What Will the Structural Collapse (or Rebirth) of the United States Look Like?

Let’s start the weekend with some gloom-and-doom, shall we?

First, Chris Hedges, a journalist who has been calling out the moral bankruptcy and pyramid-scheme economy of the United States for some time.

In this short film by Amanda Zackem, Hedges highlights the bread-and-circuses distractions of entertainment, consumerism, and digital media that distract U.S. citizens from the plutocratic consolidation of wealth and plundering of the state.

Next, let’s spend some time with Peter Turchin and his mathematical approach to “megahistory” in this excellent profile by Graeme Wood. Turchin, a Russian zoologist who turned his attention to the study of mathematical patterns in human history, famously predicted the unrest of 2020 back in 2010. Turchin believes he has uncovered iron laws of human societal evolution, cycles of unrest perpetuated by the “overproduction of elites.” In the United States, Turchin asserts that 1920, 1970, and 2020 are all points of major civil unrest on his 50-year historical cycle graph.

Peter Turchin hypothesizes that too many elites competing for too few elite positions leads to the creation of “counter-elites”: troublemakers who rise to power by allying with the non-elite classes. He gives Steve Bannon as an example of a counter-elite. Bannon was raised working-class, attended Harvard Business School, got rich via various investments and a small share of the Seinfeld television show, but only rose to power via his Breitbart race-baiting tactics.

Historians tend to discredit Turchin, arguing that human behavior is too idiosyncratic and unpredictable to reduce to 50 year cycles.

On the other hand, many fields “yield” to mathematical analysis, and there’s no reason to think that history should be any different. Patterns exist in nature, human behavior, and history, and mathematicians who discover those patterns may be able to predict aspects of the future more cannily than even science fiction writers.

But I think Turchin gets something wrong…

Association not Causation

The “overproduction of elites” may be a signal for societal unrest and even collapse, just as too many freckles can be a signal for skin damage and the potential for skin cancer. But freckles don’t cause skin cancer. Some things that reduce the number of freckles, such as using sunscreen or avoiding excess UV exposure if you are fair skinned, also reduce the risk of skin cancer. But other factors can reduce the risk of skin cancer as well, such as supplemental niacin. UV exposure is not the only factor in skin cancer; the body’s ability to avoid or repair DNA damage is also important.

In the same way, the “overproduction of elites” may be associated with social unrest, but it is not the cause of it. The root cause is the excessive accumulation of wealth by a small number of people, the government-facilitated theft from the poor to give to the rich. The 1920’s, 1970’s, and our current decade all feature outrageous wealth and income inequality. Wealth booms may incidentally overproduce elites, and frustrated status-seeking “counter-elites” may cause problems, but neither are the root cause of civil unrest.

Income inequality in itself isn’t problematic (and aiming for total income and wealth equality would create a disastrous dystopia of a different sort). But income inequality so extreme that it guts the middle class and keeps the working class locked into grueling wage slavery with meager opportunity for advancement — that’s the kind of environment that breeds populist demagogues like Trump, stokes racism and nationalism, presents ripe opportunities to sociopathic agents of chaos like Steve Bannon, and generally leads to the dumpster-fire of a nation we’re currently living in.

Two Paths

We have a pretty clear idea of where we’re headed without addressing extreme wealth inequality, don’t we? More cult-like populist leaders who cling to power at any cost, more chaos and death, more corruption and graft, less effective governance, and ongoing systemic and ecological collapse.

But addressing wealth inequality directly offers a different path, one towards effective governance, in which the existential threats to both our country and humanity can be vigorously addressed.

Policy

We know what doesn’t work.

Quantitative easing bolsters the stock market and leads to various asset bubbles (housing, equities) but doesn’t trickle down.

Corporate bailouts are both anti-capitalist and counterproductive. In most cases they don’t protect workers. Corporations tend to use government bailouts to buy back their own stocks or give dividends to shareholders.

So what works? Looking at successful, thriving democratic countries, the following recipe is tried and true:

• Increase public wealth, well-being, and quality of life with non-means-tested social benefits, such as healthcare, education, green spaces, environmental regulations, public health, libraries, emergency services, green energy, infrastructure, public transportation, affordable housing, and basic income/citizen dividends. Why no means testing? It’s cheaper and simpler, prevents system-gaming, and once implemented it creates a positive citizen entitlement that is nearly impossible to roll back. In the US we take it for granted that we can check a book out of the library, visit a National Park, drive on a road, etc. We need more of these citizen entitlements, including healthcare, to raise everyone’s quality of life and create a bulwark against extreme wealth inequality.
• Pay for increased public wealth with modest reductions in military spending, and very modest wealth taxes on the extremely rich. There is an enormous amount of fat to be trimmed (and we would still have the strongest military by far, and the most billionaires by far).
• Address systemic racism (such as disparities in criminal sentencing), homophobia, attempts to legislate access to abortion, voting disenfranchisement, low minimum wage, and other policies that explicitly disempower and attack groups that are already wealth-disadvantaged. Fascist-tending governments legally attack the poor, the weak, and the disadvantaged with legislation intended to consolidate power among the wealth elites (often very rich white men) and keep everyone else down (barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, doing slave labor in a private for-profit prison, working multiple minimum wage or “gig-economy” jobs, etc.).

Are these “leftist” policies? Some are, some aren’t. Rent control is considered a liberal policy, but it results in the underproduction of affordable housing and thus reduces public wealth. Quantitative easing (which does NOT increase public wealth) horrifies conservative deficit hawks, and could thus be considered a liberal policy. And few conservatives would argue that libraries, parks, and public schools are “leftist.” Public services should not be partisan issues; they are simply an efficient way to deliver economic abundance to the people.

And as for addressing systemic racism such as mandatory minimum sentences, even conservative icons like Charles Koch have gotten on board.

History Is Not Preordained

Mathematical patterns exist in macro-patterns of human behavior (history) just as they do in population dynamics of beetles (Turchin’s previous speciality). But history, like all statistical data sets, contains unpredictable outliers. The complexity of human consciousness and our ability to make individual and collective choices based on our values gives us some recourse against the “inevitable” tide of civil unrest predicted by Turchin.

We voted the Graft Dorito out, didn’t we? That’s a good first step. But it doesn’t guarantee any sort of systemic reform. The Biden-Harris administration may or may not effectively address the extreme wealth inequality that allowed a criminal grifter like Trump to rise to power.

So keep fighting the good fight. Keep committing “acts of conscience” and “acts of rebellion” as Hedges would say.

Have a good weekend.