Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
As the 2016 campaign reaches fever pitch, the more heat there is and the less light is shed. Which is why evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin’s new book comes as such a breath of fresh air. “Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History” is not about this year’s presidential election, per se, but it’s a quantum leap forward in illuminating the disintegrative trends that America has experienced over the last several decades that are currently driving our politics.
“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.”
What is interesting about these periods is that the people who are in a position to prevent the blowup never do. There is no sign the American elite is willing to change course, so the masses will vote for disruption of the status quo – Trump.
If this country dissolves over the next decades I think future historians will name three people as disproportionately responsible: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and Rupert Murdoch. It was not that they were so powerful as that they knew where to hit in a way that progressively fractured the nation, and they had a platform to do it.
Countries are cultural constructs based on enough people having sufficient common beliefs and loyalties to maintain a common identity even with the inevitable disagreements that also exist. Any construct has fissures and we have one big one: the distinction between the Confederacy and the rest of the nation was never healed. It was rendered fairly harmless (if you weren’t Black) because they were allies with the urban liberal Democrats. Pat Buchanan advised Nixon to deliberately split the country because they “would have the bigger half.” So for the first time a President planned to divide the country in order top keep and expand power. The GOP’s “Southern Strategy” institutionalized Buchanan’s advice. Once the split was deepened it took on a life of its own and traditional American conservatism committed suicide.
Ann Coulter mainstreams talk of killing your opponents. When she first did it people, even conservatives, were mostly outraged. But she kept it up, Buchanan added talk of holy culture war, and now the NeoConfederate Republicans frequently talk of killing their opponents. Attitudes like that make democratic politics impossible to sustain.
Rupert Murdoch, well I think I needn’t expound on what this traitor has done to our country.
At the deepest level, as I argue in my book “Faultlines”, there is a very deep split between a culture and attitudes rooted in hierarchical masculine agrarian values, centered in the South in the US, and a modern technological and by contrast very egalitarian one open to feminine values, centered in our cities. There has been nothing quite like it since people shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture. That transition was rocky and this one will be as well, if it is not aborted.
My own view is breaking up the country into at least these two cultural units might be the most humane approach to our crisis. It sure beats having a strong man to hold it together.