Cycles of Radicalization

Why the tumultuous times will pass

What is woke? The word originated among African Americans and meant being awake to racial prejudice and discrimination. A similar terminology (awakening) is used to describe episodes of religious enthusiasm. Journalist Matt Yglesias combined these two notions in a 2019 article to refer to a rising consciousness among whites of ongoing anti-black racism.  Economics writer Noah Smith compares “wokeness” to the rise of abolition movements rising out of the Second Great Awakening. Linguist John McWhorter sees anti-racism (often considered as an element of wokeness) as a kind of secular religion. These authors see wokeness as relating to ideologies characteristic of our time (and possibly other times) that represent a new way of seeing our society or culture. I see wokeness as a member of a more general category of cultural instability (CI), defined as moralistic challenges to established notions of American society and culture.

Another, possibly related, phenomenon is sociopolitical instability (SPI), arising from political challenges to the established order. SPI events include things like riots, labor violence, assassinations, lynchings, acts of terrorism and so forth. Scientist Peter Turchin did a study on trends in the frequency of SPI in America in 2012 that predicted a new peak in SPI would happen around 2020, resulting in some media attention when 2020 turned out to be pretty eventful. I extended this analysis farther back that Turchin did and updated it in chapter 6 of America in Crisis. I added colonial unrest events, slave revolts, and battles in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars as SPI events to Turchin’s database and plotted a moving average of their frequency to find the fifty-year pattern continuing back into colonial times.  I found peaks in SPI around 1740, 1780, 1835, and (provisionally) 2020 in addition to the three (1870, 1920, 1970) Turchin found, identifying six cycles of approximate fifty-year length.

I did the same thing with CI, assembling a database of more than 250 CI events. One type of CI event was Christian revivals or movements such as Abolition, Social Gospel, Fundamentalism, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Religious Right, or Moral Mondays as moral challenges to a complacent society. Another was the founding of new Christian denominations or new religions as challenges to established religion. Noting a temporal correspondence between oscillations in the prevalence of SPI and CI with eras political scientist Samuel Huntington calls creedal passion periods (CPP), I included events in the CI database that can be described as cultural politics, such as the rise in salience of transgender identities and an environmental movement revitalized by concern about climate change. Like the Abolition and Social Gospel movements, which arose out of the Second (1800-30) and Third Great Awakenings (1890-1920), respectively, these modern movements build on cultural understandings coming out of the Fourth Great Awakening (1960-80).

I found periods of elevated CI happening around 1735, 1830, 1910-30, 1970, and 2020 which closely correspond to peaks in SPI. Based on this correspondence, I speculated that SPI and CI are manifestations of the same phenomenon (radical ideation) operating in political and cultural domains, respectively. Hence, I combined the two measurements into a single property, sociopolitical and cultural instability (SPCI), which is plotted in Figure 1.

Figure 1 SPCI cycles and social contagion model output.

Turchin explains these episodes as arising from a social contagion process, where people are “infected” with radical ideas at variable rates over time resulting in periodic “epidemics” of instability. Rate of infection is affected positively by the number of “radicals” (those infected with a radical meme), and negatively by the number of “moderates,” those who have recovered from infection and provide a form of herd immunity that suppresses inflection. Figure 1 shows that the model fits the data reasonably well.

This analysis suggests that some of the social and cultural turmoil of the present time will likely be ephemeral. Previous social contagion epidemics saw things like the Shakers (1770’s), New Thought (1830’s), Theosophy (1870’s), Father Divine’s Peace Movement (1920’s) or Heaven’s Gate (1970’s) which did not stand the test of time. On the other hand, some of the new ideas are going to become part of the social and political fabric of the nation. Historical examples include the subversive ideologies of the Sons of Liberty and Abolitionists, charismatic Pentecostalism during the Third Great Awakening, and Gay Liberation in the Fourth Great Awakening.

Figure 2. Trends in SPI (3y mov. avg) and SPCI (SPI + 3*trailing 5-yr avg of CI)

Figure 2 shows trends in SPI and SPCI over the last half century. The previous CPP (to use Huntington’s nomenclature) in SPCI in the sixties and seventies is evident as is the beginning of the current CPP in the mid 2000’s. Another measure of the current CPP is David Rozado’s analysis of trends in the frequency of the use of words denoting prejudice (e.g., racist, white supremacy, sexist, homophobic) in the news media or on Twitter. He finds the incidence of such words in both places rose dramatically after 2012.

According to the social contagion model, the current CPP should have peaked already and be starting on its downslope. Figure 2 suggests a peak may have occurred around 2019, but it is still too early to be sure. Rosado’s analysis shows no evidence for a trend change in the news media, but he does find a 2019-20 peak and subsequent decline on Twitter. I recently watched a video called 2023: Year of Anti-Woke in which youtuber Kidology commented on her perceptions of a change in the discourse on political youtube. Confirmation of such a trend will require seeing a clear downtrend in SPI frequency which will require several more years of data.