this book and its lessons for the current times are certainly in line with much current thinking on the Realist Right. The instabilities in our political regime are probably greater, not lesser we think. Watch for where the societal fractures exist. Learn the lessons from elite theory - work on organisation, not infiltration of mass movements. And maybe mot of all - keep your head in our changing political situation.

1. “End Times”, pp xiv-xv

2. “End Times”, pp 174-5

3. The wise lady in question appears in Episode 4 of Adam Curtis’s “TraumaZone”

4. “End Times”, p 96

5. “End Times”, p 208