Everything from skyrocketing inequality and political gridlock to white working class angst and the rise of mass shootings and other troubling signs of our times — these are all interconnected reflections of where America is in a cyclic historical process: social integration followed by disintegration, discord and violence. Turchin and others have observed this pattern repeatedly in civilizations from ancient Rome and early Chinese dynasties up to the present day.

Here are two summary snapshots of these long-term cycles from the book, the first from Europe:

Then from China:

“The American polity today has a lot in common with the Antebellum America of the 1850s; with Ancien Régime France on the eve of the French Revolution; with Stuart England during the 1630s; and innumerable other historical societies,” Turchin writes. “However, unlike historical societies, we are in a unique position to take steps that could allow us to escape the worst. Societal breakdown and ensuing waves of violence can be avoided by collective, cooperative action.”

Historians, and even poets, have long been familiar with cycles of rise and fall, but understanding them has proved more difficult. The ideas of Thomas Malthus — that population growth will exceed growth in agricultural production, leading to mass immiseration — provide one sort of starting point. But civilizations are more than a big, undifferentiated mass of people. Elites can and do prosper while average citizens’ welfare declines, as happened in Victorian England, in our own Gilded Age and again since the 1970s. Elites have their own population dynamics, and can suffer their own equivalence of immiseration when they outstrip their resource base. Thus, both elites and masses go through similar cycles, which are interconnected, as well as interacting with the structures of the state, where elites contest for power and maintain the strength and well-being of the whole society. Jack Goldberg’s 1991 book “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World” was the first to develop a coherent explanatory model with all the pieces connected, which Turchin has modified slightly in his work.

“Structural‐demographic theory represents complex (state‐level) human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with sociopolitical instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks,” Turchin writes. Their relationship, as described and measured in the theory, is summarized in this figure:

“Ages of Discord” also tests this theory against the example of American history, with special attention to turning points in different trends, which show a remarkable degree of coherence.

One table lists 29 proxies representing 15 variables, all but one of which — life expectancy — reversed direction within about a decade of 1970. These include three proxies of labor oversupply; two of economic and health well-being; three of social well-being and economic inequality; two of elite overproduction, intra-elite competition and intra-elite cooperation; three of cooperation and equity; and one of intra-elite fragmentation, patriotism, state legitimacy, state capacity and sociopolitical instability. 

In short, Turchin finds that it wasn’t just similar social trends that changed together; trends from every aspect of the model changed direction around the same time.

Conservatives have repeatedly blamed liberals for all manner of social ills, such as the decline in the number of children in two‐parent households, which began during that period. But other trend reversals at the same time — top 1 percent income and wealth shares, real minimum wage, labor union coverage, etc., clearly signal shifts in a more conservative direction.

What’s more, similar broad, interrelated changes have occurred repeatedly throughout history, and the positive trend directions that were reversed around 1970 were set in motion decades earlier, and reinforced by major developments of the New Deal. The halcyon days of the 1950s did not reflect a lengthy lost golden age, Turchin argues. Rather, they were a cyclic echo of the “Era of Good Feelings” around 1820, when social discord was at a low ebb, and there was only one national political party — a period that also quickly gave way to new forms of intense social conflict.

The core of the theory in pre-industrial form is that population growth in excess of agricultural productivity gains leads to falling living standards (“popular immiseration”), urban migration, and unrest. It also results in “elite overproduction” — less money for ordinary workers means more for elites, whose numbers grow, producing their own set of problems in the form of intra‐elite competition, rivalry, fragmentation and loss of cohesion. Population growth also leads to growth of the army, state bureaucracy and taxes, pushing it toward fiscal crisis, state bankruptcy and loss of military control, opening the way for elite fragments to rebel and/or mobilize popular resentments to overthrow central authority.