The historian who predicted a political crisis in the US, about the protests in Los Angeles: “History has accelerated”

15 years ago, in the middle of the first term of Barack Obama, against the background of the rapid ascension of social networks and a slow recovery after the financial crisis, a professor at the University of Connecticut launches a warning: the United States goes to a decade of political instability, reports Newsweek.

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In the context of the protests in Los Angeles and sending the soldiers from the National Guard, against the background of the Trump administration against immigration, Peter Turchin, an ecologist, commented on current US political turbulence.

“The quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent waves – and predictable – by political instability,” he wrote in Nature magazine, anticipating an increase in disturbances around 2020, determined by the economic inequality, “elite overproduction” and increasing public debt.

Currently, when a few months have passed since Donald Trump's investment, the US knows polarization, institutional distrust is at maximum levels and political conflict deepens, Turkin's prediction seems to have been with surprising accuracy, notes Newsweek.

In his 2010 analysis, Turkin identified several warning signs among the electorate: stagnation of wages, income gap, surplus of educated elites without appropriate jobs, as well as an accelerated fiscal deficit.

“These apparently disappeared social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically,” he wrote at that time.

“Almost all these indicators have intensified,” Turkin said in an interview with Newsweek, invoking phenomena such as stagnation, the effects of artificial intelligence on the professional class and public finances, which are increasingly difficult to manage.

Turkin's prediction was based on the so -called structural -demographic theory (TSD), which shapes how historical forces – economic inequality, elite competition and state capacity – interact to generate political instability cycles. These patterns were repeated during history.

“The structural-demographic theory allows us to analyze the historical dynamics and apply the conclusions of current trajectories,” said Turkin. “It is not a prophecy. It is the modeling of feedback loops that appear with an alarming regularity.”

This data show that US violence tends to repeat about 50 – for example, disorders erupted around 1870, 1920, 1970 and 2020.

Historical parallels with the present events

The 1970s can be considered the clearest parallel to the present, says the American professor.

In that decade, the radical movements from the university campuses and from the middle class enclaves appeared not only from the US, but throughout the West. The far left movement Weather Underground, which started on campus at the University of Michigan, bombed government buildings and banks; The fraction of the Red Army in Western Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy have committed abductions and assassinations. These were not movements of the disadvantaged, but of those in social decline – over -educated and politically alienated.

“There is a real risk of that dynamic recurrence,” Turchin said.

Inflection points

Critics challenged the deterministic note of Turkin's models. But he emphasizes that he does not predict events, but only the risk factors and the phases of systemic stress.

While many political and historical analysts consider Donald Trump's choice in 2016 an inflection point for the modern era of American political disorders, Turkin had launched the warning signals earlier – when Trump was especially known as a popular reality show from the NBC.

“In 2010, based on historical models and quantitative indicators, I predicted a period of political instability in the United States that will start in the 2020s,” Turkin told Newsweek. “The structural factors behind this prediction were triple: popular impoverishment, elite overproduction and weakening of the state's capacity.”

According to this model, not Trump's ascension was the cause of the political crisis in America, but the symptom-in a society already tense by the increasing inequality and the saturation of elites. In Turkin's opinion, such figures appear when an increasing class of counter-elites-ambitious and excluded individuals-begin to challenge the status quo

“The intra-elite competition has increased even more, now mainly determined by the reduction of the job offer for them,” he said. In 2025, he emphasized the impact of artificial intelligence on the legal profession and the recent discounts of government personnel, including the elimination of thousands of positions at USAID by the new Doge Department.

A similar theory is supported by sociologist Jukka Savvolinen of Wayne State University, who argued in a recent editorial, published by The Wall Street Journal, that the US risks creating a radicalized “over-educated, under-geded and institutional excluded.

“When companies generate more aspirants to the elite than positions, the competition for the statute intensifies,” wrote Savolinen. “The ambitious, but frustrated people become disappointed and radicalized. Instead of integrating into institutions, they seek to undermine them.”

Savolinen warned that the policies in the Trump era – such as the abolition of Dei and academic research programs, together with the discounts of public institutions – have the potential to amplify this pattern, reminiscent of the disorders of the 1970s. “President Trump's policies could intensify this dynamic,” he noted.

“Many are trained in criticism, moral reasoning and systemic thinking – exactly the profile of previous radical generations.”

Structural factors

Turkin, currently emeritus professor at UCONN, considers that the American system has entered what it calls a “revolutionary situation” – a historical phase in which the destabilizing conditions can no longer be absorbed by the institutional barriers.

In a recent post of his Cliodynamica newsletter, he wrote that “History has accelerated” after 2020. He and his colleague Andrei Korotaiev monitored the number of cases of anti-government demonstrations and violent revolts in Western democracies during that year.

“And then history has accelerated,” he wrote. “America was hit hard by the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd and a long summer of dissatisfaction.”

Although many have considered Trump's defeat in the 2020 elections and the January 6th January revolt as the turning point of that agitated period, Turkin warned that these events did not mark the end of the turbulence.

“Many commentators have drawn the hasty conclusion that things will now return to normal. I did not agree,” he wrote.

“The structural motifs of instability – concentration of wealth, popular impoverishment and overproduction/conflict of elites – were still hot,” Turchin continued. “America was in a” revolutionary situation “, which could be solved either by the evolution to a revolution in full, or by decommissioning through skillful actions of the elites in power.”

These stressors, he says, do not act in isolation. It represents pressure points at the level of the entire system that accumulates over the years, generating feedback loops. “Unfortunately,” he told Newsweek, “all these trends take magnitude.”