'By Invitation: Peter Turchin' - (as emulated by ChatGPT)

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By Invitation: Peter Turchin

Cliodynamics at end-2025: The Deep Forces Driving Disorder

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History does not unfold as a random sequence of surprises. Beneath the noise of daily events, there are slow-moving forces - demographic, economic, political - that rise and fall in patterns. Cliodynamics is the attempt to make these patterns both explicit and predictive.

Two years after End Times was published, we can already see how the mechanisms it described have continued to work themselves out, reshaping politics from Berlin to Brasília.

Take Europe. Germany, long the continent’s stabilising centre, has now suffered three consecutive years of recession. Energy prices remain high, skilled labour is in short supply, and the government has been paralysed by the constitutional straitjacket of the debt brake.

When the coalition collapsed in late 2024 and the country went to the polls again in February 2025, voters did not turn back to centrist stability. Instead, the parties on the far right surged.

The same story is playing out across Europe: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Nigel Farage’s Reform in Britain, the AfD in Germany. 

Rising populism is not a coincidence. It is the predictable response of societies where ordinary people feel immiserated while elites multiply and compete ever more frantically for scarce positions at the top, positions which are increasingly threatened by automation and AI.

This is what cliodynamics calls elite overproduction. When too many graduates chase too few prestigious roles, when lawyers, journalists and policymakers are produced in excess, a class of disaffected elites emerges.

Denied status, they turn against the system that trained them. They become entrepreneurs of discontent, mobilising the grievances of the masses. The populist wave in Europe is its clearest manifestation in decades; the dynamics point to further escalation.

The economic backdrop intensifies these pressures. Global growth has slowed to around 3% - barely enough to lift living standards. Inflation has eased from its peaks, but the response of governments has been to normalise emergency fiscal measures. Deficits are no longer temporary but structural. Public debt mounts, while citizens perceive that benefits are skewed toward asset-holders and insiders. This “wealth pump” - transferring resources upward - is the second great driver of instability.

Beyond Europe, the same dynamics appear in different forms.

• In Georgia, hundreds of thousands took to the streets over contested elections and the question of alignment with Russia or the European Union.
• In Brazil, outrage flared over the shackling of deported migrants and escalated into a full-blown tariff war with the United States.
• In India, punitive American tariffs on exports have triggered talk in Delhi of closer ties with Moscow and Beijing.

These are not isolated events. They are outward signs of intensifying inter-elite conflict on the world stage, as great powers seek to defend or revise the distribution of wealth and prestige.

Even in the United States, with Trump’s return to office in January 2025, the structural pressures have not eased. Elite overproduction remains acute; the gulf between populist rhetoric and policy delivery continues to widen.

Protectionist tariffs may rally a base and assert American dominance, but they also create new grievances abroad and new inefficiencies at home. America, like Europe, has yet to resolve the contradictions driving its cycle of discord.

The lesson of cliodynamics is that these trends do not cancel each other out; they reinforce one another. Immiseration of the majority breeds anger from below. Overproduction of elites fuels competition at the top. 

When frustrated elites ally with disaffected masses, regimes destabilise. Add geopolitical rivalry and the erosion of democratic norms under intense intra-elite competition, and you have the conditions for systemic crisis.

This is the world of 2025. The “end times” are not an apocalypse but a turbulent passage in the secular cycle. History shows that such passages may lead to reform and renewal, but only if societies find ways to restrain their elites, broaden opportunity, and restore legitimacy to their institutions. Without such measures, the forces driving today’s disorder will continue to build towards more systemic breakdown.