Like the proverbial broken clock, The Atlantic takes a break occasionally (not quite twice a day) from pushing fake anti-Trump narratives and derangement, and runs an opinion article that sheds meaningful light on the pathologies that drive leftist cancel culture and authoritarianism.
One such article is The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse, by Graeme Wood.
The title doesn’t give away the important point, nor does the sub-headline: “A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.”
The article focuses on the views of U. Conn. Professor Peter Turchin, “one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings.”
Here’s the important point — our “elite” class is the problem. We have too many of them. They are too unproductive. They turn on each other and society to justify their existence. Turchin doesn’t focus on ‘the left,’ but the point he makes in the current political climate is most relevant to leftist cancel culture and aggressiveness.
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions….Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill….
Turchin goes on to describe how overproduction of elites gives rise to counter-elites looking for “allies among commoners.” Like Trump and ‘elite’ supporters of Trump. Which leads to social strife, conflict, and potentially, breakdown.
Having read and bookmarked this article, I thought of overproduction of elites as the Democrats launched a push to foregive $50,000 in student loan debt by executive order in a Biden administration.
Democrats are the party of overproduced elites, many of whom took on unsustainable government-backed debt in order to obtain that elusory elite status. The counter-elites already are making allies among the commoners, the majority of the country that either didn’t go to college, went to college without taking on excessive debt, or paid down their student debt through income earned from working through or after college.
It won’t in itself lead to strife and societal breakdown, but it’s another brick in that road. Why should a plumber or electrician or factory worker or landscaper or parents who saved their entire lifetimes for their kids colleges or students who didn’t take on excessive debt or who worked it off … have to pay for Democrats with ‘feminist dance therapy‘ degrees?
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