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June 26 - July 26, 2021
Investors, for example, have been caught in one speculative frenzy after another throughout the centuries. Eventually, such financial bubbles always burst, but in the heady days before the crash the majority blithely believes that “this time is different” (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009).
Sociopolitical instability resulting from state collapse feeds back on population growth via depressed birth rates and elevated mortality and emigration. Additionally, increased migration and vagrancy spread the disease by connecting areas that would have stayed isolated during better times. As a result, epidemics and even pandemics strike disproportionately often during the disintegrative phases of secular cycles
Overpopulation, by contrast, results in popular immiseration and discontent, but as long as the elites remain unified, peasant insurrections, slave rebellions, or worker uprisings have little chance of success, and are speedily suppressed.
Furthermore, when population declines during the disintegrative periods, there is often a substantial lag time between population density reaching a low level and the time when internal peace and order are restored. The third component, the fiscal crisis of the state, is usually present, but sometimes is missing as triggering factor leading to civil war
the dominant role in internal warfare appears to be played by elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition, fragmentation, and conflict, and the rise of counter-elites who mobilize popular masses in their struggle against the existing order.
The second part measures the degree of trust that the population and elites have in the state institutions and its ability to service the debt (this variable is related to a more general variable, the state legitimacy). Of particular importance is the confidence of investors, who buy government bonds, that their investment will be repaid. Confidence is inversely related to the interest rate on government securities
Typically, elite overproduction is due in large part to vigorous upward mobility from the ranks of commoners. As a result, the ranks of elites are swelled with individuals coming from very different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Cultural misunderstanding and mistrust between old aristocracy and “parvenus” may contribute to intraelite fragmentation.
Once the conflict has entered the phase of general civil war, however, it triggers a kind of a backlash. As violence drags on and on, often for years, the most violent leaders and their psychopathic followers are gradually killed off. The rest of the population begin to yearn for an end to fighting and return of stability. In other words, this explanation proposes that collective violence “burns out”, much like an epidemic or a forest fire.
The peaceful period may last for a human generation—between 20 and 30 years. Eventually, however, the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who have not experienced the horrors of civil war, and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then the society will slide into a second civil war.
radicals are holders of partisan norms, whereas moderates hold broadly cooperative norms.
Explosive growth of economic elites after the 1820s, especially in the North, led to an expansion in the cohort of elite aspirants vying for political power. Intensifying intraelite competition after 1845 fractured the ruling class by reducing the willingness of the elites to seek compromise.
when Northern elite aspirants, frustrated in their quest for power, used the new Republican Party as the vehicle for overthrowing the established elites in the election of 1860.
during the 1850s nativism (opposition to immigrants and immigration) was no less important than antislavery as an issue in national politics. In 1854 the Native American Party (“Know-Nothings”) achieved a stunning victory in several states, carrying 63 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, 40 percent in Pennsylvania, and 25 percent in New York (Potter 1976:250).
Another indicator of growing intraelite conflict was the increasing incidence of violence and threatened violence in Congress, which reached a peak during the 1850s. The brutal caning that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina gave to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1856 is the best-known such episode, but it was not the only one.
Although not widely emphasized, Lincoln was a fairly wealthy lawyer who had been linked with certain railroads in the Midwest, especially the Illinois Central. And many of the men he appointed to major Cabinet and diplomatic office had either strong railroad or financial ties. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, it was during the Lincoln administration that the greatest amounts of land were granted, as promotional measures, to railroads of the United States, primarily in the West.
The worst incident in the US labor history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920–21 (Savage 1990), which culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain (Shogan 2004). Although it started as a labor dispute, it eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection in US history, other than the Civil War. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles fought thousands of strike-breakers and sheriff’s deputies, called the Logan Defenders. The insurrection was ended by the United States Army.
After the Civil War, the employers organized a variety of private efforts to import immigrant workers with the explicit goal of breaking strikes.
President Roosevelt himself admitted to Harold Ickes, his Interior Secretary, that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia” (Patel 2016: 117).
Reagan’s political rise (Governor of California from 1967 to 75, his first and second presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980) actually coincides very closely with the period when different variables went through their regime changes. There is, thus, a direct parallel with the Jackson Era Trend Reversal, which largely took place before Andrew Jackson became President.
As I wrote in 2010 (Turchin 2010), we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp at which American society will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. However, a disaster similar in magnitude to the American Civil War is not foreordained. On the contrary, we may be the first society that is capable of perceiving, if dimly, the deep structural forces pushing us to the brink.
