Elite Oversupply And Civil War

These excerpts are taken from the blog of Peter Turchin. He has developed a theory of history which predicts a wave of political violence peaking in the next decade. I think his theory rings true. As a friend of mine said on another forum,”If we were born to some other race, we’d fit right in. We’d all be apparatchiks, professors, bureaucrats, and other enforcers of the system. Even whites that cuck hard are never allowed to rise to the level of their merit. They serve as fronts for controllers with a different racial or sexual set of loyalties. In another timeline, you’d be in a position of social responsibility. In this timeline, you’re either a heretic, a revolutionary, or dead.“

A related sign is the overproduction of law degrees. From the mid-1970s to 2011, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled to 1.2 million from 400,000. Meanwhile, the population grew by only 45 percent. Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. recently estimated that twice as many law graduates pass the bar exam as there are job openings for them. In other words, every year U.S. law schools churn out about 25,000 “surplus” lawyers, many of whom are in debt. A large number of them go to law school with an ambition to enter politics someday.

Don’t hate them for it — they are at the mercy of the same large, impersonal social forces as the rest of us. The number of newly minted MBAs has expanded even faster than law degrees.

So why is it important that we have a multitude of desperate law school graduates and many more politically ambitious rich than 30 years ago?

Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction. The other two important elements were stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

Consider the antebellum U.S. From 1830 to 1860 the number of New Yorkers and Bostonians with fortunes of at least $100,000 (they would be multimillionaires today) increased fivefold. Many of these new rich (or their sons) had political ambitions. But the government, especially the presidency, Senate and Supreme Court, was dominated by the Southern elites. As many Northerners became frustrated and embittered, the Southerners also felt the pressure and became increasingly defensive…

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The famous tyrants in history – think Caesar, Napoleon, Mao – all mobilized broad popular support in their struggle against the “oligarchies,” or the established elites representing pre-revolutionary order (the senatorial class, the Ancien Regime nobility, and “bourgeoisie”). These tyrants were supported by new elites, recruited from the masses of elite aspirants whose quest for elite positions had been frustrated by the established elites.

What I see as key in the rise of “tyrants” is that they always come after a prolonged period of social instability and political violence. Their appeal is, first, based on their promise to restore internal order and to end violence. Their suppression of the old and discredited old-order elites is of secondary importance (and may be absent in certain cases, such as in the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany – of course, this case is also different because political turbulence in Weimar Germany was brought about not by a structural-demographic crisis, but by a catastrophic defeat in an external war).

Returning to the question of whether a tyrant can arise in the United States in the near future, my analysis suggests, most emphatically, “no.” A tyrant-wannabe lacks most elements on which to base his or her power. We haven’t experienced a long civil war (at least, not yet), or a catastrophic defeat in an external war. The established elites, while fragmenting, are still very strong. Here I agree with much of what Tyler says in the paragraph I quoted above. An aspiring tyrant has to deal with the deeply entrenched bureaucracy, the powerful judicial system, and the mighty coercive apparatus of the American state (the FBI, the CIA, the military). Also important is that the frustrated elite aspirants are not organized in any coherent social movements. Tyrants never rule alone, they need an organization stuffed by dedicated cadres (a desirable feature of which is the animosity towards the old-order elites).

In my opinion, the greatest danger for us today (and into the 2020s) is not the rise of a Hitler, but rather a Second American Civil War.