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Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?

Time evolution of issues motivating political violence in the United States.
Time evolution of issues motivating political violence in the United States. (Image credit: Peter Turchin)










But we might not be so lucky this time around. If Turchin's model is right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really unprecedented for the last 100 years," he said. "So basically by all measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."

Pigliucci, who writes a well-known blog on pseudoscience and skeptical thinking, says that although he believes Turchin is "moving in the right direction" by applying mathematical models to history, in this case he might be seeing patterns in random data. Violence and other forms of social unrest undoubtedly vary over time within any given society, Pigliucci said, but most historians would say these fluctuations are chaotic.

"The database is too short: the entire study covers the period 1780-2010, a mere 230 years," he wrote in an email. "You can fit at most four 50-year peaks and two [long-term] ones. I just don't see how one could reasonably exclude that the observed pattern is random. But of course we would have to wait a lot longer to collect new data and find out."

Daniel Szechi, professor of early modern history at the University of Manchester in England, agrees that not enough time has passed for patterns to have emerged. However, he believes "cliodynamics" could eventually work, once humanity racks up a few more centuries of good record-keeping. "Maybe 500 years from now we will have sufficient data and sufficient number crunching power to really make use of the data we will have generated and stored in vast quantities since about 1900," Szechi said in an email.

But even if, half a milennium from now, massive data generation and sophisticated programmatic analysis allows predictive history, Szechi asks: "is this a good idea?" Prophecies of violence pose the danger of becoming self-fulfilling. Another concern is that governments and other institutions could respond to their knowledge of impending violence by taking preemptive measures, which would not always be in the interests of the people.

The heated debate over cliodynamics will continue among historians and scientists. Only time will tell if the cycle of U.S. violence identified by Turchin holds true, and another telltale peak — or lack thereof — is only a few years away.


Natalie Wolchover