Optimism?
http://peterturchin.com/blog/2016/10/09/when-elites-cant-and-people-dont-want-to/
When Elites Can’t and People Don’t Want to…
Posted by Peter Turchin
This is the most bizarre presidential election that I’ve seen since coming to
this country in 1978 and probably the most bizarre in anybody’s living memory.
Evidence for declining wellbeing of the American population has been piling up
for years (as I exhaustively review in the just-published Ages of Discord) and
one would think that the election would be about how to reverse this deplorable
state of things. Instead, all you read in the press is how one candidate made
vulgar comments about women in 2005 and the other tried to discredit women who
accused her husband of sexual misconduct decades ago.
There is a Russian saying, “when Elites Can’t and People Don’t Want to”, which
is a contraction of a recurrent theme in Vladimir Lenin’s writings about the
necessary conditions for a revolution.
Lenin speaking to revolutionary masses (source)
The full quote goes something like this: for revolution to happen, it’s not
enough that people don’t want to live as before; it’s also necessary that the
rulers can’t rule in the old way (for the Russian version see here). This idea,
in fact, is also a central one in the Structural-Demographic Theory (which is
not surprising as SDT integrates major ideas of Malthus, Marx, and Weber).
This observation is of direct relevance to the 2016 elections. One on hand,
popular discontent, resulting from declining well-being, has propelled an
anti-establishment candidate, Donald Trump, to the point where he has a real
chance of becoming our next president. On the other hand, we see an
unprecedented (at least, since the nineteenth century) fragmentation of the
political elites. The Democrats are split between an establishment candidate
(Clinton) and a surging populist from the left (Sanders). The Republicans are
even in a worse shape, with three factions: the Republican establishment, the
Tea Party, and populism from the right.
Are we, then, on a brink of revolution? Lenin (probably) would say “no”. After
all “when Elites Can’t and People Don’t Want to” are necessary, but not
sufficient conditions. There is no organized revolutionary party, armed with a
radical ideology, that could mobilize the masses and overthrow the old regime.
So we still have time to figure out how to get out of this mess without piling
up lots of dead bodies, which is the most common way in which
structural-demographic crises are resolved.
Sent from my iPhone
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