The current crisis era
What in the hell is going on?
There is a lot of pessimism about the state of the American nation and the rest of the West. Some Americans feel we are heading towards civil war or at least some kind of civil strife. Others worry about declining birth rate, rising economic inequality, campus unrest or the rise of extreme ideologies on the political left and right. These concerns have birthed a zeitgeist of decline or decay in America and perhaps the West in general. In this post I give my take on what is going on based on a quarter-century of inquiry into the cycles of history. For me, the zeitgeist of decline is well expressed in the poem The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, the first part of which I give here:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats’ poem seems to capture the sense of institutional decline (things fall apart), a weakening of the moral fiber of society (the worse are full of passionate intensity), and the loss of confidence in those in charge of our civilization (the best lack all conviction) that is being expressed today. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which also seems in sync with today’s zeitgeist, was written in 1918, just one year before Yeats’ poem.
I believe what we are experiencing today is the secular cycle crisis period. The secular cycle is a concept proposed by Peter Turchin, which I previously described in the linked post. This cycle is divided into four periods: growth, stagnation, crisis and resolution. America has been the crisis period since 2006. The previous crisis period was over 1907-1929. At the time of Yeats’ poem and Spengler’s book, America (and presumably the West) was in the middle of the same kind of thing we are going through today.
According to Turchin, the intensity of the crisis is tracked by the political stress indicator (PSI), which can be approximated by the following expression:1
1. PSI = e2 / (L (1 – L))
Here e is a model variable that represents the relative number of people eligible for elite positions in society and L is labor fraction, a measure of economic inequality that represents the fraction of GDP that goes to labor. L is approximated as:
2. L = (1 – U) * (1 – S) * (W*LF + B) / GDP
Here U and S are the fraction of the labor force who are unemployed or slaves, respectively. W is a wage index: I use 1.61 times the unskilled wage index given here. LF is the labor force, B is the sum of social insurance and private benefit expenditures, and GDP is nominal GDP. Values for e are given by the solution to this differential equation:
3. de/dt = k * (L0/L – 1) where k and L0 are adjustable constants
Equations 1-3 give PSI as a lagged function of inequality. According to secular cycle theory inequality is the principal driver of PSI. The mechanism described by equations 1-3, through which political stress manifests, is called elite proliferation, the tendency for the fraction of elites to rise during periods of high inequality. Such periods allow for enterprising middle-income people to rise to the top by taking advantage of the opportunities rising inequality provides.
For example, during agrarian times, periods of rising population meant rising demand for foodstuffs, while the supply of such was limited by the total amount of arable land and a relatively fixed agricultural productivity. Rising demand relative to fixed supply meant rising prices. Similarly, rising population (labor supply) relative to a fixed amount of land to farm (labor demand) constrained the ability of workers to demand higher wages in the face of rising prices. Enterprising commoners could lease land at fixed rates from absentee aristocratic landlords for long periods and work the land with hired labor. As prices rose the real costs of the rent and labor inputs to his product fell, allowing the entrepreneur to earn windfall profits, becoming a wealthy individual who naturally felt they warranted elite status. In modern times, periods of rising inequality such as the last forty years have seen soaring financial markets that have created over 700 billionaires. Both are examples of elite proliferation.
Competition for positions in elite schools has greatly intensified as the numbers of Americans who can afford the preparation necessary to secure their children’s entry has swelled providing a clear example of elite proliferation. Another is competition for top positions in government. The income share of the top 1% has doubled over the last fifty years, doubling the per capita demand for elite influence while the population has risen by 50%. This translates a tripling of those seeking to influence state policy while the number of points to which influence may be exerted has remained about the same. Each side today has three times the “concentration” of influence leading to 3 x 3 = 9 times the intensity of the conflict when the two sides contend with one another.
A direct consequence of the basic mechanism of secular cycle political instability is that it rises as the square of elite proliferation. Rising political competition first manifests as rising polarization, then shades into political war, which can intensify into the real thing. So, when people point to the dynamism of our economy by noting how many billionaires it has created, I can only think that means we are hurtling all the faster towards conflict. Fifteen years ago, this was all theoretical,2 like some dystopian sci fi story. It no longer feels that way anymore.
Figure 1 shows a plot of PSI calculated according to equations 1-3. Inequality is given by 1-L before 1913 and as a composite of 1-L and top 1% income share after 1913. The adjustable constants in equation 3 are set so that the peak PSI value for each secular cycle is equal to 75. The final values for PSI for the current cycle will not be known until the peak is in, when the constants will be adjusted to set that value at 75. This means PSI is not predictive. Although it looks like we are heading to a crisis peak in the near future, this is not necessarily so. The PSI peak will happen when elites finally decide to resolve the excess elite problem and act to do this.
Figure 1. Inequality and PSI over time
For example, the last secular cycle crisis was resolved by the catastrophe of the Great Depression, which brought the New Deal coalition to power. It was these same New Dealers who were in charge during WW II, in which they restructured the American economy into a war production colossus that reduced income inequality as an intentional side effect. Reducing economic inequality reduces elite number, dramatically reducing PSI (see Figure 1). Another solution is to selectively eliminate the elites of one side. For example, slave emancipation in 1865 wiped out some 60% of plantation elite wealth. This, and defeat in the Civil War, effectively removed the Red side from national influence for a couple of generations. Some Democrats (Mandarin, Blue faction) believe that if Republicans (Capitalist Elite, Red faction) win the election this fall they will enact authoritarian measures. Such policies would then be used to neutralize Democratic opposition. Were they to succeed in this endeavor they would solve the elite proliferation problem; the Blue half of the existing elites will have been eliminated from competition for positions of power.
Secular cycle crises do not have any fixed length, they last until the resolution period begins, no matter how long this takes. In the Plantagenet secular cycle3 (1070-1485), the secular cycle crisis period spanned 140 years from the Great Famine in 1315 to the start of the Wars of the Roses in 1455.
CPPs, a “crisis-like” period arising from an entirely different mechanism
We are also in a creedal passion period (CPP) projected to run over 2012-27. The CPP cycle is a more expansive version of a fifty-year cycle that Turchin has proposed. The outbreak of “wokeness” on the Left, and the rise of fascistic ideologies on the Right are both religion-like manifestations of cultural instability caused by the same mechanism as the higher levels of sociopolitical instability Turchin forecasted. Going back a century we can see both the rise of new religious movements such as the Azuza St. Revival (1906-15) which launched the worldwide Pentacostal movement, the 1919 beginning of the Fundamentalist movement, and the start of the Spiritualism craze of the 1920’s. The 1920’s spiritualism fad was opposed as nonsense by the famous magician Harry Houdini. Fifty years later during the next CPP, amidst all the New Age woo, another magician, James Randi, was campaigning against the paranormal performer Uri Geller, demonstrating the cyclical outbreak of cultural radicalism.
With this backstory I can now present my take. The CPP issues, such as equation of gender with sex, declining fertility hysteria, Black Lives Matter ideology, and the desire for an American Caesar will decline in salience, unless one of these is used by a secular crisis resolution period actor. Here is where things get scary. Nazism was a political ideology that arose in Germany two CPPs ago. Rather than dying out like such things normally do, it was used by a charismatic Adolf Hitler during the political turmoil of the secular cycle crisis period to achieve power in 1933, after which it killed 17 million people. And on the crazy left there were Lenin and his successor Stalin, who vied with Hitler for the title of most evil sonofabitch in history. There is always a possibility than a radical notion raised during a CPP will play a role in a subsequent secular cycle resolution. I agree with Ross Barkan that the fascist tropes Trump and his supporters are playing with during this CPP will not manifest into actual fascism. And it is starting to look like wokeness is on the way out. But I could be wrong.
Alexander 2017 pp 25-6.
Back then I was using the Strauss and Howes saeculum as a framework, which also called for a crisis in the early 21st century, but through a less empirically supported mechanism.
Alexander 2016 p 97.