Peter Turchin totally deflates the "Mamdani moment" in present day politics
His own, data-driven "end times" scenario has real legs to it
In the last go-round I urged my readers – a teeny-weeny bit tongue-in-cheek, albeit with ultra-serious intent – to spend what’s left of their summer consulting end-times prophecies.
I imagine the overwhelming majority glommed on to the “tongue-in-cheek” and not the “ultra-serious” part.
It’s not just snooty secularists, but also self-ascribed hard-core Bible-believers, who routinely refuse to take the notion of the “end-times” seriously.
Even if they pretend to do so, their “eschatology” remains strictly formal, or gestural. Why worry about Christ’s “glorious appearing” when it’s really all about fund-raising for the church’s new youth recreational annex?
But as the TV character, ex-mobster Jimmy Falcone would say, fugget about it.
And for all you sated, no-proselytizing-please, ex-vangelical, haughty, haute-monde high-steppers, this piece is definitely for you.
We’re going to talk about the “end of the world” in a very worldly way – yes, one that’s even data-driven. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to like what you hear.
I call your attention to a book entitled End Times by the eminent American social theorist Peter Turchin, whom you’ve probably never heard of.
You’ve probably never heard of him, because even if you had you probably wouldn’t want to hear what he has to say.
His website describes him as “co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America’s civil strife and its possible endgames”.
Not exactly premier-grade MAGA conspiracy caviar, let alone the red meat revelatory religious risotto of St. John the Divine.
The title of Turchin’s tome is catchy, although the subtitle doesn’t exactly give you goosebumps - Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.
Turchin’s argument, which derives from what is otherwise known as “complexity theory”, can be summed up as follows. Complex societies – pace the United States - periodically experience crises driven by two interwoven social factors. They are what he depicts as “elite overproduction” and “mass immiseration”.
Turchin argues that societies in a kind of cyclical pattern give rise to far more individuals aspiring to elite positions than are economically feasible or available. This would-be crisis of elite overproduction lays the groundwork for intense competition among the credentialed class in competition for scarce status roles.
At the same time elite overproduction occasions the production of “counter-elites”, triggering intensifying political conflict. Meanwhile, what Turchin dubs a “wealth pump” diverts economic resources from the general population to the elite, resulting in growing inequality and “popular immiseration”.
Such mechanisms foment social instability, cultural deterioration, and political unrest, which history shows more often than not instigate revolutions and civil war.
Turchin maintains that America right now is at such an inflection point. The transition over the last five decades from a labor-intensive to a knowledge-intensive system of production led to the social and economic marginalization – indeed, the “immiseration” - of the traditional working class, which in turn fueled the populist revolt that elected Trump and has now become a worldwide insurgency.
However, the “wealth pump” that has quite recently from an historical perspective advantaged the so-called “cognitive elites” – not so much the academic entrepreneurs or scientific researchers who generate new knowledge, but the corporate functionaries, lawyers, accountants, etc. who are responsible for making the “knowledge economy” hum along at peak performance levels – is about to go haywire.
Turchin published End Times only two years ago, and within the past year his thesis has been leveraged brilliantly by a number of equally influential social analysts, in particular Musa al-Gharbi’s best-selling We Never Have Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
But at the moment the problem of “elite overproduction” has been exacerbated almost overnight by the explosion of generative AI.
As a report from the World Economic Forum emphasizes, “while 170 million new jobs are projected to be created this decade, the rise of AI-powered tools threatens to automate as many roles as it creates, particularly for white collar, entry-level roles”.
The popular canard that AI will replace millions of white collar jobs is a misleading half-truth. A study by the Pew Foundation found that while highly educated professionals have the large “exposure” to AI, their work is just as likely to be enhanced by the incorporation of “large language models” (LLMs) as rendered obsolete.
The report notes that “analytical skills are more important in jobs with more exposure to AI”. Moreover, “these skills include critical thinking, writing, science and mathematics”.
In other words, it is employment requiring only narrow technical competencies, which in the past companies have prized, that are most likely to become extinct under future AI regimes.
Unfortunately, the knowledge production system – i.e., higher education - has long been skewed toward turning out technical specialists rather than analysts and thinkers. The outsize cost of a college education and its corresponding debt burden , which has been soaring way beyond the rate of inflation over the last half century, has cemented the false belief among degree aspirants and their advocates that the sole purpose of post-secondary learning is to secure a well-paying entry level position.
In other words, you go to college to become a member of the surplus “elites”.
AI, nevertheless, is about to puncture once and for all that grand illusion. And it will inevitably hasten a relative “immiseration” of the professional class along the lines the working class has experienced in recent history.
That, according to Wall Street Journal writer Gerald Baker, is the telltale import of the selection last June of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee.
Baker observes that Mamdani’s ascendancy and predicted victory in November “may herald a new kind of class struggle”. He adds that “it’s the overeducated elites, not laborers or the masses, who are getting behind socialism today.”
Finally, the clamor of the now downwardly mobile elites for socialism fits hand-in-glove with Turchin’s schema.
If AI is the transformational force that everyone thinks it is, the political consequences will be as profound. Mr. Mamdani’s success in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary offers a glimpse of one way in which that transformation may be unfolding. The socialism he has been selling to younger voters may reflect not only the usual radical idealism of the young but also the disruptive economic consequences of technological change.
Currently the stats, though, do not support a trend of mass layoffs due to AI. MIT’s “State of AI in Business” report finds that most jobs eliminated so far by artificial intelligence are low-priority, outsourced positions overseas.
And the return on investment for most companies to date is zilch, according to the same report, most likely because managers have not yet figured out to integrate it properly.
But in the long run that will certainly change. The report is not sanguine at all about these trends persisting in any meaningful sense.
White collar anxiety about AI is real and in no way irrational. Furthermore, the fatal conjunction of downward pressure on salaries because of AI and the upward push of living costs in blue-state urban centers where superfluent elites congregate is apt to produce a “Mamdani moment” in many places beyond New York.
In addition, this dynamic has darker ramifications.
It is no accident that Mandami’s absurdist amalgam of socialism for the elites cum Hamas-scented woke jihadism has burst on the scene just as antisemitism has become au courant among the progressive neoliberal intelligentsia.
Even though he exploits formulaic Marxist rhetoric in his call to “seize the means of production”, Mamdani is “socialist” only in the measure that “national socialism” was.
Real Marxists do not scapegoat the Jewish people, and they certainly do not shout slogans like “globalize the intafada” intimately associated with radical Islamism.
As Marxists from Friedrich Engels himself to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have repeatedly underscored in red letters (pun intended), antisemitism is a perverse debility of those social classes that have been the jetsam and flotsam of what the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter’s dubbed capitalism’s “creative destruction”.
The equally renowned French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who was not a Marxist, cited Engels’ view in his analysis of the infamous antisemitic imbroglio during the transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries known as the Dreyfus Affair.
Engels, Durkheim commented, “associated anti-Semitism with déclassé groups who were sinking into ruin as a result of capitalist modernization.”
Durkheim’s take squares perfectly with Baker’s own argument about the displaced “professional managerial class” (PMC) in New York City, who have gone gaga over Mamdani. The construct of the PMC was first tendered by John and Barbara Ehrenreich back in the 1970s and has lately been revived to characterize the kinds of educated elites Baker references and Turchin theorizes.
Turchin is certainly no “end times” prophet if the conventional connotations of the expression are applied.
But if the productive capacity of the now firmly established global knowledge-based economy is truly on the path of systemically purging the livelihoods of its debt-carrying, educated elites – and it’s not totally clear that is what is actually happening – then the “end” of the world with which we take for granted may truly be in the offing sooner than we can anticipate.
That may be prove to be either a good or a bad deal from a more detached historical vantage point. Turchin stresses that elites rise and fall as “the means of production” are transfigured by rapid technological change.
No one laments these days the disappearance of European landed aristocracy, though the Congress of Vienna, which met from 1814-15 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, used all means available to preserve the old system that was already coming unglued and for the most part collapsed several decades later.
And the “Mamdani moment” itself may turn out to be no more than what the British poet T.S. Eliot said about how the world “ends” – “not with a bang but a whimper”.