The Scholar Who Predicted America's Breakdown Says It's Just Beginning

Fifteen years ago, during Barack Obama’s first term and amid the rise of social media and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, a University of Connecticut professor issued a striking warning: the United States was on track for a decade of growing political instability.

At the time, this prediction felt counterintuitive. The global economy was recovering, and the American political system still seemed grounded in post-Cold War optimism, despite early signs of unrest like the Tea Party movement. But Peter Turchin, an ecologist turned historian, had the data to back his claim.

In a 2010 article for Nature, Turchin explained that complex societies go through recurring and predictable waves of political instability. He forecast a spike around 2020, driven by economic inequality, excess elites competing for power, and rising public debt.

Fast forward to the early months of a second Donald Trump presidency, with deepening polarization, record-low trust in institutions, and escalating conflicts, Turchin’s forecast now appears uncannily accurate.

Amid growing protests and the National Guard’s deployment in Los Angeles under Trump’s immigration crackdown, Turchin spoke to Newsweek about the current political unrest and the deeper, systemic forces that have been pushing America toward crisis for over a decade.

Predicting Turmoil

In his 2010 Nature paper, Turchin highlighted warning signs within the electorate: stagnant wages, widening wealth gaps, an oversupply of educated elites without enough elite positions, and ballooning fiscal deficits. These factors, he argued, began intensifying in the 1970s and are dynamically interconnected.

In a recent interview, he noted that most of these pressures have only worsened — from real wage stagnation and AI’s impact on professionals, to uncontrollable public finances.

Turchin’s analysis is based on Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT), which examines how economic inequality, elite rivalry, and state capacity interact to produce cycles of instability — cycles observed in empires and republics from ancient Rome to the Ottoman Empire.

“This theory lets us analyze history and apply that understanding to today,” he said. “It’s not prophecy — it’s modeling feedback loops that repeat with alarming consistency.”

Turchin sees political violence in the U.S. recurring roughly every 50 years, with unrest spikes around 1870, 1920, 1970, and now 2020. He attributes this pattern to generational forgetting: after two generations, memories of upheaval fade, elites restructure systems to favor themselves, and tensions build again.

Echoes of the 1970s

He points to the 1970s as a particularly relevant comparison — a time when radical movements emerged from university campuses and middle-class areas across the West. Groups like the Weather Underground in the U.S., Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Italy’s Red Brigades carried out violent actions. These groups weren’t the dispossessed but rather the politically alienated and downwardly mobile—overeducated individuals frustrated by their declining social status.

“There’s a real risk of this dynamic resurfacing,” Turchin warns.

The Rise of the ‘Knowledge Class’

Some critics find Turchin’s approach deterministic, but he stresses that he predicts risk factors and phases of systemic strain, not precise events.

While many trace today’s turmoil to Trump’s 2016 election, Turchin identified warning signs years earlier, when Trump was mainly known as a reality TV host.

“In 2010, I predicted political instability in the U.S. starting in the 2020s, driven by popular impoverishment, elite overproduction, and weakening state capacity,” he told Newsweek.

According to his model, Trump’s rise was a symptom—not the cause—of deeper societal strains. Such figures often emerge when a swelling class of ambitious, credentialed “counter-elites” find themselves blocked from power and challenge the established order.

“Intra-elite competition has intensified, fueled by a shrinking number of elite positions,” Turchin said, citing AI’s disruption in professions like law and recent government job cuts as accelerators.

Sociologist Jukka Savolainen echoed this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, warning the U.S. risks forming a radicalized “knowledge class”: overeducated, underemployed, and excluded from institutions.

“When societies produce more elite aspirants than roles available, competition for status grows fierce,” Savolainen wrote. “Frustrated, ambitious individuals become disillusioned and radicalized, seeking to undermine rather than integrate into institutions.”

He warned that Trump-era policies—dismantling diversity and academic programs, slashing public institutions—could intensify this dynamic, mirroring unrest from the 1970s.

Structural Pressures Mount

Now an emeritus professor, Turchin argues the U.S. is in a “revolutionary situation” — a historical phase where destabilizing forces overwhelm institutional buffers.

In a recent Cliodynamica newsletter post, he and colleague Andrey Korotayev tracked rising anti-government protests and riots across Western democracies leading up to 2020, predicting an end to prior declines in unrest.

“Then history accelerated,” Turchin wrote. “The pandemic, George Floyd’s killing, and a long summer of discontent slammed America.”

While many viewed Trump’s 2020 election loss and the January 6 Capitol riot as turning points, Turchin warned these events didn’t end the turbulence.

“Many assumed things would return to normal. I disagreed,” he said.

“The core drivers of instability—wealth extraction, popular impoverishment, and elite conflict—were still intense. America faced a ‘revolutionary situation’ that could either erupt into full revolution or be defused by skillful elite governance. Now, we know which path was taken.”

These pressures aren’t isolated; they’re systemwide and self-reinforcing. “Unfortunately, all these trends are only growing stronger,” Turchin concluded.